All photos © Michael Hanson. Above: Paul Glowaski, the director of the Homeless Garden Project in Santa Cruz, CA, stands in a field at sunset.

People have always grown food in urban spaces—on windowsills and sidewalks, and in backyards and neighborhood parks—but today, urban farmers are leading an environmental and social movement with intent to transform our national food system. To explore this agricultural renaissance, brothers David and Michael Hanson and urban farmer Edwin Marty document twelve successful urban farm programs, from an alternative school for girls in Detroit, to a backyard food swap in New Orleans, to a restaurant supply garden on a rooftop in Brooklyn. Each essay offers practical advice for budding farmers, such as composting and keeping livestock in the city, decontaminating toxic soil, even changing zoning laws.

For seven weeks, David, Michael, and videographer, Charlie Hoxie, traveled the country in a short school bus powered by veggie grease (and a minivan after too many breakdowns delayed the production). The trio slept in empty lots overlooking the Pacific Ocean, mall parking lots, and alongside the very farms they were documenting.The images and stories to come out of these farms show that America’s urban landscape is rich with opportunity for fresh local food. Hanson’s book, Breaking Through Concrete : Building an Urban Farm Revival, published by University of California Press, was recently released.

-courtesy Michael Hanson.

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Keynes Country Park Beach, Gloucestershire, 2008, by Simon Roberts from his We English exhibit at Klompching Gallery in Brooklyn’s D.U.M.B.O. district. We English explores identity, attachment to home and the relationship between people and the land in England.

“In 2005, I spent a year traveling across Russia to produce Motherland, a book exploring the Russians’ attachment to their homeland. This attachment to place was somewhat mysterious–simultaneously profound and banal–and it led me to think about my own sense of belonging and memory, identity and place. We English became another journey, not quite as epic as that across Russia, but involving a 1993 Talbot Express Swift Capri motorhome, my pregnant wife, our two-year-old daughter and a 5×4 large-format camera.”
—Simon Roberts

We English is on view until October 24 at Klompching Gallery, 111 Front Street, Suite 206, Brooklyn.