Author Archive

Forget chicken coops – this past week I was in Aruba for work and snapped the following pictures of a mother hen and her young in a neighborhood adjacent to downtown Oranjestad that I thought were quite fun. The scene reminded me of a 2008 vacation to Kauai, which is overrun by roosters (rumor has it that a hurricane destroyed the coops and the wild hens and roosters have dominated the island ever since). Doesn’t the last one remind you of a corny “Why did the chicken cross the road?” joke?  I thought so. It’s fun to

For those of you who have not used it, Google Analytics will blow your mind!  It’s a program from Google that tracks all sorts of data about how people find your website.  So, in the vein of the “So, Who Reads GitC Anyway?” post, I decided to do a quick pull of how people are finding the site through Google.  The program revealed that there were 2,159 unique searches over the past year – but here’s a breakdown and commentary on the top 10 (redundant/similar searches were edited and combined): “grown in the city” – 289  It makes sense that people are finding the blog through a search for grown in the city, and it blew away the next closest keyword search 7 times over. “emily oaksford” – 41  Emily is one of GitC’s regular contributors, and a good friend.  Be sure to check out her great articles. “gardens” – 36  This one’s simple

In case you missed it, Grown in the City content was featured in Mark Bittman’s blog on the New York Times on Friday, March 25.  The post, titled “A Feast of Food Links” compiled a list of what Bittman has been reading this week in the world of food – and links to Grown in the City’s article on food sovereignty in Maine (also check out the interactive map!). From his NYT bio:  Mark Bittman is an Opinion columnist and the Times magazine’s food columnist; his Minimalist column ran in the Dining section of The Times for more than 13 years. In 2009, Mr. Bittman, who has been urging Americans to change the way we eat for decades, published “Food Matters,” which explored the crucial connections among food, health and the environment. His most recent book is “The Food Matters Cookbook”; he is also the author of “How to Cook Everything”

Urban planning school was a great experience. I loved the intellectual stimulation, the camaraderie of workshops and studios, and being exposed to the variety of disciplines at PennDesign. It’s no surprise then that I keep in pretty close contact with the City and Regional Planning department (and even try to facilitate studios where I can). Keeping in close contact means that I get all the great reports and newsletters that current students produce, and I must say that I was blown away by the Spring 2010 issue of Panorama, the Journal of the Department of City and Regional Planning of the University of Pennsylvania. Beyond the great layout, I think that the team of editors, led by Bryan Rodda, did a fantastic job selecting articles – especially the article on page 10 by Beth McKellips, “Why Food Systems is a Fad (That Should Not Fade).” As I was happy to learn from

While Washington may get a cold streak this weekend, the balcony garden enjoyed a relatively mild and sunny weekend and beginning to the week.  The strawberries, zucchini, and peas have all taken root and are getting stronger and stronger by the day!  How are your seedlings doing?

This week’s interview is with Dr. Nevin Cohen - an Assistant Professor and Chair of Environmental Studies at The New School, where he teaches courses in urban planning and food systems.  Dr. Cohen’s current research focuses on urban food policy, particularly innovative planning strategies to support food production in the urban and peri-urban landscape, public policies to engage citizens in sustainable food production, urban planning and food access, and civic agriculture in cities and suburbs. He has a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from Rutgers University, a Masters in City and Regional Planning from Berkeley, and a BA from Cornell.  He runs the website urbanfoodpolicy.com and you can follow him on twitter @urbanfoodpolicy. 1. Your research focuses on urban planning and food policy.  If there were one local policy recommendation that would have the biggest impact on the most municipalities, (a “magic bullet,” if you will), what would that be? Food systems are just that – interconnected

In the spirit of open source data sharing, I thought it would be interesting to share an overview of the Grown in the City audience. It’s actually quite varied!  On the global scale, it’s no surprise that the United States holds the vast majority of visits over the past year (more than 15,000), but it is interesting that there were also visits from 131 other countries (many where English is not the first language.) The site is incredibly “sticky”, with a bounce rate of less than 1%.  This means that people who land here tend to stick around for a while (over 2 minutes, on average, and view a bit more than 4 pages of content on average) – which is great considering the international 3,400 international visits: So if we drill down into the good old US of A, it’s nice to see visits from all 50 states and 2 territories.  The territories