ジャック・スミット / Jac Smit

Jac Smit studied city planning at Harvard and worked on development plans across South Asia, Africa and the Middle East — in Bogotá, Karachi, Jakarta and Port-au-Prince, and in refugee camps in Bangladesh and Tanzania. Through this work he recognised, earlier than almost anyone, how much food production was already happening inside cities.

In 1992 he founded The Urban Agriculture Network (TUAN), and in 1996 he served as lead author of the UNDP report 'Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities.' By estimating that hundreds of millions of people worldwide were engaged in urban farming, the report became the turning point at which governments and international agencies began treating city farming as policy rather than exception — and it remains a classic of the field.

Until his death in 2009, a few days after his 80th birthday, Smit kept encouraging practitioners worldwide through lectures and advice. The title 'father of urban agriculture' honours a man who cultivated not a single farm, but the field itself.