Category: Greenspace & Farming

There they are in the middle of page A19 in the New York Times: the young couple, scruffy but stylish, all plaid and beard and leather jacket, holding a chicken. A few weeks ago there was a different chicken story, about the front yard hens on Franklin Avenue in Bed-Stuy and the way the neighborhood rallied when one went missing. After losing (badly) at board game night this past week, I was awarded a consolation prize of a dozen eggs laid by my friend’s four backyard hens — Rhonda, Shirley, Rosie, and Sandy.

But really, does anyone want to hear about backyard chickens anymore? Is feeling a lack of a “connection” with your grocery store produce really the most pressing issue of the day? What do urban chickens have to do with democracy and human rights?

Geographers Michael J. Widener and Sara S. Metcalf at SUNY Buffalo write about the the negative reaction of many Buffalonians to the legalization of backyard chicken-keeping. Chickens and their keepers, according to a letter written to the local paper, don’t belong in the city: “It is the ultimate in anti-social behavior for someone to move to the city and try to force their neighbors to endure health risks and nuisances due to their unwillingness to live on a farm where they would prefer to be.”

As Buffalo continues to suffer, folks who lived through its heyday would like to see it return to a busy industrial city; they are not interested in the “subversive spatial fix” of urban agriculture and chicken keeping.

Underneath this attitude lies the premise that there are things, behaviors, activities, and people that do not belong in the city. However, the cities in this country contain a great many things, many of them at odds with each other: kitchens too small to cook in and stores devoted entirely to spatulas, bicycle lanes and the police cars that park in them, wheelchairs and subway stairs, loud bars and 311.

In 1903, the German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote about the alienation one feels in the modern city but also the way it frees individuals from the rigid confines and social control endemic to small communities. The city, Simmel wrote, “can give room to freedom and the peculiarities of inner and external development of the individual…the citizen of the metropolis is ‘free’ in contrast with the trivialities and prejudices which bind the small town person.”

Cities are the places for peculiarities and freedom, for all to craft the lives we want to live, to the best of our abilities. Earlier this winter, Ben (the friend who awarded me the eggs) took a certain glee in posting photos of himself shoveling the chickens out of the snow. “I don’t think this is what people have in mind when they think of a New York City life,” read the caption. By affording us the freedom to take delight in not quite belonging, the city creates an alternate—and completely reasonable—way of being. Chickens in New York City are their own “subversive spatial fix.”

So this is what we are talking about when we talk about chickens: democracy, self-determination, and the way we must learn to live together. Chickens are allowed, but roosters are not. Their cock-a-doodle-doos are loud and will disturb the neighbors, (though, by this logic, I don’t quite understand why car alarms are permitted).
The chickens are not faux-utopian garden-cities-in-reverse. They are not the saviors that will make us renounce the evils of industrial agriculture. They will not solve New York City’s garbage problem by eating all our food waste. What they do is remind us that we are all individuals living in a place where we must recognize each other’s peculiarities. They ensure that the city remains, as Simmel writes, “the seat of cosmopolitanism.”

By Dory Kornfeld

With warmer weather approaching, New York City’s parks will once again play host to a plethora of public programs. From concerts to exercise classes, the season of free activities is something I look forward to all winter. When Brooklyn Bridge Park first opened last summer, park programmers offered science lessons, a series of four world music concerts, Zumba classes, and the popular outdoor ‘Movies with a View’ series showing classics from Hitchcock to the Big Lebowski. Officials at the park wanted to get a profile of the typical park user: how did they hear about the park, how did they get to the park, and what activities were they most likely to take part in? Working with the Brooklyn Economic Development Corporation, I was the one charged with finding all that out.

In order to answer these questions I led a team of eight undergraduate students from St. Francis College in Brooklyn in surveying park visitors. The students put shyness aside and administered over 1000 two-page surveys of park-goers, asking people for demographic information, reasons for coming to the park, ideas for improving the park, and familiarity with park events. The park staff hopes to use the results of the survey to better determine how to advertise events at the park, as well as ensure that the park is drawing a diverse crowd citywide.

Despite some nasty summer weather, including a case or two of heat stroke, the survey team was able to get enough data to compile an interesting profile of the park’s first summer visitors. Park visitors tended to be rather young, well educated, and came to the area specifically to see the new park. About 40% of park-goers walked to the park, almost the same amount took the subway in from a different neighborhood, and 12% drove. (Not surprisingly, the drivers were the group most likely to suggest that building a parking lot would most improve the park.) The park drew an ethnically diverse crowd. Approximately 50% of the respondents were people of color, a proportion comparable to that in the Brooklyn Heights/Downtown Brooklyn area. However, some three-fourths of park visitors came from outside of the immediate neighborhoods, including 10% of which were tourists visiting from out of state or country.

