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An Outdoor Living Room in Los Angeles [Image courtesy of ciclavia]

Improving an inner-city neighborhood without setting it up for gentrification could be as simple as placing a few wooden seats on the sidewalk. Or at least that's the premise of architect Steve Cancian's Outdoor Living Rooms, a project featured in SPUR's new show at the Urban Center, DIY Urbanism: Testing the grounds for social change (opening today! -- get your tickets here).

The project began as an exploration of the problem of gentrification in low-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Cancian knew that many of these areas drastically needed improvement, but doing so often resulted in overdevelopment, and subsequent displacement of the current residents. The usual solutions for revitalizing these areas, such as lining the streets with trees, only made the neighborhoods more attractive to potential gentrifiers. Was it possible to improve these areas without the side effect of gentrification?

What constitutes neighborhood improvement for inner-city residents is often different than what constitutes improvement in wealthier areas. In Cancian's case, the residents of the neighborhoods he catered to wanted a livelier street and a better place to socialize. Cancian found that this street culture had the effect of preventing gentrification. Places like West Oakland, where ocean views and Victorian houses made it a prime target for gentrification, had not yet become gentrified because the vibrant street culture tended to repel developers who favored quieter streets. In preserving this street culture, Cancian hoped gentrification would be discouraged. "We want to celebrate what the neighborhood is," says Cancian in an interview with LA Weekly. "For anyone whose goal is to change the neighborhood into something that excludes the current residents, we hope that living rooms will actually be a deterrent to them moving in."

The solution, then, was simple. Create an outdoor living room by putting unembellished, inexpensive outdoor furniture on inner-city streets. This would facilitate community development and improve the area in a way the residents wanted, but also maintain an active street culture that prevents these vibrant areas from turning into homogenized middle-class neighborhoods."¨

"Living rooms" are straightforward enough that a community can agree on their look and location, they can be built almost immediately, and they are inexpensive enough for a low-income neighborhood to afford. "What has kept them expanding is communities without resources," Cancian said in a New York Times interview. "A simple pocket park takes a half-million dollars and two to three years to build, while a living room takes as little as a month and between $5,000 and $15,000."

And so far, the living rooms seem to be serving their purpose. Not only have they slowed gentrification and sparked street life, but they have also helped to make the areas around them cleaner and less crime ridden. Residents of low-income neighborhoods are embracing them, pleased with the positive changes they've seen. As one resident of South L.A. says about her local outdoor living room "There was nothing before, just a lot of trash right here. It makes it look a little bit decent."

A prototype for a bike rack designed by David Baker + Partners [Photo Credit: David Baker]

Build pretzel-shaped steel tubes, bolt them to the sidewalk, and the cyclists will come. Or at least that seems to be the logic behind the newfound interest in bike rack design in cities throughout the country. I remember a time when parking your bike meant locking it to anything you might tie a dog to, but these days everyone seems to have an opinion on the right way to lock up your bike — and a lamp post or park bench just will not do.

San Francisco-based architect David Baker (whose elegant, pleasantly weathered bike rack prototype is featured in DIY Urbanism: Testing the grounds for social change -- opening next Tuesday!), provides an excellent primer on bike rack design and implementation. Who knew that round tubes were more susceptible to pipe cutters? Or that a standard U-rack can easily accommodate three bicycles? It would behoove city planning officials to consult this guide before potentially installing the wrong kinds of racks on their city streets.

But bike racks have become much more than just another place to park your bike. Following in the wake of widespread bike lane implementation in even the most car-centric of cities (like Indianapolis and Detroit), bike racks are an instantly recognizable symbol of a city government's commitment to promoting bicycle transportation. In recognition of the bike rack's symbolic potential, cities like New York and San Francisco have brought industrial designers and architects into the process, sponsoring bike rack design competitions. Even David Byrne has collaborated with the New York Department of Transportation to install his own whimsical designs — although he seems to be on such good terms with the DOT that his work managed to bypass the usual jury process.

American cities have a long way to go before we come close to approximating the volume and efficiency of bike storage in iconic cycling cities such as Amsterdam, but a standard curbside U-rack with a galvanized steel finish is a good place to start.

