Santana's vegetable garden consists of old car tyres filled with soil and compost. He gets the soil wherever he can, even from the scrapings off the tubers sold at the local market. Building the garden has been a slow process but a rewarding one. Pumpkin on the ground. The Cuban lesson Urban food gardens are a powerful idea for cities, particularly those in poorer countries.
Cities produce very little of their basic needs.
They are resource sinks, sucking in food, energy, water and other material goods. The costs of this are high and include transport, roads and construction, fuel, refrigeration, storage, packaging, and the associated pollution. There are also costs in agricultural communities where food crops have been replaced by cash crops. Such communities often lose their community culture and their more sustainable land use practises. But cities do not have to be represented by poverty and class division, the sprawl of shanty towns, unemployment, crime, drugs, sex tourism, garbage and traffic.