Backyard vegetables can fight crime, improve health, and boost the economy.

By transforming its vacant lots, backyards and roof-tops into farming plots, the city of Cleveland could meet all of its fresh produce, poultry and honey needs, calculate researchers from Ohio State University. These steps would save up to $155 million annually, boost employment and scale back obesity.

"Post-industrial cities like Cleveland are struggling with more and more unused land, these become sources of crime," said Parwinder Grewal co-author of a study "Can cities become self-reliant in food?" published July 20 in Cities.

"I was motivated to show how much food a city could actually produce by using this land," he said. "We could address global problems through this way of gardening."

Urban gardening improves health, reduces pollution, and creates local businesses, Grewal said. The population of Cleveland, what Grewal considers a typical post-industrial city, peaked near one million in 1950, and has been declining since. Today scarcely half a million people call Cleveland home.

As industrial jobs have dried up, the city's exodus has accelerated. Unable to keep up their properties, many former residents have abandoned their homes. Vacant lots are proliferating, and currently number more than 20,000, according to the Cleveland City Planning Commission.

Ten percent of Clevelanders have been diagnosed with diabetes, as compared to the national average of 8 percent, and more than a third are obese. Among cities with a population between 100,000 and 500,000, it is the seventh most dangerous, according to one crime ranking. Growing tomatoes and beans, and keeping bees and chickens, would change all this, Grewal said. Studies have shown that gardens improve community health, reduce crime and increase property values.

Cleveland city planners have placed special emphasis on programs to foster urban gardening in the past five to 10 years, however, Grewal's visions are on a more ambitious scale.

In the most intensive scenario he outlines 80 percent of all vacant lots, 62 percent of business rooftops, and 9 percent of residential lots would be tied to food, allowing the city to meet up to 100 percent of its fresh food needs. Grewal, who grows the bulk of his own food in his backyard, believes that his propositions are realistic and practical. The largest barrier is convincing citizens to garden.

"No discredit to the value of Grewal's study," said Kim Scott, a Cleveland City Planner and urban gardening specialist, "but articulating an idea is a different experience from implementing it."

While Cleveland might have enough land to be self-sufficient, it doesn't yet have the labor force to make it happen, Scott said.

"A mental shift has to take place," said Scott. "Many people don't have a clue about farming. They lack the patience to eat whole foods, they lack the desire."

Both Scott and Grewal hope that shift is coming. Cleveland now has hundreds of community gardens. Some residents are growing market gardens, cultivating and selling produce as a full-time job. The city is seeing the grandest show of large public gardens since the Victory Gardens of World War II, when 40 percent of U.S. vegetables came from private and public gardens.

"If we could do it then," said Grewal, "we can do it now. And if we design cities that are as self-sufficient as possible, the longer human civilization can sustain itself."

Image: Parwinder Grewal

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Citation: “Can cities become self-reliant in food?” By Sharanbir S. Grewal and Parwinder S. Grewal. Cities, July 20, 2011.