Wednesday, January 12, 2011
As part of a broader effort to encourage healthy eating and local food growing, the city of Minneapolis is crafting an Urban Agriculture Policy Plan, which it's asking for public feedback on via a couple of community meetings this month.
The plan deals with land use, zoning codes, access to land, and design as it pertains to urban agriculture, according to city information.
It's an extension of Homegrown Minneapolis, another initiative that the city started in 2008 to "improve the growth, sales, distribution, and consumption of healthy, locally grown foods within the city," the program's webpage reads.
The plan outlines various recommendations for zoning changes that would allow for commercial food growing and full-fledged urban farming, explains city planner Amanda Arnold.
For instance, it calls for urban farms in industrial areas and in certain commercial districts; allowing market gardens to be located on rooftops and the ground, and setting maximum lot areas so that market gardens fit into neighborhoods.
Other recommendations emphasize urban agriculture in long-range planning and in conjunction with new development, as part of the landscaping.
In general, she says, "The idea is to make it more feasible for growing in the city."
A number of other cities around the country, she says, are undergoing similar initiatives to address the growing trend toward urban agriculture. Seattle recently revised some aspects of its zoning code to allow for more local growing and Chicago is in the middle of doing the same thing. Meanwhile, urban farming has caught on in Milwaukee, Detroit, and Cleveland, according to Arnold.
"Efforts around the country vary a lot," she says, adding that although the concept has been around for a long time, "I think the formalization and promotion of urban agriculture is a recent movement."
The plan will go before the City Council in February.
Source: Amanda Arnold, Principal Planner, City of Minneapolis, Department of Community Planning and Economic Development
Writer: Anna Pratt
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Just don't call it a corporate campus.
That might send prospective tenants of the Minnesota Science Park--a million square feet of research facilities on 32 acres near the University of Minnesota campus and the border between Minneapolis and St. Paul--running in the opposite direction.
Inventors, research scientists and biotech entrepreneurs want spare, efficient, functional spaces to do their work, says architect John Cuningham, whose Minneapolis-based Cuningham Group Architecture will design the dozen or so buildings on what's now industrial land nestled up against the edge of the U of M's East Bank campus.
"They don't want ostentatious display," Cuningham says. "They actively dislike it." They want shared spaces where researchers in different areas can interact, but beyond that they tend to be hostile to what they regard as wasteful niceties.
It's "a very demanding project," he says, requiring Cuningham's designers to be "very economical with very advanced technology."
The project breaks the mold of most research parks located near university campuses, Cuningham says. Like the U of M itself, the Minnesota Science Park will be crammed into the urban core rather than sprawled across farmland on a rural, land-grant campus. The nonprofit team behind the project (no state dollars involved) announced it at the annual gathering of the national Association of University Research Parks held in Minneapolis last week.
Cuningham's firm had already been involved for a decade or so with urban design and planning in the Southeast Minneapolis Industrial (SEMI) Area at the western end of the Midway, a linear industrial district that stretches for miles through St. Paul and Minneapolis.
Once renowned as having the world's highest concentration of grain elevators, the area will instead be home to "21st-century American discoveries," Cuningham says, such as alternative fuels and nanotechnology.
"This is not manufacturing farm implements," Cuningham says.
Source: John Cuningham, Cuningham Group Architecture, P.A.
Writer: Chris Steller