Growing food in the street

Michael Mobbs at the raised garden beds greening up an intersection in Chippendale (photo by Mark Metcalfe/City of Sydney).

I expect summer this year will be like no other experienced in Australia, similar to the extraordinary summer in the northern hemisphere – fires, flash floods, premature human, animal, bird and insect demise.

But in Chippendale, NSW, where I live – where we’ve planted over a thousand edible plants and trees, and nurtured them with an average of 400kg of food waste composted weekly in footpath garden composts – we’ve measured it to be 10–15°C cooler in many of our streets on 35°C+ days.

Street community

In 2006, we held a ‘Food for the Future’ fair in our Peace Park and closed off a couple of adjoining street blocks. We were overwhelmed with the local support when around 8,000 people turned out to learn about and embrace our gardening initiatives. It changed our community, grew trust between residents and fostered a meaningful relationship with council.

Sydney City Council kindly gave us 300 plants to be planted out in the streets on the fair day, and many who had never held a shovel or plant did so for the first time that day. Plants were divided into those for the shady and those for the sunny sides of the streets. My daughter, Jessica, managed the allocation of which plant where and about six local residents led street planting gangs of locals to plant them throughout the neighbourhood. A locally based construction company, Built, generously supplied us with three wheelbarrows and some shovels. Food providores, beekeepers and other farmers came to sell and demonstrate their wares.

The power of policy

The footpath gardening policy grew out of that initial event and from similar ones in other city communities and since 2006, citizens in the Sydney City Council area have legally gardened in the street without the need for written council approval.

The policy is a vital piece of community-driven, self-empowering regulation, treasured and used daily by residents and businesses. Many people now garden in the streets without knowledge of the council policy, simply copying the planting initiatives of others around them. Isn’t the best regulation self-enforcing and self-generated? It’s just common sense.

Today, the policy is a powerful tool to cool streets as well as grow food, community and beauty in our neighbourhood. Research shows that footpath gardens and trees have a positive economic impact, increasing property values in streets with greenery.

Our community helped achieve the policy by:

• Having no constitution, charter or committee.
• Calling ourselves by our own names, or sometimes using ‘Sustainable Chippendale Active Gardeners’ (e.g. Facebook).
• Meeting casually in the street, cafés, homes and out gardening – not in organised committee meetings.

Perhaps a key reason we garden in and on our footpaths is that there is simply nowhere else to garden in this tightly-built, small land holding suburb – but it also gives us gardeners the greatest of pleasure in digging, sowing, harvesting while connecting with each other and nature.

City councils across Australia could take a leaf out of Sydney City Council’s policy manual and allow residents to garden in communal spaces. We’ve experienced so many positive outcomes through our street gardening, not least of which is a better relationship with our council, whose support has been much appreciated.

Because it’s effective and I hope other Australian councils replicate it, the following is an extract of our council’s footpath gardening policy:

“Our footpath gardening policy makes it easy and simple for residents and businesses to start a garden on public footpaths. Footpath gardening is about taking the patch of the city out the front of your house or business and making it beautiful. To make sure your garden meets City of Sydney requirements, we ask that you fill out a simple checklist before you start your project.

You must be able to answer ‘yes’ to all relevant questions in the checklist. Depending on the scope of your footpath garden project choose between:

• garden beds checklist
• planter box checklist

Once you’ve submitted your checklist you can start your garden – you don’t need confirmation from us.”

Written by Michael Mobbs, gardener, designer and author.