Remember how great it was for us all to be together here in April at the Vacant Acres symposium?
If you’ve forgotten, check out this great report-back by Rachel Dobkin with the help of participants plus photos by Marco Clausen.
We at 596 Acres have updated our Community Land Access Network page to reflect the awesome projects we learned about at Vacant Acres. Let me know if anyone is missing who you think should be here.
Materials from the conference are available here. We have collected all the slides, documentation from the Day Two break out groups and audio recordings and we are working on creating transcripts. If you’d like to help transcribe, email paula@596acres.org.
Thank you again to the Tishman Environment and Design Center, the New School Environmental Studies Department, the Small Planet Fund and Southwest Foundation for making Vacant Acres possible. And thank you to our dinner hosts: the Sunview, the Meat Hook, Four & Twenty Blackbirds and the fabulous chef Hira Lesea.
A few resources that we think should be on your radar:
– Peleg Kremer will serve as the editor of a section of a special issue of the journal Cities and the Environment, derived from the proceedings of Vacant Acres. Neat! Stay tuned for more! We’re using the transcribed presentations as a starting point.
– The Baltimore Urban Agriculture Law Conference is coming up on September 19, hosted by the Community Law Center. See you there!
– If you want to continue the discussion with practitioners, we think the urban list of Land Trust Alliance Network is a great place to have it. We’re all on this list – join us!
– Our friends at 3000 Acres in Australia have published a guide for developers who are looking to set up a similar tool for their city. Note that the big difference between the tools we have developed for Philadelphia, New Orleans, New York and Los Angeles and the 3000 Acres tool for Melbourne, Australia, is where the data comes from. The Melbourne tool is not set up to use open data or any bulk information; all properties are entered manually.
