Southwark 2030: From grey patch into green patch
In his movie, ‘Life on our planet’, David Attenborough talks about how massive farming has grown over the past decades, hurting the delicate balance between all the life forms on earth. Since the 1950s, animal populations have more than halved; Humans account for over one-third of the weight of mammals on Earth. A further 60% of animals are those that are raised for us to eat (Domestic animals). The rest- “from mice to whales”- make up just 4%. Domestic animals require vast swathes of land and half of the fertile land on the planet is now farmland. (A life on our planet, 2020)
The demand for producing more food keeps growing constantly as the world’s population keeps growing, which leads the global citizens of today to face this urgent challenge of how to feed more people within the reality of finite resources. Around the world different governments and organizations are trying to deal with this issue without proper global legislation.
“Governments need tools and models to estimate yields and effects on biodiversity and climate change, and they should use these tools to guide land-use regulations, plan roads and manage public lands” (Ranganathan, J., Waite, R., Searchinger, T. and Hanson, C., 2018)
The aim is clear, we have finite world resources, therefore, we need to reduce the space we use for farmland. Attenborough claims that the easiest way to do this is to change our diets. If we all had a largely plant-based diet, we would need half the land we use now. Today we can see this mindset happening in different fronts; Technological, social and political. On the technological front, The Netherlands is a good example of a country that is already addressing this issue; as one of the world’s most densely populated countries, Dutch farmers had to come up with a solution that would use land much more efficiently through creative and innovative changes to farming practices, such as hydroponic farming.
On the social front, Meatless Monday is another example of a global movement that encourages people to reduce meat in their diet for their health and the health of the planet. Eating less meat and more healthy plant-based foods can help reduce diseases, preserve precious land and water resources, and combat climate change.
On the political front, Costa Rica is an example of how the government incentivized landowners by giving grants to replant native trees, Instead of continuing to prepare farmland. Thanks to this initiative, forests are now back to cover Costa Rica once more. (EARTH.ORG, 2020)
But we are still left with the question, how do we translate this aim into global action? How are people encouraged to shift to a plant-based diet and reducing land use?
In the London borough of Southwark, where our project has taken place, the council has set itself a goal to encourage more plant-based diets with more sustainable choices and less waste.
The council’ vision Southwark as a carbon neutral borough by 2030, that redefine the residents relationship with food. Which means that beside diet changes, the council wish to increase the awareness of where the food is from and to drive consumer behavior changes, while using Allotments and other local food growing spaces are being developed and help feed local people. (Tackling the Climate Emergency Together Southwark’s strategy to become Carbon Neutral by 2030, 2020)
The reality today is that, currently Southwark is a growing population, with over 300,000 residents, rated 9th highest population density and 8th most deprived borough in London (Southwark facts, n.d).
London’s first ever measure of food insecurity report which took place between 2018 and 2019 found that almost 1 in 4 Southwark residents over age 16 are likely to be food insecure. This means that 60,000 of the residents may be skipping meals due to lack of funds, are unable to afford balanced meals and those at the more extreme end will be experiencing real hunger (FAIRER FOOD SOUTHWARK, 2019).
So clearly, the council has a good intention, but how do we translate an intention into action?
It’s our duty as a society to start implementing these intentions, otherwise, on the long term, we will find ourselves dealing with limited resources, especially the scarcity of food products resulting from wrong use of finite resources.
In this blog I will be reflecting on different trends and signals that have a direct or indirect impact on the topic.
Trend 1: Food Consumption
The world population has become used to consuming food in an increased way that has become established over the past decades, relying on supermarkets, imported food and processed food are just some of the examples, it is convenient, affordable and accessible. From a report on food consumption in the UK, a number of trends are emerging regarding how people in the UK consume their food.
According to the report, what people consume still falls short of dietary guidelines, most UK consumers do not meet the recommended standards for a healthy diet, although there is a reduction in salt, sugar and red meat consumption but there is still no increase in fruit and vegetable consumption.