Working with St Francis professor Julio Huato, we ran a regression analysis to determine the likelihood that park-goers woulod attend the different summer events offered at the park, including movie screenings, educational tours, rowing, concerts, exercise classes, and the water taxi service to Governors Island. While most of the correlations were not statistically significant, we did discover a couple of determinants for potential program attendance.

For example, people who drove to the park were less likely to attend events overall. People who did not complete a college degree were more likely than both those with a 4-year degree or graduate degree to attend educational events. African Americans were more likely to attend fitness classes. While in general park visitors who lived further away were less likely to attend events, the weekly movie screenings appeared to attract people from all throughout the City.

The data certainly provides an interesting look at the demographics of the new park’s visitors and the demand for proposed events. Perhaps more interesting, and definitely encouraging, is that the department is interested in who is going to the new park, and is conducting such sophisticated studies so early on. They are not done; the park plans to conduct more surveys this summer in order to see if last year’s guesses match this year’s realities.

Nathan Tinclair

Upon first encounter, the Arava Desert, located between the Dead and Red Seas on the border of Jordan and Israel, appears to offer little other than sand. So it’s surprising that this arid landscape, which receives summertime temperatures in excess of 120° Fahrenheit and approximately one inch of rain per year, is becoming synonymous with green initiatives. Leading environmental sustainability efforts in the region are two communal farms or kibbutzim: Keturah and Lotan.

Kibbutz Keturah houses The Arava Institute for Environmental Studies where I had the opportunity to work this past summer. The Arava Institute, which is affiliated with Ben-Gurion University, affords Palestinian, Israeli, Jordanian, and other international students the unique opportunity to live and study together. With the premise that “nature knows no boundaries,” the school works to prepare future Arab and Jewish leaders to work cooperatively in order to solve the region’s most pressing environmental challenges.

Research initiatives at The Arava Institute are just as progressive, focused on the areas of renewable energy, trans-boundary water management, water scarcity, and sustainable agriculture. For example, one current project helps Bedouin and rural Palestinian communities to replace their diesel powered generators with biodigestors, a healthier and renewable alternative. Biodigestors allow these communities not only to dispose of animal and human waste but also to use the waste to produce methane gas for cooking, heating or lighting. Another project seeks to introduce salt-tolerant water-saving crops into sustainable agriculture systems, better enabling gray water, run-off water, and saline water resources to be used for farming.

Kibbutz Keturah is also notable in that it is a partner of The Arava Solar Company, an Israeli solar energy organization. Taking advantage of solar conditions on par with the Sahara and an official renewable energy zone designation by Israel’s economic cabinet, The Arava Solar Company has constructed a solar field on Kibbutz Ketura land. This 20 acre field will become operational in June 2011 and will produce five megawatts of power enough for 4,000 Israeli homes.

Another extremely innovative kibbutz in the Arava Desert is Kibbutz Lotan, which exemplifies sustainable living practices. In addition to composting all waste from the community dining hall, the sustainable neighborhood includes solar photovoltaic panels, waterless sanitation systems, solar ovens for cooking, LED pathway lighting, solar hot water collectors for showering, and greywater treatment systems. Apartment buildings also serve as a prototype, requiring significantly less material than conventional buildings do. Through using a geodesic framework of steel pipes, straw bales, and earth plaster (think mud), buildings are both renewable and extremely energy efficient.

Kibbutz Lotan is also a leader in innovative recycling techniques such as using tires and garbage to build benches, playgrounds, bus shelters, and other creative structures. This process is accomplished by filling used tires with recyclables from the kibbutz recycling center and then applying a mud coating over the structure sealing and finishing the project. The results speak for themselves: over the past four years, the kibbutz has been able to reduce waste disposal by 70% each year, and tire recycling efforts are so successful that the community now accepts and recycles all tires for the city of Eilat (population: 46,000).

Sustainability efforts by both Keturah and Lotan exemplify the truism that “necessity is the mother of invention.” Given harsh environmental conditions, kibbutzim in the region – led by Keturah and Lotan – have turned to innovation to capture the niche market for sustainability and solar power. Through their efforts, they have turned a hindrance into an asset and given new meaning to the Zionist expression, “making the desert bloom.”

By Lisa Blake

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