Urban planners rarely encourage agriculture in cities as they are busy focusing on other avenues for land use in cities. The importance of agriculture for cities is being ignored even as horrifying statistics such as 1 in 7 people in the world go to bed hungry and more than 20,000 children under the age of 5 die daily from hunger, stare us in the face.
But the situation can be salvaged if modern urban planning includes agriculture among its purposes of land use. Cities such as Bhubaneswar must integrate urban agriculture with it Smart City vision. Globally cities are looking at urban farming as means to produce food locally so as to decrease the carbon footprint associated chiefly with the transportation of food.
Unlike rural agriculture, urban agriculture is integrated with the urban economic and ecological systems. It interacts with urban ecosystems and employs urban residents as labour and utilises typical urban resources such as organic wastes and wastewater to support cultivation.
In the past few years Bhubaneswar has witnessed a heightened interest in urban agriculture. It is being bolstered by new approaches to urban planning and development that emphasise diffused, informal, community-based initiatives, open space, green space and soft-edge interventions in place of a centralised master plan that ignores urban farming.
Urban farming can decrease the environmental and economic costs of dealing with the city’s wastes, although it can realistically handle only a small percentage of compostable waste. But its greatest value lies in being a catalyst for shift in consciousness and behaviour of residents.
Other benefits of urban farming include addition of greenery, dip in runoff, increase in shade and dissipation of heat islands. It can also bring jobs to underserved and depressed urban areas. Urban farming offers multiple possibilities such as vertical farms that can eventually produce most of what a city within itself and can also contribute to gentrification and rise in rents.
The city has the opportunity to place itself at the vanguard of a new approach to urban space if it focuses on urban farming. But in the near term, it is unlikely that urban farming will be able to compete with other land uses in the open market unless it is incentivised by government bodies.
The government must create a public database of vacant and underutilised land that could be repurposed for urban farming. It should also create “urban farming incentive zones” in which residents would be allowed to produce crops for local consumption.
Cities such as Bhubaneswar could impose additional property taxes on land lying vacant for prolonged periods; this levy could be offset if the owners allow farming or gardening on a certain percentage of the land.
Bhubaneswar can also consider waiving Floor Area Ratio, or FAR, requirements and height restrictions for rooftop greenhouses, provided they are dedicated to food or horticultural production. This would eliminate a significant policy barrier to rooftop greenhouses from being constructed.
Urban farming should not be approached with a one-size-fits-all attitude, as communities within a city live in widely divergent conditions and different models may be suitable for their different needs.
India has a massive population of 1.3 billion, second only to China, and one-fifth of people in the country live in poverty. They need to be fed one way or the other. Urban farming is the answer to this need.
There are challenges before establishing the viability of urban farming compared with conventional agricultural practices, including scalability, energy efficiency and labour costs. But the city should explore opportunities to integrate urban farming with its city planning process so that it could create a model for the rest of the nation to follow.
The author is an urban planner based in Bhubaneswar.