Urban Agriculture Hits Close to Home

I love food. But more importantly, I love fresh, delicious food. Living in the Bay Area makes that pretty easy thanks to the farmers markets and restaurants committed to serving local and sustainable food. I even have my own hipster backyard garden and, I hate to brag but my friends will agree that my fridge has triple the amount of fresh food than all of theirs combined.

Still, I struggle to maintain a 100 percent local, fresh food diet. Even as someone who attempts to instill sustainable thinking in every design challenge I approach, it can be a real struggle for me to find the time for this type of diet. I shop for food on the weekends or at night on my way home for my 8:30 dinner. And I meet friends out a few times a week for dinner. Does any of this sound familiar to you? Eating fresh, local food takes work.

If someone who is passionate about this issue is struggling to make it work, it’s no wonder the City of San Francisco is also struggling to convince thousands of city-dwellers the benefits of supporting local, urban agriculture. That’s just the type of challenge designers at frog love to sink their teeth into. And so we did.

A group of designers from frog approached the Digging Deeper ‘09 challenge by designing system solutions that would support the city in their efforts to encourage “community-wide benefits in urban neighborhoods as well as wellness and business opportunities on an individual scale.” After much deliberation we landed on two concepts we felt would support the biggest challenges we uncovered during our research:

Challenge 1: Most farmers live outside the 100-mile radius that technically defines "local." The biggest barrier to getting their local food into the city is transportation. On top of tending to their farms, they must deliver the food themselves—attending up to 25 markets in the high season!

The flip side of this challenge is recognizing that shoppers need easy, convenient access to fresh food, perhaps even prepped meals that will help educate them on cooking and preparing healthy meals.

Our solution, Mobile Market, makes fresh, local produce the fastest, easiest (and most delicious) food option for hungry urbanites. Unique carts are deployed to pedestrian throughways with produce from local farms, and fresh, prepped, pre-packaged ingredients for meals. They not only become the signature transportation mechanism for the produce, but have a special design that allows for ultra-fast transactions. Placed around the city at rush-hour hubs, school pick-up zones, and other high foot-traffic centers, the carts make the best use of both customer and vendor time: customers get the freshest food right before mealtimes and vendors can quickly and strategically set up to be located at the most frequented places.

Challenge 2: There is plenty of unused land in San Francisco that could be farmed, but the city has struggled to sustain them with limited resources. But, across the country there is a movement in backyard and co-op urban gardening. So, how can we use those spaces to encourage urban farmers while leveraging existing efforts to support the local community of shop owners and neighbors?

Our solution, Stones Throw Harvest, is a city-wide distribution system of local, organic produce grown by individuals and sold at neighborhood corner-store markets. People exchange their produce for system credits, which can be used to purchase local organic produce throughout the city.

We're excited that both of our concepts have been selected as final entries for the people’s choice in the Digging Deeper competition. We feel both would be of great value to the city and its community. In whatever venture the city chooses to invest, the real success will be in the partnerships they make and in creating a ecosystem where local, sustainable food is part of a holistic solution.