At the Rooting DC conference this Saturday, activist, scholar, and consultant Joe Nasr will speak about how North American cities have been organizing for urban agriculture, and what the DC region can learn from that. Joe, who is based in Toronto, has worked on urban agriculture and food issues globally since the early 1990s. He has had longstanding ties to the DC region, discovering the subject by working with Jac Smit, “the father of urban agriculture.”
He is the co-ordinator for MetroAg – Alliance for Urban Agriculture, co-founded The Urban Agriculture Network and maintains several worldwide affiliations, including the Centre for Studies in Food Security at Ryerson University in Toronto . He received a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania.
Joe brings hands on experience to his perspective at the conference. He has mentored a number of students interested in urban agriculture worldwide, including architecture students working with food- and agriculture-related design. Joe also co-curated the traveling exhibition: Carrot City – Designing for Urban Agriculture, which showed how the design of buildings and cities can enable the production of food in the city, and is now being turned into a book. Hopefully we’ll see the Carrot City exhibit in DC in the near future!
In 1996 he co-authored a book, entitled, “Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs, and Sustainable Cities,” which has now become a standard textbook on the subject. Long out of print, this book might become available online very soon. Joe is also spearheading the creation of a digital clearinghouse on urban agriculture that MetroAg is setting up currently – keep an eye for an announcement on the launch of that website really soon.
We are excited to have Joe in DC, and look forward to gleaning some green nuggets of wisdom from his knowledge and experience! Joe will joined in his session by Kim Hodgson, who has been spearheading initiatives related to urban agriculture at the American Planning Association, who will be sharing with us some exciting stories from across North America on how planners have been recently supporting urban agriculture.
