PUVeP News

Urban Design for the Use of Organic Waste in Urban Agriculture

Can the way we design urban space facilitate the use of sustainable waste management practices for local food production? That is the question being explored by Jeannette Tramhel, a guest researcher at PUVeP (PeriUrban Vegetable Project at the College of Agriculture, Xavier University, Cagayan de Oro City.) In conventional planning, food production and waste management are typically designed as separate urban systems. This approach results in the loss of potential nutrients and ignores the reality in many countries that organic wastes are misapplied in food production. What is needed is an effective planning tool to encourage wider adoption of proven practices to “close the nutrient loop.”

Ms. Tramhel will use a participatory urban design process with members of the community. Participants will represent various stakeholder groups, including householders, waste collectors, allotment gardeners, and government officials. The process will assimilate lessons learned at PUVeP from five years of allotment gardening in Cagayan de Oro and from various waste management initiatives throughout the city. The objective is to develop a set of urban design guidelines and an illustrative site design to "test" these guidelines. In the "test case," community participants will develop a site plan that integrates the use of organic waste generated by the city's major wholesale vegetable market with vermicomposting operations at a new allotment garden in Barangay Lapasan. By using a participatory design approach, it is hoped that the project will have the necessary support of stakeholders over the long term and that the process will have doubled as a capacity building exercise.

Informal dumpsite near market

Urban design is the field of study particularly concerned with the quality of life in the public realm. Public "open" spaces provide important ecological functions in cities; they serve as the "lungs" of the city, the riparian filters, the wildlife habitat, the groundwater infiltration. They also provide a variety of recreational opportunities and are an important aesthetic amenity. But in densely populated urban centres in the developing world, such spaces are rare and under constant pressure. Since healthy urban systems are those that are multifunctional, by incorporating urban agriculture and organic waste management into the functions of open space, perhaps the odds for survival can be improved for those few "breathing spaces" that remain.

This project will examine how urban design guidelines can contribute in the transition towards more sustainable cities.

Ms. Tramhel is a Master's student in urban design in the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary, in Canada. This work is being carried out with the aid of an ECOPOLIS Graduate Research and Design Award from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada. Information on the Centre is available on the web at

http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-1-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html

Back 09.05.2008.