Oh, how we love New Urban News (a printed paper newsletter you have to subscribe to or log onto: www.newurbannews.com). Dave Sheridan and I have been talking till we're purple about the irony of the future. It has little to do with robots and intelligent homes. But a lot to do with vegetable gardens in the back yard and what I often saw back in the sixties in tiny spaces next to front stoops in Washington DC - a couple of rows of greens and rhubarb. Maybe even a fence line with pole beans. In other words, it looks like the future is in fact what constituted the norm until the late fifties.

It took an eight-day charrette last May, led by one Andres Duany in British Columbia, to come up with an "innovative" agriculturally-oriented brain stormer called "agricultural urbanism". Folks this is cutting edge. From high-density housing with window boxes, to somewhat less dense houses with kitchen gardens, to quarter-acre plots, 50-acre farms and even a 160-acre farm, the 21st Century innovation is to sprinkle our already populated urban areas and future home sites with earth. Beautiful, permeable, compost-nurtured earth to grow food. But all irony aside, what makes this a very revolutionary idea, in fact, is not just that we might replace concrete for cars and even mini malls, with agricultural plots, but that consumers could begin the process of reclaiming control of what they eat. Agricultural urbanism brings food home, free of the question marks of where it comes from, how it has been grown, how it has been protected from disease, how it has been irrigated, and how much energy has been consumed to finally reach the home refrigerator. This is indeed cutting edge we can live with.

To the left are more interesting articles about burgeoning roof gardens where least expect them.