It has become more convenient as technology allows us to order home deliveries of groceries and takeaways from restaurants. There are some people who are concerned about the origin, sustainability and ethical production standards of their food, and there seems to have been an increase in sales of ethical and sustainable products in the last decade and an increase in the consumption of plant-based meals. However, many consumers demonstrate a gap by saying they have sustainable preferences, but often this only translates into action if other needs are met such as cost, quality and habit.
In other cases consumers are simply unaware of the social and environmental consequences of their consumption. Having a lack of awareness that increased meat consumption leads to climate change, a lack of awareness will hurt the efforts of behavioral change. Even when people are aware, it may be difficult for them to implement these behavioral changes, whether it is because of belief, values, or Financial capacity. The report shows that older consumers (aged 55 and over) consume food that is grown in an ethical way, it reflects their values relatively to the rest of the population, but it may be that financially they can afford to buy it, because it is usually more expensive and perceived as higher quality comparing to younger populations affordability.. . There is room here to intervene in economic policy, to facilitate consumers in purchasing while encouraging social awareness to purchase sustainable food (d’Angelo, C., Ryen Gloinson, E., Draper, A. and Guthrie, S., 2020)
In addition, there is evidence that main actors in the food industry, such as international food corporations, play a significant role in driving demand for processed foods, driven by global marketing campaigns and policies’ interventions
It’s a worldwide problem, current food consumption patterns demand too much from finite resources, changing our diets to depend less on rich foods, especially ruminant meat and reducing food waste, can reduce global demand for food and help decrease the use of land which will lead in the future to reducing the danger of food scarcity (Colombo, B., Engstrom, P., Ray, D., Urevig, A. and West, P., n.d).
Trend 2: Growing of global population
The forecast for 2050 is that, by this year, more than 9 billion people will live on the planet, which will increase crop production between 60%-100%. Massive stress would be forced on farmers as well as the farmlands to produce enough food for everyone, in order to keep the pace, 1 billion Hectares of land expected to be transformed into new farmlands, most of them would be rainforests and savannas.
“Further expansion of agriculture is a poor solution to meeting future needs because we’re using nearly all of the land that’s suitable for agriculture already. Relying on increased production alone — whether through increased yields or harvest frequency — will be an important solution, but not a sufficient one.” (Is There Enough Food for the Future? Food Matters).
We could no longer use the traditional ways to produce food, since implementing the old methods in the rising amount of lands needed for crops will lead to a high use of nitrogen. Meanwhile, the rise in yearly CO2 equivalents would be greater than the annual emissions from every car, train, and plane in America.
We simply can’t afford to double food production this way. It would drive many animal species to extinction, hurt the planet’s ecosystem, impact climate change and accelerate the planet’s deterioration. Eventually, human health would be damaged because of a lack of healthy and nutritious food, and the world will become a hard place to live in
Meeting the problem through production alone won’t be enough. Humans should explore many alternatives that focus on reducing demand for food, like changing diets and reducing food waste and loss. Other way that would need to be considers is to slow down the rate at which the global population is growing; To slow the population growth rate, we need to raise people out of poverty, improve access to healthcare globally and enable children, especially girls, to stay in school for as long as possible. (EARTH.ORG, 2020)
A good future scenario must hurt a bit
After gaining a better understanding of the context, at this point of the project, with that mindset, I understand that we, as a team, identified a possible future. Meaning that, we managed to gather enough data from our horizon scanning so we can speculate how our future will look like. As a speculative designer, my role here was to stop and think; how can I turn this possible future into a preferable future, that the residents of Southwark could be inspired by and act for preventing food scarcity? As part of my role it means to point out the issues the council should take care of- today and provide guidelines (ban, amplify and create) so they can start planning their way to this preferable future.
As a service designer, I brought with me to this project the holistic vision that usually uses me to ‘do better’ in the present. By combining this vision with Speculative design discipline, I can use my experience as a service designer to tackle wicked problems. As is well known, service designers excel at locating pain points and offer them solutions. The combination of service design with speculative design discipline allows me to identify the pain points of the future and prepare better, thus minimizing those pain points or avoiding them completely.
