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Experiments with local food supply in 2 hi-density urban estates
Maison Radieuse, Rezé, Nantes and Broadwater Farm, Tottenham, London

soundtrack: interview with Abdel Karim Boucham, Maison Radieuse 2008

In this continued post I look at two initiatives at the downstream end of the food chain, the consumer end, through the different approaches in two community projects I have engaged with in the past few years. Both are in high density public sector housing, one at Maison Radieuse in Nantes, one of Le Corbusier’s celebrated Unité D’Habitation buildings and the other at Broadwater Farm, the sprawling prefabricated 60s Modernist housing estate in Tottenham, London N17

Broadwater Farm is still remembered for the violent riots that took place here in 1985. But 25 years on it is a hub of community activity including a community kitchen and a food coop run by volunteers. The coop inventively uses surplus produce from local allotment holders thus providing an incentive for them to engage in the local food economy to add to the coop’s stock. Monies from this is put back into coop funds to ‘stretch the local food chain’. This raises multiple possibilities for the future of food in cities creating a space for ordinary people to participate in the food market, a way of envisaging an economic adaptation of the Cuban organopónicos model for the western urban context.

The Broadwater Farm coop buys from coop wholesalers and sells at wholesale prices; there is no profit and for labour it is dependent on each customer giving 2 hours a month to the coop.
The perennial question, as ever, is how volunteer time is accounted for. This is not an argument for free market practices but for sustainability; volunteer labour in community sector should be considered an externality, that is something not reflected in the price. Community initiatives are too often top heavy in terms of such externalities just as supermarkets are laden with invisibles – food miles, widespread use of precarious labour, etc. Certainly a lot has to do with identity and affiliation; many food coops do not want an association with market practices. But the upshot is the building up of invisible ‘community’ externalities that in effect limit interaction with broader sections of the community. The methods of getting food out from field to the dining table have been radically reshaped by the retailers through vertical integration and without learning the lessons of contemporary inventory management and new forms of social networking, many advantages of community sited practices, like assets in the form of free volunteer labour, may turn out to be liabilities. Thus how new forms of social interrelations and information management find their way into construction of the community food chain to the benefit of both the consumer and producer may present the key challenges.

The Maison Radieuse marché (market) evolved through a series of experiments with how best to source ethically produced vegetables. At first the residents used a system known as amap whereby 60 to 70 families would have an annual contract with a local farmer thus securing the farmer the income to continue farming; a form of contemporary patronage system to protect the local farmer. But this limits the freedom that modern consumer has become accustomed to and will not easily give up and thus amap is likely to be limited in scale.
Equally the Maison Radieuse marché also first started with a close association with residents’ own allotments or potager, but this involved ‘heavy organisation’, with volunteers having to get up at 7.30am and so forth.
Out of these experiments came the present simpler form of the Maison Radieuse marché: the small producers set up their own stalls in the entrance hall of the building estate one evening a week on the Wednesday.
The strategic location at the common entrance for all inhabitants is decisive – and this is something that most hi-rise buildings benefit from. The vegetables confront everyone coming home from work Wednesday evening. The result – 80 families out of 300 in the building buy their weekly vegetables from the marché in just the space of a few hours.
This amounts to a significant engagement with the real economy of food supply into the estate. The marché achieves this by cutting out the number of actors involved to a bare minimum but then that allows the running of the marché to create the links between people, between people and the producer. The intention is that the horse comes before the cart so that things can go forward.

Both these examples provide possibilities and critical lessons in different situations. There is a lot to be done to inculcate a thinking about the food chain into the culture of a community. Hi-density estates are the right places to undertake such experiments. And there is an appetite for affordable locally-sourced ethically produced food even in poor households. If this appetite can be met, the social spin-offs are more than just food.
Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University, London has spoken about getting away from the consumerism of food to the citizenship of food. We have been trained by advertising to think of ourselves as consumers (our power at the point of sale or purchase), rather than as citizens who have leverage in the food economy. As a consequence the food chain is both distorted and misrepresented. But the only way to revise it is to enter the food economy decisively at the ground level.

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