Urban Agriculture
“In an accessible rooftop garden, space becomes available for localized small-scale urban agriculture, a source of local food production. An urban garden can supplement the diets of the community it feeds with fresh produce and provide a tangible tie to food production.” At Trent University, there is currently a working rooftop garden which provides food to the student café and local citizens.
Available gardening areas in cities are often seriously lacking, which is likely the key impetus for many roof gardens. The garden may be on the roof of an autonomous building which takes care of its own water and waste. Hydroponics and other alternative methods can expand the possibilities of roof top gardening by reducing, for example, the need for soil or its tremendous weight. Plantings in containers are used extensively in roof top gardens. Planting in containers prevents added stress to the roof's waterproofing. One high-profile example of a building with a roof garden is Chicago City Hall.
For those who live in small apartments with little space, square foot gardening, or (when even less space is available) living walls (vertical gardening) can be a solution. These use much less space than traditional gardening (square foot gardening uses 20% of the space of conventional rows; ten times more produce can be generated from vertical gardens). These also encourage environmentally responsible practices, eliminating tilling, reducing or eliminating pesticides, and weeding, and encouraging the recycling of wastes through composting.
Read more about this topic: Roof Garden
Famous quotes containing the words urban and/or agriculture:
“Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–62)
“In past years, the amount of money that has had to be been spent on armaments, great and small, instead of on productive industry and agriculture and the arts, has been a disgrace to all of us in every part of the world.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)