Streets Are For Vegetables (and People)
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 04. 9.08
San Francisco's Tenderloin National Forest
Where we live, the bylaws say that residential units need parking spaces, but to discourage car use, the city has been dropping the ratio of spaces to units. The result- more cars fighting over street spaces. TreeHugger writer emeritus Ruben Anderson notes that this may not have worked out as well as planned, as the streets are now filled with cars. He notes that if drivers had to pay for their street parking all over town the real cost might be as high as six hundred dollars a month, and suggests that taxpayers money might be put to better use- growing vegetables.
"Imagine your own block stuffed with flowers and vegetables. Big sprays of lupins, colourful mats of marigolds, nodding rows of poppies. The big white blossoms of pumpkin changing to the shiny orange of jack-o'-lanterns-to-be. Fat, red Early Girl tomatoes alongside the sweet Gold Nugget grape tomatoes." His rallying cry:
"A garden plot -- not a parking spot -- for every citizen!" ::Tyee and ::Alternet
People prioritize their car over the leisure/chore of tending a garden because people are under enormous pressure to 'produce' (in dollar terms), and cars make that easier for a lot of us. People don't choose car-filled concrete jungles because we prefer it to orchards. The concrete jungle is today's tradeoff, a means to bear today's pressure. It's purely a product of today's incentives.
i'd give up my car for a garden in a heartbeat if i had a better method of travel, but it's just not feasible for most. i drive 30 miles to work, i can't do that by bike and no train or bus stops anywhere near there or my apartment...
Haha! That's what you get for living in the filthy, nasty degenerate wasteland of the Tenderloin. No places to plant anything. You need to take a nice walk up to where I live in Pacific Heights and learn what real gardening and sense of community is all about!
Jean Paul said:
"People don't choose car-filled concrete jungles because we prefer it to orchards. The concrete jungle is today's tradeoff, a means to bear today's pressure. It's purely a product of today's incentives."
"Today's pressure" as you put it, was *made* by cars. The concrete jungle we now know was built specifically for the automobile. For evidence, compare Los Angeles to Paris (even on a map). Some of the streets of Paris were first laid down 2000 years ago. The property lines have resisted change in the usual way ("You want to do *what* to *my* land?!" and "Not to Cathedral Notre Dame!!!") for the past hundred or so years since its introduction. Notice the vast difference in the layout?
We travel faster now because we can. People demand that we travel faster now, because we do. 30 years ago, if you wanted to order something by mail, you could expect to wait 4-6 weeks. Now it's 4-6 days thanks to the Internet. The very expectation has changed due to technology.
And now people can be expected to show up at work immediately, thanks to telecommuting.
I'm all for urban agriculture. The problem I have with this article is the jump from cities requiring fewer parking spaces to a desire to replace street parking with gardens. It's not as if the first causes the second.