"What You Can Do With the City" @ Graham Found. 'til 3/2010

Actions: What You Can Do With the City

I've been anticipating the arrival of this exhibition for a while. It features 99 social interventions from around the world. Organized by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Montréal, it runs in Chicago through March 13, 2010 at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Like so many CCA-organized exhibitions, Actions is rich in ideas and documentation, well worth visiting if you're interested at all in cities, urban planning, social action and design. A good portion of the projects presented relate to food including:

#10. Forager Eats Traffic Island

Since his university days, Fergus Drennan has sustained himself with the plants he finds growing wild in and around British cities, as well as roadkill. He provided regionally foraged produce to London restaurants and is attempting a year-long diet of foraged-only food.

#11. Trains Grow Salad

Nance Klehm is an artist and forager based in Chicago, where she frequents train tracks in the Kinzie industrial corridor, among many other urban sites, to forage for food and medicinal plants.

#12. Executive Dines in Dumpster

Food-safety rules do not allow groceries to sell, or in some cases even give away, products that are past their expiry date; additionally, many fruits and vegetables are thrown out for cosmetic reasons. Dumpster divers and freegans short-circuit this flow of waste by shopping from dumpsters and garbage bags outside grocery stores....Emily Rauhala and Lorenzo Morales, as part of their 2007 master’s project at Columbia University, created a website and a series of video interviews with freegans in New York City.

#13. Sticker Rescues Food

Edible Excess is a sticker identifying a dumpster as containing food. The sticker helps dumpster divers share resources and draws attention to the abundance and easy accessibility of useful excess; it also advertises the existence of a dumpster-diving community dependent on trash to those who produce it.

#20. Website Collects Figs

Bristol Food for Free is an online database of edible plants in Bristol. The website generates a map of any of the 113 species identified by its authors...Bristol Food for Free allows inexperienced foragers to find fresh fruits and vegetables quickly and safely.

#23. Playing Cards Eat Central Park

“Wildman” Steve Brill has been leading forages in Central Park and the New York City region for over twenty-five years. He was arrested in 1985 by New York City park rangers for leading paid foraging tours of Central Park, but hired by them later that year to continue the tours.

#26. Corn Restores Land-Use Diversity

Not a Cornfield was a 13-hectare cornfield planted to remediate an industrial brownfield. Seeding, maintenance, and harvesting were organized to involve locals from all over the city, establishing links to water and seasonal cycles that are otherwise obscured by the city’s concrete infrastructure.

#56. Beer Makes Gardens

Moss Graffiti is a recipe for living graffiti inspired by the hardiness of London weeds. A mixture of beer, sugar, and moss is painted onto an outdoor surface (brick and roughened concrete work best). The moss will gradually colonize the structure, covering undesirable architecture and making an individual mark on a corporate structure. Eventually, the moss graffiti will look as if it has always been there.

#62. Tomatoes Colonize Traffic Islands

Love Apples is the experimental settlement of Los Angeles traffic islands by tomato plants. Some of the most visible land in the city, traffic islands are marginal, ignored, and rarely planted. Ten urban archipelagos were planted with young tomatoes in May 2008, and their produce tracked to identify which traffic islands sites best supported agriculture.

#71. Vietnamese Farm Feeds New Orleans

An 11-hectare community farm located in an area severely damaged by hurricane Katrina, Viet Village Urban Farm was designed by residents of New Orleans East with architects Mossop + Michaels to restore a thirty-year old tradition of backyard farming that ended with the hurricane. The plan includes a market to resell excess produce and an ecologically-sensitive infrastructure to support traditional farming.

#75. Concrete Casting Tubes Grow Lettuce

A recycled and recyclable installation in the P.S. 1 courtyard, Public Farm One is a stage for the museum’s summer music series and a model for vertical farming in the city. Cardboard tubes from concrete casting are used as planters while structural columns contain phone-charging stations and juice dispensers...Plantings include peas, mint, rhubarb, and fennel.

#77. Bees Make Concrete Honey

Urban agriculture suffers from a lack of pollinators compared with rural farming. The Toronto Beekeepers Cooperative operates twelve hives in the city, including three on the rooftop of the Royal York Hotel. The honeybees produce neighbourhood honey, and their travels increase the yields of fruit and vegetable gardens in the vicinity as well as contribute to local biodiversity in general.

#78. Market Sprouts Under Sunshade

A temporary repurposing of a parking lot that restores it to the pedestrian urban fabric of Köpenick, Germany, by installing a farmer’s market. A red sunshade signals the binary uses of the project: when the shade is down, the red-paved lot of 1,024 square-metres is used for parking; on market days the shade is opened and farmers occupy the square. The marketplace is designed to be removed once a permanent plan for the renovation of Köpenick’s medieval centre is fixed.

#82. Megapicnic Takes Streets with City Produce

A market and massive “continuous” picnic held to show how urban food production and public space can be combined advantageously in central London. Produce grown inside the metropolitan London limits was judged and displayed, followed by a picnic that occupied two large parks and a connecting corridor.

#83. Sheep and Lambs Eat City Parks

The city of Turin saved 30,000 euros by using sheep to mow lawns at three public parks. In Pasture in the City, cows were also used during the experimental first year, but because they produced too much manure they have not returned...After the animals are rotated through fenced-off parks for two months, they return to the Alps for the remainder of the summer. The sheep aerate and fertilize their temporary pastures.

#85. Plastic Bag Feeds Neighbourhood

A system for the transformation of vacant lots into community gardens using plastic bags filled with dirt, seeds, and water. Grow Bags hold half a tonne of soil, and can be moved with little effort while empty. The Vacant Lot project transformed concrete lots lacking soil in London and Cornwall into productive gardens; plantings included beetroot, kale, and broccoli.

#87. Table Attracts Neighbours

A series of related spatial “moorings” and “insertions” composed of mobile pool, foosball, and picnic tables designed to offer residents opportunities for easy interaction with trivialized urban spaces. Simple interventions, like placing a picnic table between two highway columns, function as invitations to engage with the site.

#88. Herbs Move Office Workers Outside

A kitchen garden planted in a simple wood structure on Copenhagen’s office park harbour front. A Kitchen Garden at the Harbour Front confronts office workers with a herb garden and its associations with the private home; passersby find a public garden in an area of private enterprise. The garden structure is designed as a temporary installation; the planters also function as benches, creating a zone of interaction and communication in what is otherwise a transport corridor.

#89. Tubs of Dirt Transform Concrete Campus

The Edible Campus project demonstrates that underutilized concrete spaces can be unobtrusively made edible with little effort and low cost. Student volunteers maintain over one hundred simple containers in a 93-square-metre modular, mobile seasonal garden. The site is a corner on McGill University’s downtown campus with heavy pedestrian traffic. Edible Campus allows Santropol Roulant, a Montréal charity that delivers food, to source organic fruit and vegetables locally and provide up to ninety meals daily during the harvest. Fourty percent of the kitchen's organic wastes are turned into natural fertilizer through vermicomposting, with part of the output reintroduced in the garden's soil. By localizing food production, the Edible Campus also reduces food miles.

Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts
Madlener House
4 W Burton Place
Chicago IL 60610
312-787-4071

Gallery Hours:
Wednesday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm
Every third Thursday of the month, 10am to 9pm
Free admission