I was going through some old files recently and came across the keynote speech I gave at the American Community Gardening Association conference in Toronto in 2004. I had scrawled some notes on index cards that were attached to the original speech. I remember that I had added a few things to my talk after attending some of the workshops. One of the excerpts is below. Even though I’ve been hanging out in academia for nearly two years, I still have to suppress a laugh when someone let’s a foci fly or heaven forbid, syllabi slips out. Jac Smit was the president of the Urban Agriculture Network at the time. He is often referred to as the father of urban agriculture. He passed away in 2009.
Yesterday I attended some of the international stream of workshops, which were all very interesting, even though I’m not sure I understood all the academic lingo. But in one of the workshops there was a lively debate over whether or not urban agriculture was a realistic solution to food security in a “commodified global economy” which sparked a lot of talk about urban this and peri-urban that. Jac Smit somehow worked flying cars into the discussion around urban sprawl. And that may have been when someone let fly with the foci, and I drifted off into space.
I think the time is not very far when we will have flying cars and personal cabins in urban metropolis such as in New York. These flying cars have a number of benefits to their credits, such as, they are environment friendly. I wish the concerned policy makers good luck.