Welcome to our webinar on future of urban
agriculture: culture and community. This webinar is part of a bigger project that is
funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers and the project aims to link the Nordic and Baltic
knowledge and know-how on urban agriculture and also produce a case study report that is done
by our partners Nordregio. Today we have a great panel of esteemed speakers who will talk about
the aspects of culture and community. When it comes to urban agriculture. Malm is an
architect
involved in urban gardening at Dodo since 2010 and she's interested in the many shapes and sizes of
urban gardening and how it can be implemented. All this volunteering work has led me so that I'm
now the Head of Organizational Development at Dodo in Helsinki. Dodo is an urban environmental
NGO founded in 1995 and our main themes are food, urban gardening, urban planning and
building, global development and climate. TURNTABLE is a lab for sustainable food
production and urban pla
nning as well as a center for peer learning and urban culture.
These aspects are brought forth in bi-monthly urban dinners – waste food events, as well
as bigger yearly events such as harvest in autumn and smaller work parties. The central
goal of Turntable is to increase adaptability of citizens by raising both the degree of
self-sufficiency in food and a variety of civic skills. The main focus group is
young adults and there's more and more no-Finnish-speakers joining. You also start
to
see the city in a different way – like what's already growing there. And you start to
look at the surroundings in a different way. As the next presentation we will hear from Riga
City Council and Mārtiņš is representing that. Mārtiņš is an urban researcher who has been
working with culture, tourism and urban topics for the last 15 years and currently working
for the Riga City Development Department. Hello! My name is Mārtiņš Enģelis. You may also
know me from such TV shows as Game of Throne
s, Breaking Bad and Succession, but I'm also
working on a regular people's basis at the City Development Department. My story is about
LASTĀDIJA. Free Riga is this local place-making giant and trailblazers and they started their
place-making activities in 2013 and they are very much connected to what Lastādija is today.
And it all started in 2013 where good friends of mine decided to point out vacant houses and they
wanted to impress people by saying that we can do something else with vacan
t houses. And in 2014
when Riga was the capital of culture they made these stickers and they put them on every
single vacant house in the city saying that we have a problem. Lastādija is a community
garden also a cultural space and DIY center. Thank you, Mārtiņš! It's very inspirational.
Hege is calling in from Svalbard. Since 2020 she works as a business consultant and
assists SMEs with application-writing, project planning and so on. And Hege also
coordinates The Culinary Business Networ
k in Svalbard. I'm happy to be here, to tell you
about Robert and my story about Svalbard brewery, distillery and horticulture. Svalbard is located
very close to the North Pole. It's actually closer to the North Pole than it is to the mainland
of Norway. We live in Longyearbyen. We are approximately 2,400 people living here from more
than 50 nationalities. We have very little local food supply: we have some fishing, some reindeer,
but most of the island is snow, ice and rocks. So, there's n
ot very much local production. A
small look at the history. Robert is the founder of this and he is a man of many great ideas.
Back in 2019 he wanted to establish a brewery in Longyearbyen, but a Norwegian law said that
it was not allowed to make alcohol in Svalbard, so he made an application, made a phone call to
the government every month for 4–5 years before they changed the law so now he could establish his
brewery. Svalbard and Longyearbyen has their 120 years history of coal-mining th
at will come to
an end in a couple of years, so we see a lot of changes in this society where we need to find
new kinds of jobs. We need to make us living up here more sustainable. The project is that we
want to make joint facility for Svalbard brewery that needs more space. They are expanding,
they are starting their export to Europe, and we also see that to be more sustainable we
can make our own greens and vegetables up here instead of taking them by plane. So, we want
to develop that n
ew green solutions that fits into the Arctic environment. Hopefully we will
have our first container-farm up here in a year. Thank you, Hege! Very interesting insights. Let's
start with the questions from public. Is there a story of people getting the feeling of success
through this urban agriculture? Urban dinners that we arranged that are free and open in summer.
We have them in the greenhouse – we get surplus food from a local store and then we also have
harvest from our garden. And toge
ther prepare this to a dinner like community or getting
together, eating together and then often it's combined with a discussion or presentation
of something. We heard about Plant Clan which is a new community garden in Helsinki.
Connections as a success – definitely! How can one reach out to those in the society
that could need a community like this like Lastādija or Dodo, but struggle with finding it?
If you have a community like that and if you want to reach more people then and especially
if we
are talking about a location like I defined which is not the wealthiest location which has a lot
of difficulties and it is a fragile community, then the only way how to reach the people is
by slowly building a relationship. And that's it! But if you are someone living somewhere and
looking for a community like that then I believe it's even harder, because most of the people
don't really have time just to sit all day and Google what kind of communities we have around.
