Fallen Fruit, is “an activist art project which started as a mapping of all the public fruit in our neighborhood.” (USA)

Edible Estates is an “an ongoing series of projects to replace the front lawn with edible garden landscapes responsive to culture, climate, context and people!” It “proposes the replacement of the domestic front lawn with a highly productive edible landscape.” (USA)

Dott07: Urban Farming was a massive, effort to “increase local food production and reduce food miles.” It culminated in a “banquet for 1,500 in the town’s main square. Participants in the growing project created the menu from produce they’d harvested. Local producers provided meat and vegetables to supplement the meal, which was cooked and eaten in the open air.” (UK)

The City Planting Farm Modules “enable persons to grow plants in cities.” The modules are made of fibre cloth, soil and water hose and are made into flexible forms. One situation can be seen in the image above. Lot more interesting images on the site.

Links via WMMNA.

• once a variety of vegetables and fruits are growing in different parts of Bangalore, recipe-based routes would develop. So to eat a recipe one would need to walk along a route, pluck the ingredients, cook the recipe and eat it.
• to compile maps of regular and stable crops in print form and work with organizations to make the maps available to the range of migrant and temporary labour force and the homeless in Bangalore (initially).
• to create a social and communal safety-net of food in cities so that in our modern cities of abundance and affluence, starvation and malnutrition won’t be as common as they are now.
• make cities less cold, unwelcoming and apathetic.
• the data collected across the process would help in developing inter-relations between factors such as soil toxicity and fertility, light, aggression (trampling, uprooting, eating), heat etc. and their impact on the survival factor of plants. I would further attempt to visualize this data in multiple ways.

Challenges:

• safety of plants growing in unguarded and unenclosed spaces
• develop spaces with growths of vegetables, fruits and flowers which influence their environment in multi-sensory ways (aesthetic, ecological…)

Method:

• a weekly routine of sowing, nurturing and documenting the planting effort.
• effort to involve volunteers in the process (students, street children etc.).

Time-scale of project:

Pilot: February to April 2008. The target of the pilot:

1. Have one good crop of vegetables, fruits etc. for a public street-side party in the vicinity of the area where the plants are grown.