Your neighbourhood may be the key to your city’s resilience
Biomimicry at a systems-level can be a valuable tool for building greener cities. In our circular economy project with the City of Guelph, we are implementing an ecological model, called “patch dynamics” as a way to build more resilient food strategies.
A city of villages | Patch Dynamics
The simplest definition of patch dynamics is that it represents the diversity of subsystems nested within a larger ecosystem. It invites us to imagine nature as a tapestry of diverse microbiomes that each contributes to a larger piece of the environment, but that can behave semi-independently. In other words, it is a conceptual approach to studying ecosystems in which the emphasis is on dynamic, semi-autonomous, and diverse “patches”; a mosaic of small ‘sub-ecosystems’ that showcases its patterns, processes, and scales.
Guelph as a pilot for urban food resilience
At Biomimicry Frontiers, we use patch dynamics as a lens of viewing the complex socio-ecological systems. Within Guelph, we view the city more-so as a “City of Villages”, which allows us to focus on the uniqueness of neighbourhoods and their characteristics. For example, Guelph’s Downtown is renowned for its unique local shops and vibrancy; the South End is known for urban development, and midtown is known for its proximity to the two rivers and the university. Each neighbourhood represents a patch within the ecosystem of Guelph’s mosaic.
Patch dynamics allows us to reframe the narrative by focusing on the local (a key tenant to biomimicry). Viewing a city through the perspective of patch dynamics allows us to find ways to build community resiliency by leveraging hidden or underused assets — wasted opportunities. One member of the community has a vegetable garden that receives full sunlight, making it an ideal ground for tomatoes and cucumbers. Their neighbour across the street has much more shade, making their garden an ideal ground for root vegetables, such as carrots and radishes. What if each community could effectively map out their hidden assets, to promote more strategic relationships with the land and provide for the patch? This would encourage resource sharing within patches, ensuring nothing is wasted, benefitting both the environment and the health and wellbeing of the community.
The point of patch dynamics is to avoid cities being massive nodes of importation and exportation. Patch dynamics allows us to explore how cities can become more self-sufficient, which in turn will make them more resilient to change. Imagine if each neighbourhood “patch” was producing enough food and dealing with its waste. At this more manageable scale, we could avoid potential collapse caused by events on a global scale.
As part of our commitment to Guelph’s Our Food Future initiative, Biomimicry Frontiers is leveraging our knowledge of patch dynamics by focusing on the unique patch that is the Junction neighbourhood. Located at the heart of the city, the Junction neighbourhood is filled with mature foliage, distinctive homes, and front porches where neighbours intentionally build community. Food has been a core feature in building this intentional neighbourhood, which is why connecting the Junction neighbourhood through Seed Voyage, a platform that connects neighbourhood growers to eaters, is a natural match. Our goal is to build food resiliency by encouraging more backyard garden sharing and community collaboration. If this story inspires you to grow food, embrace community and create meaningful connections, we encourage you to sign up for Seed Voyage and get growing so that we can all share resources and work towards a world without waste.