Empowering Sustainable Living: Urban Planning & Local Economies in Los Angeles.
When you see a plant poking through concrete you realise how resilient nature is.
In cities, despite the sprawl, there are always nooks and crannies where nature triumphs over the concrete jungle’s attempt to strangle it.
There are also humans trying to find ways to nurture nature even in the most arid of conditions.
My Brave New Girl guest this week is Jamie Hwang, city planner for Los Angeles City Council. She is also the creator of the Urban Farmers’ Almanac which is a free, community-sourced digital resource guide for gardening, sustainable living, and supporting urban farms & independent makers in LA.
She believes in circular, local economies, and food justice, and she helps local communities to create gardens in empty lots, that property developers haven’t built on yet, where they can grow their own food.
In this way she is helping people to transform the city and the lives of those who live there.
NURTURE NATURE
Whether it’s a tomato plant on your windowsill, or a tiny plot in a concrete jungle, growing your own is a powerful force for good living.
Jamie’s passion for urban planning made her realize how precious our environment is. And while in LA, they need to build more housing quickly to address homelessness as the most urgent humanitarian crisis, she believes they can also simultaneously address climate change as well.
For her, true courage is
trying ideas out even when you know you may fail.
It's hard to begin a journey not knowing if you'll succeed, and it's even hard to start if you know you're likely to fail.
But when you take a leap, you learn new things, and those lessons add up to successes in the long run.
The trick is to realize you never really "finish" learning.Jamie shows us that wherever we live we have the opportunity to take sustainable living into our hands and create places where we feel more in tune with the planet.
As a result of my conversation with Jamie, I am now transitioning my allotment to a food forest using permaculture techniques.
You can find out more about Jamie’s work at shegrowscities.com
And follow her on Instagram @shegrowscities
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