Fertilecity is taking over the world! Just kidding (for now)—but they were very popular at the 2017 Maker Faire hosted in Barcelona this weekend. Innovators in all sorts of sectors participated in Maker Fair to show off their cool inventions and concepts, network, and educate the public. Dr. Xavier and Dr. Joan presented on the productivity going on in ICTA and the potential for these rooftop models to make the urban foodshed more resilient, sustainable, and tasty. Education is spreading on the train too. I met an ICTA PhD student while traveling to Barcelona who told me about his research, and he gave me some very thoughtful literature on the narratives that exist within urban agriculture discourse. Before my stop, we had a thoughtful discussion about complexities in urban agriculture and localism. Before I began getting into the nitty gritty of my urban agriculture research, I truly believed that urban agriculture was the end-all answer to resolving climate change and food security issues. I still think that’s true, but it’s only part of the picture. Urban agriculture can happen in farms on the dirt, in a warehouse, on a rooftop, and more, but other sectors in the food system, such as distributors, governments, educators and more need to be behind urban agriculture to make sure that it’s done fairly and sustainably. For example, urban agriculture isn’t going to solve the world’s problems if any sort of production is energy intensive, and renewable energy isn’t easily accessible. Being able to discuss urban agriculture with the perspectives of social science researchers, urban metabolism experts, and urban planners here at ICTA are helping me think about urban agriculture from perspectives outside of my own that’s heavily rooted in one small, environmentally and culturally unique environment. It truly shows that overcoming global environmental issues is going to come from a global effort to fix food systems from the bottom, up. The sheer amount of exposure I have to new ideas by having conversations with the folks of Barcelona: students, public transit operators, restaurant employees, etc. is astonishing. This experience is certainly peaking my interest for pursuing my graduate degree outside of the western U.S.
In other news, this weekend Kayla spent time in Madrid while Kelley, Sarai, Mickey and myself had a beach day, and visited the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres. Dali’s art has always been some of my favorite, so I definitely shed a few tears in Dalí’s edifice.Today, we had our USA student meeting. We gave updates on our projects and had a good discussion about Catalunyan independence, and the cultural, linguistic, environmental, and socio-economic impacts of tourism. Tourism is an incredibly complex issue with a handful of undeniable benefits in one hand and regrettable harms in the other.
As a reminder: I’m doing a Salt Lake County Urban Agriculture Social Network Analysis which will show how UA stakeholders are grouped in the community, and how resources and information flow amongst stakeholders. The IRB is in process and I’m expecting to be able to release surveys next week! It’s exciting and probably going to be the most fun of the project. I’ve been learning a lot about SNA in rStudio over the past couple of weeks and anticipate that I’ll be set to process the survey data when the responses begin to flow in!
Fun fact of the day: The Dalí Theatre-Museum we visited in Figueres was a performance arts theatre before it was destroyed in the Spanish Civil War. Salvador Dalí spent some of his childhood in Figueres, and was baptized in the church nearby, so he took the theatre's ruins into his hands for creating more art as well as displaying hundreds of other pieces. The theatre itself is pure art, and in it, us viewers are the performers!
Comments