as public space, as new commons, as productive, arable ground where people can grow supplemental food. Walls of buildings abut common air, water and pollutants as surely as horizontal surfaces and, even in moderately dense cities, are greater in area.

Enabling this new territory will have wonderful consequences. Food production within city limits will recalibrate the dependency of the city on its global hinterlands. Urban dwellers will retain water for the hydrological cycle, deploy water for agricultural purposes, maximize embodied energy in rain water, and benefit from improved air quality. Buildings will be better insulated through plant coverings and use less power for environmental conditioning. A fabric of plantings will host animals and provide bio-habitat continuity, enhancing bio-diversity and contributing to our potential to survive. Most importantly, this discovered landscape has potential to rejuvenate the social life of cities as the multiple sites will become, like community gardens, areas of local political independence, communication and negotiation- catalysts to transform the bureaucratically frozen city into a living metropolis, where people are the city.

The act of gardening, together, allows an informal social exchange that sustains community. Like doing laundry, cooking, or washing dishes; gardening encourages a liminal atmosphere where important concepts having to do with collective life are aired, rather than discussed, within a space of shared goals. Gardening provokes a systemic understanding of the complexities of our ecosystem as people touch the meetings of plants, animals, earth, air and water.

My grandmother’s “Victory” garden provided supplemental, local food for her, my grandfather, my great-grand mother and seven children through World War 2 and the Depression. In the 1980’s Cuba survived the sudden absence of Russian fuel and goods with community gardens. In an age where a hamburger might contain meat from cows from all over the world, we can trust the tomato we have grown ourselves. Growing food is seasonal, reminding us of the cyclic nature of life on this planet. Garden food has more nutrients. It tastes better.

I am not alone. Guerilla gardeners are ubiquitous, it seems. I often spot small, clearly cultivated plots on public land and, just last week, discovered a sumptuous zucchini vine (already harvested) in a tiny site squeezed between off-ramps. But horizontal surfaces, suitable for gardening, are contested spaces in dense, urban areas where we tend to use the ground for transportation, or building footprints and rooftops for environmental conditioning, or power gathering equipment.

In New York City, storm drainage from all hard, horizontal surfaces is combined with biological waste and directed towards underground drainage routes. Rain water overwhelms these often, flooding subways and underground passageways. As the fetid water reaches treatment plants at the water’s edge, it overflows into the river. The combined sewers release untreated, raw sewage into New York’s waterways about half of the time it rains- about 27 billion gallons per year.

The city has legislated storm-water mitigation: every lot must retain its rainwater on site and disperse it slowly. Unfortunately this water is most often directed towards detention tanks, underground concrete basins, rather than used to water plants, flush toilets, clean streets, etc. Many buildings do not even have detention tanks since this legislation took place after much of New York City was built.

Central to this proposal is that folks who live and or work near a potential vertical garden appropriate it as their own. The means to do this must be inexpensive, simple to install, easy to maintain and secure.

Up to six stories high, facing the street or on easements crossing abutting properties, building owners will be encouraged, through additional floor area allowance or tax rebates, to provide simple steel hooks at prescribed intervals and properly fastened to structure on the walls above the second story. These would secure a flexible scaffold which, in turn, would support containers of earth.

The flexible scaffold to hold plants and containers would be provided by the would-be gardener. Looking around the neighborhood we thought that an ideal and appropriately jury-rigged solution for existing buildings might be to attach steel chain link fences to walls. Clinging plants and vines love these common fences. Their fabric like structure allows for a scattered fastening technique and, even, exterior maintenance since they can be climbed. The use of a flexible, scaffold in conjunction with building attachments also reduces eccentric loading on the building wall.

To hold soil and plants we propose locally produced, bio-degradable, semi-permeable baskets of woven grasses with provision for directing water via capillary action (drip fronds, as illustrated). These will conform to specifications for loading and drainage but could assume diverse configurations. Flexible baskets will add less wind load on a building surface and can be fastened to the chain link fence at multiple points. Losing soil and plants, they will fall to the ground and cause minimal harm and pollution.

Existing and new buildings would be given street space or site easements, creating a layered public or shared vertical space. New York City allows buildings balconies, building ornaments or trellises 18” over the property line abutting a street or public way. Eighteen inches is not usable for growing in this situation. Three feet would be ideal. And eighteen inches of those three feet, if given to inhabitants to use, would be within the public space of the street where the city can require plant growth. Similar incentives exist in the Zoning Resolution: sidewalk trees can be planted in exchange for additional floor area under Quality Housing regulations.

A three foot terrace would greatly increase the value of an apartment, requiring no further incentive on the part of the City.

For rainwater storage and deployment, existing buildings will tap into the roof storm drain, bringing water to exterior plantings. New buildings will store water above the vertical trellis and trickle it down as needed.

The next stage: implementation

With favorable regulations and available, inexpensive means, people will take this proposal to the next stage of development. We propose to enable this process from the bottom up and from the top down, simultaneously.

We have access to a small, 20 foot by 40 foot lot that is surrounded by blank, vertical walls of buildings. We will test these ideas in Brooklyn, New York in full view of our neighbors to verify that this proposal is practical, replicable and achievable.

Working with local community groups and not for profits we will propose New York City be the first metropolis to institute the “Right to Grow”. Like the “Right to Fish” laws that protect New York State navigable waterways or the “Right to Farm” laws in many states that protect farmers against nuisance laws (for smells, animal presence and the like), the “Right to Grow” will be seen as necessary and in the American spirit of self help. It will also open up other neglected public space (surrounding highways, for instance) to productive cultivation.