Urban farming and DIY — how making it yourself reclaims sovereignty over growing

Urban farming is often spoken of as the problem of 'how to grow in a place with no soil.' Rooftops, balconies, indoors, vacant lots — there is no neatly prepared soil as in a field, nor the tools a farming family has handed down over generations. Precisely for that reason, someone who sets out to grow in the city must begin by preparing the 'apparatus for growing' themselves. Some buy a ready-made home-garden kit, but within a limited budget and the peculiar conditions of a particular place, many end up 'making' something from materials close at hand. Plastic bottles and styrofoam boxes, scrap pallets, PVC pipe — the sites of urban farming are lined with a surprising number of self-built tools.

To dismiss this act of 'making it yourself' as simply 'because there is no money' is to miss an important side of urban farming. In the process of making, a person comes to understand the mechanism of the system they grow with. They learn in the body how water circulates, where nutrients come from, and why a plant withers. Further, they convey a successful contrivance to others in photographs and drawings, and take in others' improvements — and as such sharing accumulates, a single tool ceases to be one person's possession and becomes a 'commons of knowledge' that everyone cultivates. What this report follows is the story of how far this culture of self-building and sharing has pushed the farming of the city.

The word DIY inevitably carries an echo of 'a cheap makeshift.' It is true that keeping costs down is a great advantage. But if we shrink the meaning of DIY in urban farming to 'thrift' alone, we cannot explain why engineers and even farmers around the world join this movement. What many of them speak of is the word 'sovereignty.' Like seed, soil and water, the tools of farming too — once held by a particular company or patent — leave the grower no choice but to obey those terms. Conversely, if the design of a tool is made open, so that anyone can build, repair and improve it, then the grower can control their own farming themselves.

This way of thinking has a long prehistory. In the 1970s the economist E. F. Schumacher, in his book 'Small Is Beautiful' (1973), argued for the importance not of huge, centralised technology but of 'appropriate technology' that people can handle themselves and that is rooted in a locality. The self-build culture that spread around the same time, and the later maker movement, carried this thought forward into the practice of making tools. The DIY of urban farming appeared as part of that larger current. In the chapters that follow, we trace — through four cases — what concrete tools and organisations this thinking actually produced.