Fallen Fruit -Austin Young and David Burns on planting public fruit parks around the world, and fruit as an art medium and subject
17: Antonio Roman-Alcalá on coming out of DIY culture, pushing institutions, and transforming the food system at multiple scales
Antonio Roman-Alcalá is a food activist, gardener, teacher and scholar. In 2005, with a group of friends, he broke into a vacant lot by the freeway in the southern part of San Francisco to start Alemany Farm. He has taught Ecological Horticulture there and at many other food projects. He managed a food justice project and garden at San Francisco’s Potrero Hill public housing and organized the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance. He made a movie called In Search of Good Food, and worked on forming the California Food Policy Council. He was part of Occupy the Farm. He recently got a masters degree at the Institute for Social Studies at the Hague for research on Food Sovereignty. His current project is a book called entitled An antidogmatist's guide to food systems, and how to change them. He will be writing the book blog post by blog post, and you can read it as Antonio writes it at antidogmatist.com -- starting soon in the spring of 2016. He is a musician and new father, and lives in San Francisco with his family. Antonio talks with Chelsea about coming out of DIY culture, pushing institutions, and transforming the food system at multiple scales.
8: Michelle Glowa on urban gardens as a space for re-imagening the city
Michelle Glowa is an assistant professor in Anthropology and Social Change department at CIAS in San Francisco. Her research interests include critical political ecology, urban social movements, and agri-food studies. Her work uses interdisciplinary frameworks to explore the dynamics between activists engaged in changing the landscapes of cities and food systems and the contemporary institutions with which they interact. Michelle approaches her research with over a decade of experience working with food justice and urban agriculture organizing in the United States and Mexico. Specifically, she focuses on the dynamics of land access and property rights, shifting land use and development, in food justice organizing. Michelle received her B.S. in Natural Resource Management and Political Science from Colorado State University and her PhD in Environmental Studies from University of California Santa Cruz. In this episode, Chelsea talks with Michelle about the role of urban gardens in re-imagining and reshaping cities.