For our preferable future, my team and I chose the topic of “Sustainable self produce growing”, aiming to provide guidelines for actions that must be taken as a society and as individuals.
While developing the future scenario, I tried to explain myself what is this scenario that we are trying to define, my rule of thumb was as follow:
The future scenario must cause my tummy to hurt but also make me say: Yes, I can see that happen one day.
Our future scenario:
Our future in 2030 would be characterized by limited resources, especially the scarcity of food products. This scarcity is due to lack of farmlands and wrong use of finite resources such as soil and water, and has affected around the globe. Eventually leads to increasing difficulty in procuring international imports of produce, leaves many people with severe shortages of certain foods that previously relied on imports. In such a time, citizens understand the importance and value of conserving food, nurturing food produce and taking more initiative to help mitigate this difficulty. Thus, the local communities place emphasis on individual (and therefore, collective) action and each person contributing to the betterment of their society.
Yes, that of course is a very nice scenario and even a bit optimistic, some would say, but what does it mean? How is it going to happen? It was our time to understand how we are going to get there. So in that point we asked -
What if we could empower the local community to grow produce in a sustainable and accessible manner?
Developing the Concept:
Developing a future concept was not an easy task, I think the term ‘Roller Coasters’ would be a better way to describe the feelings and emotions we dealt with as a team.
Finding the fine line between utopian future and preferable future was a struggle, we had to keep asking ourselves if our direction is too exaggerated or feasible?
For example, ideas like growing your own lettuce in the oven (because kitchens in the future would not use us as kitchens anymore) or grow Carrot beds on the roof of a high-rise building with your neighbors. Can you tell which is the utopian concept and which is the preferable?
And of course not forgetting the most important rule when you speculating:
We can not predict the future! We can only assume based on the present and past!
“These possible futures are lenses used to better understand the present, and what we want and don’t want to see in our future as a society.” (Ho Tran, T., 2019).
Looking back, I think we didn’t feel comfortable with any of the ideas we had when we started working on the concept and we couldn’t understand why. We kept shifting from one idea to another, instead of going forward with one idea and developing it, we moved it aside and tried to brainstorm looking for a better one.
While modeling the carrot village (Yes, it came to that). Values of community and sharing have risen as an answer for growing produce in a sustainable and accessible manner among the local community. We called it-
15 minutes growing city.
Where communities in Southwark turn into small villages that produce their own crops, while taking care of each other as part of a cooperative.
This all talk about villages, locality, sharing, caring started sounds very familiar, and I couldn’t ignore the fact that it felt that I heard about this concept before, simply because it has a name:
Kibbutz!
In one of my posts I wrote during the project, I asked myself:
“Is it possible our future could go back to the past?
…
I wonder, why not using the kibbutz system with some new adjustments that will match the urban environment of the future?
Fixing the existing over new is part of sustainable thinking, why not embrace that?”
The model answered our aims of empowering citizens, building resilience and also sustaining social justice by enabling residents to come together as a community.
Further confirmation of the relevance of the direction also came from a trend that emerged following the pandemic; the usefulness and resilience of very local connections has become increasingly important. The level of local can be seen as house; street; village; town; district; city. The potential for connection at the village level — even in much bigger settlements like towns and cities. (The Village-In-The-City Manifesto version 4., 2020)
But then, we met our first stakeholder- Peter from Tabard Growers, and we landed back to reality.
Peter runs the Tabard community garden voluntarily, he is a resident of Southwark and he took us on a tour around the area, showing us the community gardens, some areas that residents nurtured independently and his beautiful garden under his building that he nurtured with much love.
At the end of the tour we showed Peter our model of 15 minutes growing city, talking about sharing and community values after spending the last two hours hearing Peter talk about how residents don’t like to take care of the common areas and only care about their own allotments.
I felt very uncomfortable presenting such a disconnected concept, but I understand it was essential. Because that’s the importance of research through design.
This process allowed us to research by making things and then test them with people, in that way we incorporated the knowledge we gained from people’s reactions and implemented it in the object, we showed people the new object and gained more feedback. That’s how the iteration continues. In addition, it helped us to start a conversation and engage with our stakeholders.
