An artistic rendering shows the Swale barge floating on a New York City waterway. (Rendering courtesy of Mary Mattingly)
In New York City, where land is valuable and developers can rake in big profits, community gardens are being uprooted to make way for more profitable ventures. As a result, some families are losing a key source of fresh food. But what if members of the public had access to a site where they could pick freshly grown fruits and vegetables for free? And what if the space it occupied was not at risk for development?
That site now exists. In July, a barge carrying a “food forest” of fruit, nut, and vegetable plants began a five-month cruise in the waters around New York City—waters that, unlike much of the land, remain public.
“Food should be available as a public service, and we want to show that the waters are a commons which can be used as public space to grow food,” says Mary Mattingly, the local artist behind the project known as Swale. For Mattingly, Swale is not just a way to distribute fresh food but also an art project aimed at provoking the public to imagine how urban environments might adapt to a more resource-constrained world. She hopes Swale can show how “New York City has the potential to be more resilient in the future.”
Forty feet wide and 130 feet long, the Swale barge houses beds filled with an array of fruit and vegetable plants, including blueberries, basil, arugula, walnuts, leeks, sorrel, scallions, asparagus, yams, artichokes, and watercress. It’s scheduled to dock in five spots—Concrete Plant Park along the Bronx River, Yankee Pier at Governors Island, Pier 6 at the Brooklyn Bridge Park, Neptune Park in New Rochelle, and the Brooklyn Army Terminal—spending a month at each. Any member of the public is welcome to board and harvest the available produce, a bounty stretching across almost half an acre.
“Everyone has a right to eat well, and it’s attainable if we rethink a few basic things about the way we live,” says Carol Zakaluk, a board member of Friends of Brook Park, a community-based environmental organization in the South Bronx that supports Swale. Mattingly came up with the idea for the barge back in 2009 while hunkered down for five months aboard another floating experiment, the Waterpod. She and other artists designed the Waterpod as a residence-on-water that could hold everything they needed to live self-sufficiently—water treatment tanks, rainwater collection bins, a composting toilet, fruit and vegetable gardens, and a handful of chickens.
Inspired by that success, Mattingly decided to develop another project on the water to serve the public. Collaborations with a wide range of partners helped bring Swale into being: neighborhood groups, local food justice and environmental organizations, community gardeners, permaculture specialists, designers, and artists. This diverse group provided technical expertise, helped to design the food forest, curated events, and contributed the time to get Swale off the ground. A combination of individual donations, foundation grants, and a Kickstarter campaign funded it.
“Part of what’s interesting about Swale is that it’s a symbol [aimed at] capturing the public imagination to rethink the use of space and what is possible in cities,” says Lindsay Campbell, a social science researcher who studies food forestry and food justice at the US Forest Service’s New York City field station. The field station (where Mattingly is currently an artist in residence) helped Swale identify community assets, shared its knowledge of edible and medicinal plants, facilitated introductions between Mattingly and other partners, and contributed plants, compost, and soil to the barge.
The idea of using public space in an urban area to grow communal food isn’t new. Groups in Baltimore and Seattle are also working to develop food forests where residents can harvest produce in public space at no cost. Slated for seven acres, the project in Seattle is the largest in the United States so far.
Land-based food commons on that scale aren’t currently feasible in New York City, given both soaring real estate prices and, in recent years, stepped-up enforcement of a long-standing ban against foraging on public land. But by placing a forest on the water—no matter how temporarily—Swale is expanding the food-commons concept into an entirely new domain.
“Open water is some of the most prominent remaining space in New York City,” says Campbell. “People think cities are completely built out. But they’re also sites of transformation and change.”
Read more stories by Kristine Wong.