The Market Garden City
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The background - green revolutions
Throughout the first green revolution, over thousands of years, the human species learnt to cultivate food, which enabled the creation of cities and civilisation. The second green revolution in the mid 20th century used industrialisation to increase produc tivity in agriculture to support the increasing global urban and rural populations.
The world population is still expanding, increasing affluence and mirroring the tastes of the developed world. As a result the current world population consumption requir es the land area equivalent to three planet earths. Global population is increasing from one million 10,000 years ago, one billion in 1800, 3 billion in 1950, at present the population is 7 billion and is estimated to reach 9 billion by 2050.
The seco nd green revolution was a runaway success and prevented much anticipated famine Armageddon scenarios; however the emphasis of the second green revolution shifted food production away from a majority of rice and grain crops for human consumption towards inc reased proportion of land for crops and for meat production.
The following set of diagrams illustrates the relationship of different global trends in climate change, natural resource exploitation, food production, population increase and poverty reductio n. The diagrams indicate that the present time is a balance and crucial tipping point for decisions on water security, energy supply and food production for the present and future communities.
The challenge – create a new garden city concept to arrest runaway consumption
A new garden city concept has to start from the assumption that consumption and pattern of living will change to avoid destruction of the planet. The proposal is to provide a market garden city ; and an urban framework which integrates the essential activities of food production and consumption at a local level, providing security for individuals and local communities to ma ke further choices on how the remaining consumption activities can be reduced. This will vary from individual to individual, county to county and will be subject to global stresses, of which food production is an essential part which cannot be subject to risk.
Therefore, the proposed market garden city concept provides the urban framework for a third green revolution which will be needed both to support the food requirements of increasing urban population and to contribute to strategies to counter runaway climate change. The concept requires every aspect of life to be green ; where there is no distinction between values to the environment between urban and non urban, a green ecumenopolis – a new market garden city without limits.
Why is a third green revolution required?
The 20th century second green revolution increased agricultural productivity to allow a global population surge to be supported , but eventually fail ed during the early 21st century. Curren t food productivity deman ds more i ndustrialisation and globalisation of food supply, reduced land use and diversity, increased use of pesticide and fertiliser with consequent carbon emissions and habitat destruction, causi ng irreversible global warming. Destruction of bi odiversity and climate extremes, have resulted in the current crisis to the environment and have exacerbated overpopulation , famine, drought , soil erosion and flood.
A third green revolution will be needed: based on the concept that a new urbanism must provide foo d security ; with each dweller providing a proportion of their own food and having a community responsibility , which together provide s the remaining food as part of a reciprocal investment of human capital as a community value.
The market garden city conc ept which supports the third green revolution must accept that since the start of the 21st century more people live in cities than rural areas. The market g arden city and third green revolution cannot therefore be a return to low density disaggregated rura l settlement . Instead it must promote a dense urbanism built around public transport and integrate d into the urban model , a local framework ; for supporting urban food production and culture.
The challenge is to integrate space for food growing into , and close enough to , dense urban centres to allow communities to have individual and collective ownership of food. Conventional thinking makes this impossible to resolve as there are contradictions between individual and community values and a lack of cla rity of the long term impacts of conventional consumption patterns.