Making another model, another illustration, meeting enthusiastic stakeholders like Vanessa & Malcolm from John Evelyn community garden, later meeting Ren from Sustain, the organization that runs the ‘Good to grow platform’ in Southwark. Thanks to their feedback our project kept refining and tuning till we felt we finally had something good in our hand. You can feel that you are doing the right thing when you present it to your stakeholders and see their reactions, as the conversation goes on and on, as they continue to add ideas or think about the next step, you can really see how they begin to imagine it happening.
The concept:
Finally, proud to present:
Green patch!
The Green Patch empowers the local community in Southwark to grow their own food produce. It aims to democratise urban gardening, by making urban patches available for growing produce. providing people with access to local spaces in their area, and giving them the ownership to practice growing food. This would be done by encouraging the Southwark Council to take ownership, provide access conveniently and encourage sustainable food growing behaviour. The initiative focuses on making growing a part of the lives of people, by making the process simple, convenient, easy to learn from one another and sharing responsibility.
Sections from Tackling the Climate Emergency Together Southwark’s strategy to become Carbon Neutral by 2030 report:
V- “Small changes to current policies — these ideas include policies we already have in place but which need some changes to make them more efficient or deliver differently.”
V- Identify land that can be used for food production encouraging residents to engage with how their food is produced.
V- Allotments and other local food growing spaces are developed and help feed local people.
Conclusions
Through the first half way of the project we kept emphasizing the importance of social justice, till the point we felt we were forcing it on the project, trying hard to connect the dots.
The problem is that sometimes you can force something so hard till it becomes unnatural, eventually, we understood it limited our thinking. So, we let it go.
Once we did that, something opened, we weren’t committed to one direction anymore, and very naturally, in the later stage we met social justice in it’s new shape- as democratizing access to patches.
It taught me that putting too much effort in one direction can be very tricky sometimes, it’s ok to leave it aside and try other directions. If it really have a place, it would come later in the right shape.
The residents of Southwark desire ownership of green spaces but are often given up due to complicated application processes and waiting time. I hope this project would be an opportunity for a new direction both to the residents and to the council to take collective action for a more sustainable, greener and community-driven Southwark — patch’ shaped.
Bibliography
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- A life on our planet (2020) Directed by Fothergill, A., Scholey, K. and Hughes, J. Netflix.
- Ranganathan, J., Waite, R., Searchinger, T. and Hanson, C. (2018) How to Sustainably Feed 10 Billion People by 2050, in 21 Charts. Available at: https://www.wri.org/insights/how-sustainably-feed-10-billion-people-2050-21-charts (Accessed:18.5.21).
- Southwark facts . Available at: https://southwarkclimateideas.commonplace.is/proposals/southwark-facts (Accessed:18.5.21).
- Tackling the Climate Emergency Together Southwark’s strategy to become Carbon Neutral by 2030. (2020) Southwark council. Available at:(Accessed:18.5.21).
- FAIRER FOOD SOUTHWARK: A borough-wide action plan to increase household food security. (2019) Sustain. Available at: https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/southwark_food_security_plan_2019.pdf (Accessed:18.5.21).
- d’Angelo, C., Ryen Gloinson, E., Draper, A. and Guthrie, S. (2020) Food consumption in the UK Trends, attitudes and drivers . RAND EUROPE. Available at: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR4300/RR4379/RAND_RR4379.pdf (Accessed:18.5.21).
- Colombo, B., Engstrom, P., Ray, D., Urevig, A. and West, P. Is There Enough Food for the Future? Available at: http://www.environmentreports.com/enough-food-for-the-future/ (Accessed:18.5.21).
- Ho Tran, T. (2019) Speculative design: 3 examples of design fiction. Available at: https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/speculative-design/ (Accessed:18.5.21).
- The Village-In-The-City Manifesto version 4. (2020) Available at: http://hostleadership.com/the-village-in-the-city-manifesto/ (Accessed:18.5.21).
