Increasing the Happiness Index

Penn Institute for Urban Research kicked off its conference, Feeding Cities: Food Security in a Rapidly Urbanizing World, with its 9th Annual Urban Leadership Forum. The Forum celebrates the work of emerging and established leaders around the world, and this year the awardees all work on creating greater access to food and greater livability in cities.

Ridwan Kamil helped to develop the Indonesia Berkebun movement that raises the country’s “happiness index.”

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Last night, Penn Institute for Urban Research kicked off its conference, Feeding Cities: Food Security in a Rapidly Urbanizing Wo, with its 9th Annual Urban Leadership Forum. The Forum celebrates the work of emerging and established leaders around the world, and this year the awardees all work on creating greater access to food and greater livability in cities.

Ridwan Kamil was given his award first and gave perhaps the most inspiring presentation of his work and ideas. An architect based in Indonesia, Kamil has used social media and grassroots organizing to engage people across Indonesia in urban agriculture in a movement called “Indonesia Berkebun”. Kamil noted that there are 242 million people in Indonesia and 50 million are on Facebook. With 53,000 Twitter followers, Kamil has been able to leverage mass social media for the greater good and his work was recently recognized by Google’s Chrome Hero awards. For Kamil, the point of urban agriculture isn’t just providing quality, local food — it’s about “increasing the happiness index” of people. He noted that no one is sad when they participate in a harvest.

Next up was Yael Lehman, a local food legend. Her work with the Food Trust, where she helped to grow the organization’s farmers’ markets, nuture and education programs and its Fresh Food Financing Initiative have become models for the Obama Administration’s Healthy Food Financing program.

Last but certainly not least, Dr. Joan Clos accepted his award. As executive director of UN-Habitat, Clos is in charge of overseeing Habitat’s approach to rapidly urbanizing cities; but as a doctor, Clos sees food and the welfare of a city as being inextricably linked. Clos talked about how UN-Habitat is encouraging these growing cities to develop a more local approach to growing and distributing food — both for the security of the food and for the potential of lowering energy costs.

When I spoke with Clos earlier in the afternoon, Clos stressed the importance of introducing planning into “spontaneous urbanization” in growing cities. Part of his role at UN-Habitat is to bring this message to politicians who ignore planning because “it has a bad name. Urban planning is sometimes seen as a colonial methodology.”

At the Forum, Clos spoke about the need for a paradigm shift in planing both in the developed world and the urbanizing one. Whehter it’s developed countries where so many diets have become depenedent on heavily processed foods, flown into a city from around the world, or rapidly urbanizing cities where only 20-30 percent of people have access to clean water. “We need a total change of mentality to change the food production.,” he says.

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Diana Lind is the former executive director and editor in chief of Next City.

Tags: philadelphiabuilt environment

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