But, again – pro
bably the question is just try finding a place. Try probably asking around.
It’s a kind of the question of communication. Even if you have five minutes free time during
the day and even if you're tired. But if you really have this sort of need for looking
and if it's a priority of yours, I think, you will find those five minutes somehow. Hege, do
you see that you have a local community interest in the brewery or how the things are evolving
there? I think the local community is really intere
sted. We are living in a small place,
we know each other, we don't have any greens, we don't have any trees here. A lot of people
tries to grow things inside, so we have these groups that meets to share how to grow hydroponic
– that is almost the only way to do things up here. I think green things make something with
people – they like to have that around them. Do urban gardens bring back the sense
of seasonality and do we need this? What happens with urban gardens when
there is no season,
in off-season? I think it's important to connect with the
seasons and the rhythm of the seasons. The season isn't really that short depending
on what you grow you can also plan, so that you have things to harvest even in
November. And then again it's good to have some time to plan the following season.
I think a lot of people have a sentiment that they're really looking forward to see
this place green again in spring. But because of the Lastādija doing a lot of cultural work and
doing a lo
t of activities unrelated to gardening, it makes the place live and makes
the community long for the garden back again. And I think they do also a lot of
activities already in February and March indoors. How about Svalbard? Due to the environment
up here all the growing will be indoors. It will not be that big of change during the
year, but I see that a lot of people like to get the spring feeling by buying more
greens, growing more in the springtime. How to promote this involvement and inc
lusivity?
Well, I think the very first is to level with the place. You need to be with the people on the
people's level so they speak the same language. I think the social connections are very important
and then celebrations – celebrating the harvest. We have a lot of creative people up here
with the blues festivals, jazz festivals, literature festivals and the food festival
in October, so we have actually a lot of people that are really engaged in different
kind of cultural activities. Ca
n you come up with an urban myth about urban gardens and
challenge that urban myth? Around 10 years ago there was a lot of the notion that the city
is growing food for people in the city. And then to explain – it's these people who are growing
food here in the city; it's not the city growing for the inhabitants. So, then signage helped.
Mārtiņš, do you also have an urban myth? I think, I have two. One of them is related to Latvian
worldview which is that only the real garden, only the real f
arm is outside of cities. When
you do something in cities that's not real, that's blasphemy. There's always this sort of a
tendency to disappear from cities and weekends, are doing celebrations, we all have these gardens
in the countryside, these country houses and huts. And if you don't have it you know someone and
then you visit them so you don't do gardening in city. But it's changing, because when you look
at the numbers you see that one third of a country lives in Riga and then probabl
y 2/3 live in urban
or even more than 2/3 live in urban environment, so why would you rob yourself of building
a better location where you live instead of waiting for weekend and just spend around the
green area for 1.5 day. And the other myth is that it’s definitely polluted. Right? It is polluted,
right? You can't eat a berry from an urban garden, because, most likely, you will die in agony and
everything bad is going to happen. But if we talk about Riga, it's not that bad of a location t
o
grow things. The only kind of side-effect that they have from growing food is they have become
happier. Probably it's contagious. I don't know, probably you can get that from you know urban
berries. Urban gardening is just as healthy or probably unhealthy as buying plastic food
from supermarket. Sometimes we can't do such activities because of one very stupid reason –
capacity. I work with Rīgas Meži which is this organization that works with the greenery of the
city and they say: ‘We si
mply have no people for doing a lot of things.' We need to organize the
basics and even that we can barely do. So, we need more people! So, just to wrap up our webinar
the call for action – what should be done today, in a month, in a year, to move forward with what
you're doing? So, Malm, let's start with you. Now it's a good good time to sow the
seads. The ground have warmed up to sow something today. And in a year you can do the
same, sow maybe something more. Until then, you can also wor
k on showing these places
that are around and showing them to your city municipality. If you want to have something
similar, look for the examples because they are out there. Not only these that we've
seen, but also in the region, other places. I think, my first call to action is let's just
try talking to each other and and let's just inspire each other. More and more it turns out
to be a very valuable thing – just understanding each other and understanding how can we find
a solution or a
compromise in situations. We are positive, we think we can do this. We
want to do this, we see that this is actually the best low-hanging-fruit-solution
for Longyearbyen to have more local food supplies and we have a lot of support
and a lot of people that are sharing for us. So, with this, I would like to thank everybody. Thank you the keynote speakers for the
insights and definitely – inspiration!
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