This is a fascinating article, full of links relating to "urban survivalism"--particularly the efforts of those who are literally cultivating their surroundings:
...[A]n active and growing community of artist-maker-activists is redefining urban survivalism. While their work addresses our tenuous food security and the threats of catastrophic climate change, it's not a fear-driven movement. Rather, the best of these "new survivalists" are embracing radical self-sufficiency because it fuels their creativity, arms them with a sense of personal empowerment, and strengthens their communities.
As the author notes, the reinvention of one's surroundings as productive, particularly when talking about urbanized space, is a strong and pragmatic departure from a world of decorative and/or romantic finishes, landscapes, and development plans. (To me, it also suggests a certain impracticality, and even foolishness, in much of the work of "famous" designers.)
Unmasking the potential utility of a city's leftover or otherwise latent spaces (including vertical surfaces) has far-reaching potential impacts not only to urban planning, but also to a city-dweller's lifestyle and consumption patterns. One example of this is Victory Gardens 2007+, currently part of an exhbition at SFMOMA:
...[U]rban agriculture paves the way towards "less CO2 emissions, neighborhood organizing, seasonal growing, urban planning, seed saving, art action and independence from corporate food systems....But Victory Gardens is not just an exhibition, it's an actual proposal for the city of San Francisco to provide local residents with the tools and skills to begin utilizing yards and vacant productive spaces for growing food. The program would present subsidies from the Parks and Recreation Department to home gardeners over the course of a 2-year pilot period, "to create and support a citywide network of urban farmers by (1) growing, distributing and supporting starter kits for home gardeners and (2) educating through lessons, exhibitions and web sites."
The story of Edible Estates, "the nationwide call to gardening action of LA-based architect/designer/gardener Fritz Haeg," is also featured (also here, and here). Haeg's project underlines how individual, small-scale transformation of space can spawn outsized cultural and social effects (with appealing economic results):
Yes, I think it's really interesting what happens when you graft agriculture onto a city. The more you keep people in touch with the byproducts of their daily lives, the more you see it's connected.
We used to have cities that sucked resources from a 20 mile radius around them - so you ended up with a poor working class ring around a city where all the trash went and where you got all the raw materials. So there was this pocket of prosperity within a bubble of blight, really - and now we don't see that anymore because it's global. All the resources we're sucking and all the shit we're putting out is happening at a global scale, so you don't get that immediate relationship, even in terms of agriculture.
Related, a recent article from the SF Chronicle about the spread of farmers' markets in proportion to the spread of urban sprawl, offering another dimension of the interplay between consumption and urban form:
What does this all have to do with real estate? Even as our farmland has been devoured by suburban sprawl, Californians have voted with their shopping bags to make farmers' markets an increasingly ubiquitous element in big cities, small towns and, yes, even those suburbs that pave fields of vegetables....
What exactly has happened to create the farmers' market boom? In some ways it's all inextricably linked to the urban real estate boom. The young professionals who bought into the revitalized inner city are often the same people who bought into Alice Waters' "buy local and organic" revolution. Even as they embraced urban living, they still wanted a connection to the earth.
That is, a "connection to the earth" mediated by consumption choices.
Earlier: the 100-Mile Diet.
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