If I drive east for six hours, I’ll come to that place the other half of Pennsylvania’s population calls home: Philadelphia. James Carville once said there were three regions to consider when you talk about Pennsylvania: Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Alabama. He’s not so far off, so our two cities share the kind of love-hate relationship of competition for resources and coalition against everything else that only two urban centers with so much in common can. So it certainly piqued my interest when I read about “Farmadelphia” an ambitious, city-wide permaculture project proposed by Front Studio for the Urban Voids competition.

Of course, large-scale permaculture projects aren’t new. The Maya city of Caracol has been described as a “garden city.”

Agriculture was not outside the urban domain; rather it was an integral part of it. Regularly spaced markets, likel y occurring at most causeway termini, would have been integral to the city and centrally controlled. The more-or-less regular spacing of residential groups and their lack of aggregation is further reflection of Caracol’s strong bureaucracy. This bureauc ratic organization is also directly reflected in Caracol’s causeway system. What is surprising, and what was not expected at the start of the project, is the large scale at which the various Caracol systems operated.

Something similar has taken place among the “fabulous ruins of Detroit.” A December 2003 article in the New York Times described the developments thus:

After decades of blight, large swathes of Detroit are being reclaimed by nature. Roughly a third of this 139-square-mile city consists of weed-choked lots and dilapidated buildings. Satellite images show an urban core giving way to an urban prairie.

Rather than fight this return to nature, Mr. Weertz and other urban farmers have embraced it, gradually converting 15 acres of idle land into more than 40 community gardens and microfarms–some consuming entire blocks.

These kinds of developments are really inspiring. Adoption of permaculture techniques on such a scale is a huge step in the right direction. The danger lies in fooling ourselves into thinking it is enough. Remember, despite their “garden cities,” the Maya still collapsed, and while developments like these make cities a far less destructive force than they were before, it would still be a mistake to think that this has made them entirely benign.

Still, but for that caveat, this is an enormously positive trend, even though there may be a great number of practical concerns that Farmadelphia will have to overcome. It remains to be seen whether or not Front Studio’s ambitious plan will be possible, but the very fact that it’s under consideration is enough to give me a bit of hope today.