Public Park Transformed into an Urban Food Forest!

Roimata Food Commons in Ōtautahi Christchurch is a beautiful example of community food resilience. This is a story about seeing the potential of underutilised public spaces and how they can be transformed into sources of healthy food and community connection. There's a growing acceptance that we utilise a lot of rural land in really abhorrent ways to produce our food. And that doesn't give us a lot of input into how we feed ourselves. We're relying on a system that may not have our best interests at heart. And so food sovereignty speaks to our ability as communities to create systems to feed and nourish ourselves in ways that are independent of that system, that do have our own and collective well-being right at the front of all the energy that goes into that. Wollaston's a community in the eastern part of Ōtautahi Christchurch. There's a belt of low socioeconomic communities that line the eastern side of the city and probably have been hardest hit by the continual shocks that have happened for the last 12 years. Earthquakes, a lot of them for many years following. And then we've had floods, we've had fires, we've had terror attacks in the city. And then obviously most recently we've had our share of the COVID experience. And so we felt it was important to start developing long-term solutions to some of these quite systemic issues. About five years ago, myself and some of the community that live in and around Bradley Park, which is six hectares of land, petitioned the council to start developing a food system in here. We got permission to plant 30 trees, so we planted 65. That's now expanded to between 120 to 140, most of which are contained within two to three food forest systems. And we've got about 140 heritage fruit trees. Even before we probably dug the first hole for the first tree, we had quite an in-depth discussion about the philosophy that sits behind what we're trying to do here. We decided to become a food commons, and that was something that was personally really important to me. Public parks that are dotted around our cities all over the world are commons. They are owned by the community collectively and managed by a council or a state body to look after it in a certain way that they see fit. And what we've tried to do here is hold a vision for what we can do in relationship with this land that is a lot more nourishing, not only for the land itself, but for our community. It's a step away from, I guess, the transactional relationship that dominates the way that we act in the world. But we don't hold any sense of ownership over the food that is produced. So by doing that, it allows us to kind of step away and allow people who need access to food to source that food without any shame or any other negative emotional attachments that could be felt alongside that. But still holding a level of hope and optimism that at some point they'll feel comfortable to start participating at a much deeper level, especially a practice of kaitiakitanga for the living systems that we're creating in the park here. I think it was about 18 months ago talking to friends who are organic market gardeners that sell their goods in the city. They made me aware of an opportunity to get hold of food that wasn't being sold at their farmer's markets and that could be redistributed elsewhere. So we built a pātaka kai. So a pātaka kai within a traditional Māori pā is the building that stores food. Every Sunday we head down to the farmer's market once it's finished and collect the food that they can't resell over the next couple of days. So rather than it going to compost, we collect it and we put it on the pātaka kai and community can come down and help themselves to whatever they need to nourish themselves. We only put fresh organic food on the pātaka kai. There's an ebb and flow in terms of what we have access to. In autumn the pātaka kai is not big enough. You know, we have bins of food sitting on the ground that are full of organic tomatoes and cucumbers and courgettes. But we do notice in winter that that abundance isn't there and it's important for people to acknowledge the seasonal aspect of food. I guess that drives us to look at ways that we can increase our food production so that we can have a little bit more resilience and depth behind the food that we have access to. One of the reasons we love this project is that it's an idea that can be replicated in public parks all over the world. In addition to the benefits for land and community, it can also be a huge cost saving for local councils. By petitioning the council to stop spraying herbicides and reducing the area that needs to be mowed, Romata Food Commons saves the council around $10,000 a year. Ōtōtahi Christchurch alone has over 800 parks. Imagine the benefits if more of these spaces were placed back into the hands of communities. I feel like the garden is a beautiful place to bond with other people and to get to know yourself. It's like a really nice neutral space. Our environment supports us and nourishes us, whether it be fruit trees or just the shade from trees in parks or vegetables that we grow. I feel like we've become really disconnected from that. You have to accept when you work in a public space that there are going to be challenges. We've had one particular person in our community come in twice and chop trees off at about a metre off the ground. But you get to choose how you respond to challenges like that. You can be deeply hurt and resentful and hold a lot of anger, which I think permeates down into every aspect of the project. Or you can choose to rise above that and see the hurt that actually led to that vandalism and embrace the opportunity to engage the wider community around how these spaces can be healing for people who are dealing with that. It's not our job to heal those people specifically, but we can provide spaces that help them along that journey. This morning we're at the Tohakai Warehouse here in Otatahi. We're packing up 49 boxes today to go out to local whanau across the eastern side of Christchurch. All the produce that's going into the boxes is produced as locally or grown as locally as possible, with our one exception being bananas that we tolerate coming from overseas, but we select the Fairtrade organic ones as the better option. When we started the Roimata Food Commons project, we wanted to grow a lot of food for the local community, but we realised that there were some boundaries that were going to be put in place around how much space we could use in the park. There's a lack of availability of organic and local food through the eastern side of Christchurch, so the main driver behind this is to make locally produced organic food affordable and accessible for everyone. I'm the mother of Michael and I'm here to help and to be useful. I'm retired and this is constructive, helpful, yeah. I am so proud of him. Don't worry, you'll get me crying. I'm going to hide in the apples. Yeah, I'm very proud of him, very proud. We are actually considerably cheaper than supermarkets. In fact, we actually even had one of our customers comment on one of our Instagram posts just last week saying that she went to the supermarket and compared the price of everything that she received in one of our $60 boxes, and everything that we were selling was cheaper than what she could get conventionally produced food for in the supermarket. Do you want to put that one just next to that pole, and we'll do that one first. This is kind of a nice to have, pretty soon it's going to be a have to have. Our food system is incredibly fragile and we're noticing that not just here in Aotearoa with the number of natural disasters that we're having that are putting our systems under pressure, but also the likes of pandemics and those sorts of things. We're experiencing disruption in those parts of our lives, really regularly now. Do you want to go on the other side? We need to notice that and we need to assume the responsibility to do something about it. It's so simple yet so enriching in terms of our mental and physical wellbeing, the day-to-day experience of being alive on this planet. We want more of those days and we want it for our children and for our grandchildren and all the generations yet to be born. We can do this. It's complex but it's not complicated. It just takes some passion actually, more than anything, and probably a bit of stubbornness too. I think people in my family and my friends would say that. I'd love to see more of it. If there's anyone out there that wants to do something like this, I'd do anything I could to help you do that. One tree is enough to start you on your journey and you never know who you might meet and what you might learn from doing that. Thanks so much for watching this film. If you'd like to help us tell more stories like this one, we'd love for you to join our community over on Patreon. Over there we share regular behind the scenes updates and share exclusive content like unreleased full-length interviews. Any amount, big or small, makes a huge difference and helps enable us to keep telling these stories that we feel so passionate about sharing. Thanks again for watching and I'll see you in the next film.