Growing Cities

Urban Farm DB summary

This is a review of Growing Cities, a 2013 documentary film (92 minutes) directed by Dan Susman and produced by Susman, Andrew Monbouquette, and Dana Altman. The film follows the two filmmakers' journey from their hometown of Omaha across the United States—to San Francisco, Detroit, New York, New Orleans, and Austin—surveying urban farms, noting that U.S. urban farming culture traces to World War II Victory Gardens, when 40 percent of the country's vegetables were produced in home and community gardens; it profiles New York's rooftop farms as adaptive reuse, a Detroit farm in an area where healthy food is hard to obtain, farms employing people who would otherwise struggle to find work, and a New Orleans farm functioning as a program for at-risk youth, closing with the filmmakers' own mobile garden project and the message to "grow where you are."