Bike storage in Amsterdam [Photo Credit: flickr user julia.simard]

Criteria for bike rack installation in San Francisco [Image courtesy of SFMTA]

Hayes Valley Farm extends to the very edge of a more traditional urban scene [Photo Credit: Fabiana Meacham]

Spend a few hours walking through any sector of the city and you will inevitably stumble upon a small patch of toiled earth, usually surrounded by chain-link fencing and accompanied by the all too familiar odor of manure. Urban farms have surfaced throughout the country in recent years -- in both major and not-so-major urban areas -- and San Francisco has been no exception. We now have a proposed legislation to loosen zoning restrictions on urban agriculture -- a measure that would profoundly affect small scale farms' capacity to do business.

The reasons for practicing urban farming are copious: a closer connection to food sources, reclamation of vacant land in blighted areas, education about healthy eating habits, a source of employment in hard economic times.

But for many city dwellers, urban agriculture remains a somewhat vague practice carried out by highly motivated individuals who have somehow found time to till, sow, weed and harvest small slivers of earth that have escaped the traditional urbanizing forces of cement and asphalt. For most of us, urban farms still don't play much of a role in defining the way we experience our cities and questions concerning the feasibility and longevity of urban farming still remain:

• What are the actual urban farming scenarios taking shape throughout the city and how did they come to be there?

• How do urban farms confront the task of growing food in areas that were never intended to support agriculture?

• To what extent can urban agriculture integrate itself into the urban landscape and way of life in the long-term?

• Is urban farming about more than just feeding people? What else is it about?

"Farming the City," a new blog series, will address these questions by highlighting the urban farms taking root in and around San Francisco, the people who run them and the particularities that define their role in the urban landscape.

This week we'll look at Alemany Farm, one of San Francisco's pioneering urban agriculture projects.

Alemany Farm

Alemany Farm occupies four and a half acres of land in southeastern San Francisco. Wedged between the Southern Freeway and the Alemany public housing development, the farm and its immediate surroundings reflect much that has gone wrong -- and the potential to do right -- in San Francisco's planning.

One of the City's early forays into urban agriculture, Alemany first came into use as a farm in 1994, when the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG) received permission from the Recreation and Park Department to convert the site from a dumping ground to a community farm for residents of the Alemany and Potrero Housing Developments. Although SLUG eventually disbanded, the farm's commitment to community involvement persists. Today, a core group of 15-20 volunteers (with the occasional weekend influx of corporate community service groups) cultivates the land while maintaining a close relationship with the adjacent Alemany Housing Development, whose residents are eligible to receive a free CSA (community supported agriculture) share from the farm's harvest and have open access to the grounds at all times.

On a recent tour of the site led by dedicated volunteer Kom Siksamat, the farm boasted vegetable patches, a native plant garden, fruit trees, a bee colony, a frog pond, and an evolving terrace farm. Siksamat has led the effort to cultivate the steep slope comprising about one quarter of the farm's total land area, but the challenges of applying the ancient practice of terrace farming to the urban farm micro-scale have become apparent. (The Inca may have mastered terrace agriculture by constructing miles of irrigation channels in the Central Andes, but most urban farms can't count on the unflagging labor of thousands of devoted subjects to carry out such undertakings.) For now, much hand watering and heavy lifting is required. Siksamat hopes that a "hillside full of food" will one day become a mainstay at Alemany.

In many ways, Alemany perfectly embodies the non-profit model of urban farming: greening a slice of underutilized urban space, creating opportunities for the community to enjoy and learn from it, and thereby providing a new lens through which we might question our relationship to the surrounding urban environment. The existence of this thriving patch of land in the midst of such classic crimes of urban planning (the freeway cutting through the city, the alienated public housing project) implies that although we may not be able to completely dismantle such misguided urban mega-projects, we can at least ameliorate their negative impact through smaller scale interventions. Alemany Farm gives us a reason to visit this neglected part of the city, providing a rare opportunity to consider not just what went wrong there, but also marvel at everything that seems to be going right.

The Southern Freeway looms in the distance

A volunteer amidst an abundance of greenery

The terraced hillside

[Photo Credit: All photos by Fabiana Meacham]

On Saturday, August 28, SPUR's Young Urbanists will host Urban farming 101 at Alemany Farm at 11:30 a.m. Participants will have the opportunity to practice skills learned in the workshop from 1-3 p.m

Urban farms play a central role in SPUR's upcoming exhibition, DIY Urbanism: Testing the Grounds for Social Change, opening September 7.