Sustainable Food Court: A Garden Grows in a Cleveland Shopping Mall

A new garden project in Cleveland, Ohio draws attention to another potential urban venue for producing sustainable food: under-used commercial spaces, i.e. shopping malls. Though the shopping mall has started to become a thing of the past, projects like installing organic garden in the mall may help to keep such wasted spaces afloat, while helping to create hyper-local food for restaurants in the mall food courts.

Imagine this: Fresh, organic salads and other dishes to replace the notoriously greasy food court pizza, burgers, and Chinese buffet. Good, healthy food alone might be reason enough to make a trip to your local mall. But the fact that the vegetables would also be produced inside the mall is especially exciting in cities that have little viable farmland. And since many malls and other commercial buildings incorporate a lot of glass in their design, they offer the perfect site for a greenhouse operation.

Granted this pioneer mall garden in Cleveland is still in its infancy, its creators expect it to really take off. So far they grow hearty varieties of spinach, tomatoes, lettuces, strawberries, and peas in locally provided organic composted soil and mulch and are in the process of adding an extensive hydroponic system to boost production, as well as exploring other ways to expand. One of the ways in which the project managers hope to become a more sustainable operation is to begin a mall composting system. Eventually, the goal is  to transform the largely deserted, depressed mall into a crown jewel of sustainability. An urban wasteland turned eco village, the mall hopes to host a farmer's market, vegetarian restaurants that serve home (mall) grown sustainable food, organic garden supply shops, health food stores, and alternative energy providers.

The idea of starting sustainable urban agriculture projects in venues like malls is pretty ingenious, not only for the fact that it's a superior use of space, but also as a marketing tool and a way to attract customers back to a forgotten space and boost sales. That was the original idea behind installing the mall garden, and so far it seems to be working. It's certainly garnered a lot of national and regional attention as a new way to bring together the popular sustainable food and "green" movement with consumer culture. Pretty clever, and not necessarily a bad thing. My first reaction to the idea of turning malls into eco villages was similar to my reaction when I found out that Wal-Mart was selling organic food. In a way it seems to miss the point of the sustainable food movement, turning it into a cheaper, less sustainable product. But on the other hand, why not find better, more sustainable uses for rambling, empty malls and other urban and suburban buildings whose structure seems totally in contrast to all that sustainable stands for? Why not upgrade food courts to include healthier, more sustainable food? And of course, a garden will help bring a little natural beauty to the mall's sterile interior. All in all, there's a lot of good that can come of transformation like this, and hopefully Cleveland's success will inspire the creation of gardens in all sorts of previously unused building space throughout the U.S.

photo credit: e3000