Has Metropolis Come Full-Circle? ---Urban Farming To Restore Cities

   While urban planners scratch their heads about how to restore decaying central cities, a growing movement is proving that, maybe, history goes in cycles, after all.

    The big trend, in older--especially "rust-belt" cities--is to go back to the soil--to cultivate urban gardens--especially in blighted and often deserted stretches that used to be vibrant neighborhoods near downtown.

   Urban Homesteading is playing a dual role:  Filling the growing demand for healthy, organic, locally grown produce; and in the scarcity of ideas how to bring back depressed core neighborhoods, is becoming a quaint form of urban development.

  It's kind of ironic: We started off as hunter-gatherers, then learned to cultivate the land and became farmers.  The feudal age fostered an agrarian economy, protected by territorial castles. Division of labor helped foster arts and crafts, which led to the guilds [unions of sorts] and the growth of towns, more division of labor and time to think and innovate.

   This helped foster the coming Industrial Age and the explosive growth of cities, luring tens of thousands into teeming urban centers.

   With added inventions and innovations--especially the automobile-- squeezed populations began to look outward again toward a patch of greenery outside of the city--which in many cases had become a stifling megalopolis.

  After World War II suburban growth exploded and a unique and attractive phenomenon appeared--the Suburban Mall, together with the Industrial Park, which lured people and industry out of the heart of cities.

   What remained were decaying urban centers with people whose jobs had left town, and where those who could leave, left. Various social ills took over and "doctors" of every stripe--political, social, economic, civic--prescribed solutions from afar, but very few of them made "house calls" to see if the solutions were realistic. (But, that's another story.)

   There are hopeful signs that central cities are starting to "come back"--not least of which has to be the realization that if we keep outrunning urban decay by leapfrogging further into exurbia, we'll end up in the outskirts of the big city next to us, whose people are leapfrogging our way.

   Farmers are complaining  nationwide that suburban (now exurban) growth is chewing up farmland. Where alfalfa grew now stands a 5,000 square foot manor house with acreage for grass cutting.

   That's why it is a delicious irony--that one of the prominent solutions to curbing urban blight is the establishment of farms in central cities, where entire blocks are abandoned.  This is good and healthy for urban residents--with the trend toward organic, healthful, local produce--and  for the new urban farmer, as entrepreneur.

   And, who knows, maybe that new farmer, will become the "go to" guy or gal when farmland in farm country becomes more and more scarce. Why? Because the Chinese, Saudi Arabians, and other countries are buying up thousands of acres of American farmland to grow grain for their own export--bypassing purchases from American farmers.
 
   So, the Urban Garden, may help the re-birth of the central city  in more ways than one. Vast tracts of blighted, empty city scapes, may become our new breadbaskets, and those tending them, our new moguls-- rivaling millionaire techno geeks.

  What goes around, comes around.