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How can we reach our 2020
Greenest City Targets?

GC 2020

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42 results found

  1. Encourage urban food production

    Urban vegetable gardens and container planting can go a long way towards reducing our food miles and our dependence on imports.

    Successful projects in Mexico and Cuba show us that we can produce a lot of food in the city proper, so why don't we?

    669 votes
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  2. Develop a local food hub and expand the availability of local food at a neighbourhood level

    A local food hub would support the distribution, processing and storage of local food, a current gap in the local food system. This hub would then be connected to avenues to access locally produced food distributed throughout the neighbourhoods, making more available food produced locally by farmers outside Vancouver as well as urban farmers.

    506 votes
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  3. Municipal tax break for property owners that allow urban farmers to farm their yards

    There already exist entrepreneurs producing significant amounts of food in yards in Vancouver, often through a CSA distribution model (Inner City Farms, Fresh Roots, City Farm Boy, My Urban Farm, and others). The landowners that partner with these farmers should receive tax breaks based on the amount of food being produced on their property. With such inflated property taxes in Vancouver, this would provide a delicious incentive for landowners to allow urban farmers to access their land.

    256 votes
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  4. Develop a city-supported urban farming program

    Community gardens and farmers markets are on the rise in Vancouver, but there remains a need for more productive farms (market gardens) to produce significant amounts of local food.

    There are more and more people interested in getting into farming as a livelihood, but barriers such as high land values and low profit margins in traditional farming make entry difficult.

    The City could develop a municipally-supported urban farming program where city-owned land would be affodably leased to prospective farmers for a season to gain experience, earn an income, and produce food for local residents. This could be coupled with a…

    240 votes
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  5. Create more community gardens

    Provide more opportunities for the creation of community gardens. Existing community gardens should be preserved and enhanced. Encourage community gardens on school grounds for educational and aesthetic purposes.

    227 votes
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    City has already moved beyond the 2,010 (garden plots) by 2010 challenge. Three new gardens were created in the summer of 2010 and others are currently in the planning stage. This is an idea included in the Draft Greenest City Action Plan.

  6. Support Urban Farming Entrepeneurship

    Urban farming from an entrepreneurial approach holds one of the most exciting possibilities for urban food production. Urban farming is a great way for Vancouver to achieve “worldwide entrepreneurial recognition” and create sustainable urban jobs.

    Other successful urban farming systems (i.e., Havana, Cuba; Detroit, Michigan) have developed out of necessity and urgency. Such conditions do not yet exist in Vancouver. Yet urban farming, which is now a multi-million dollar “industry” in North America, holds the potential to create economic opportunities for those wanting to engage in urban food production; provide the most local food possible to Vancouver residents (and visitors);…

    215 votes
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  7. Develop a Vancouver Food Action Plan

    An Action Plan would provide an overall strategy to guide the City’s response to urban agriculture and food system issues.

    177 votes
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  8. create an urban farm network

    Create an urban farm network, a hub that links farms, farmers, local food distribution and storage in the city and provides resources to everyone (including organized farms, non-profits, individuals, schools, community groups, city, etc) and provide business advice, links to funding, assistance in creating and sustaining local jobs, training farmers, and develop partnerships and connection to other urban farm resources throughout the city

    121 votes
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  9. Indoor farmer's markets and community garden spaces for winter months.

    Create indoor farmer's markets and community garden spaces for winter months in order to support healthy eco-living and eating.

    94 votes
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  10. Gardens on apartment property

    Most 3-storey walk-up apartment buildings have boring empty front lawns. These lawns could be replaced either with garden plots for the inhabitants, or with landscaping of native plantings to provide habitat for birds and insects. Create a system so that if the people in that specific building weren't interested in gardening, their plot would be assigned to other neighbourhood gardeners. (Since you wouldn't want to replace boring lawns with even more boring empty plots of earth/weeds.)

    81 votes
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  11. Allow greenouse enclosures around courtyards/patios (ie. do not count these in floor space ratio)

    Promote more variety of local food growth and longer growing seasons by encouraging greenhouses to transform underused residential courtyards and patios into personal food production centers. The City Development By-Laws currently discourage such greenhouses by counting them towards the total floor space of the building, preventing them from being added to existing houses, and forcing developers to choose between an extra room in their house or a greenhouse (guess which option most people would choose).

    79 votes
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  12. make food not lawns

    Stop planting grass and instead plant food that people can eat. The big living roof on the convention centre has grass right now but it, and other roofs and lawns could have edible plants living on them.

    74 votes
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  13. Reduce residential encroachment on agricultural land

    In order for us to have more local food in our supply chain we need to protect the agricultural land we have in the Lower Mainland including the Fraser Valley. Right now residential and commercial land zoning is encroaching too much on our prime agricultural land. Soil is a resource that must be protected!

    71 votes
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  14. Bring community gardeners together with those who have extra yard space

    Create a program for homeowners & community gardeners to work together. For example, elderly people who want to stay in their homes but can no longer maintain their yards, would have their yards maintained by gardeners, in exchange for garden space in the home owner's yard to grow food.

    69 votes
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  15. Protect Urban Farming by changing the laws that get used to shut it down

    Five years ago I moved to Vancouver and started turning the house I rented with friends into an urban farm. But a neighbour (one, out of dozens) thinks food gardens belong in the back yard and used the city's vague and undemocratic "Untidy Premises Bylaw" to have us ordered to remove it.

    If Vancouver really wants to be green, it should start by looking around at the amazing things that ordinary people are already doing to make it that way and stop putting up barriers to their work. This bylaw needs a specific exemption for food gardens, or it needs…

    56 votes
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  16. local food production, vertically!

    verticle farming can feed a whole neighbor hood in one city block!!
    http://www.verticalfarm.com/designs.html

    a glass skyscraper that is designed as a climate controlled environment that can grow food of all different varieties,
    vertically.
    weather hydroponic or soil medium, plants are hung vertically against the windows.
    check this link!
    makes so much sense!
    less space used in this multi-leveled complex, and not subject to bad weather!
    check this link above for designs !

    49 votes
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  17. Urban Orchards

    Create urban orchards in every neighbourhood ( cherry, apple, fig, berries, plums, apricots and peaches). Employ staff to maintain these and to teach people how to preserve and use the harvest. Graft producing branches to existing cherry, plum, apple root stock.

    48 votes
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  18. A Call to Town Hall - Plant Veggies, not Flowers

    A Call to Town Hall - Plant Veggies, not Flowers
    Poverty Reduction, Environment Protection and Community Building

    Goal
    Reduce poverty, involve community, promote healthy lifestyles, reduce personal and city spending, create a well connected and safer community, add natural nutrients back to top soil, and educate about healthy living and healthy food.

    Most cities and towns have multiple flower gardens that are taken care of by city workers. Call your local city hall, ask them to plant hardy vegetables in garden spots instead of the usual flowers. Vegetable plants produce very beautiful flowers that turn into edible veggies like Squash,…

    41 votes
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  19. Start window farms in Vancouver

    http://www.windowfarms.org/
    This could be great for Vancouver with all of our donwtown condos. Unfortunately this is only available in the US. City could start this in Vancouver and make it available like the water saver kit.

    38 votes
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  20. Buying of Local Foods

    Encourage the buying of local foods so products can be bought and sold without harmful chemicals, and are sold and grown with natural products

    36 votes
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