Salford gets ready to Dig The City
Salford gets ready to Dig The City
Tuesday 28 July 2015
SALFORD UNIVERSITY will offer a vision of a greener future at the Dig the City Festival (July 31 – August 6).
The UK’s largest urban gardening event aims to encourage more people to grow their own food and features research and artistic input from the University’s academics and students.
A showcase of how other cities are ‘growing their own’ on rooftops, in parks and on roadsides, is presented by Dr Mike Hardman, a geography lecturer, while an inspirational digital garden by graphic design student Anita Mattioni will be on show.
Mike, who co-authored the book The Secret Lives Of Guerrilla Gardeners*, will be at Manchester Cathedral to open the Carrot City exhibition – a collection of urban garden ideas from the US, Japan and elsewhere which includes vertical and rooftop gardening, community garden and imaginative uses of allotments.
New York
A researcher with the global network Carrot City, who recently returned from a study trip to New York’s high-rise ‘gardens’, Dr Hardman believes many of the ideas could catch on here: “We have already seen the success of some fantastic local projects such as the rooftop garden at The Printworks, Wythenshawe urban farm and the Incredible Edible Food project in Salford.
“We do not normally think of growing food in towns and cities but more than 20,000 people in Greater Manchester are already involved in formal types of urban agriculture.
“Urban food production has a great deal of potential to help us deal with issues of food poverty, food security, health, sustainability and what we want our city to provide for us in the coming decades.”
Mike, who will also be presenting a talk in St Ann’s Square, and making appearances at the cathedral exhibition, which runs until August 31.
Digital projections
Anita Mattioni’s novel show garden features a series of vases filled with bright blooms. But these are no ordinary flowers. They are in fact digital projections onto tiny screens. It is, she says, an inventive and unusual digital green installation.
The Digital Garden can be viewed from 10.00am until 6.00pm in the ‘show gardens’ at Manchester Cathedral.
* Informal Urban Agriculture: The Secret Lives Of Guerrilla Gardeners was co-authored with Peter Larkham and published by Springer.
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