re:farm the city

I’m here with max in laboral. max just came from washington and I from donostia. we will join david in the next hour and start to develop the new hardware. new hardware!! yeah :) the new refarm on vacations board and the new boards for kids. I’ve started a few weeks ago with david. we had more or less defined the hardware and funcionalities, got materials and this week we will try to have a prototype. more on this soon ;)

huge no?!! :p

got invited by cristina enea to give a workshop of refarm.

what a nice workshop we had in donostia :) a bit express but we could find everything on time and got a nice farm built.

check the pictures here and dlw the pdf of the nano vacations complete diagram v2

let’s change the climate profile :) here we go to vienna for one month invited to built some refarm tools and activated them on the festival. for that we need to built a team :p need programers, designers, illustrators, writers, social sciences and one chef :p

get more on this at vienna[at]refarmthecity[dot]org

since we are using donated pallets to built most of the tools on this refarm we need to protect them so that can last longer. by giving a bigger life to materials we save resources and work. so we first paint the woods with used oil from a near restaurante. we let the woods dry and them we apply this cactus mix. enjoy the process :)

as you know we were invited by ciutatscreactives.net to give a refarm workshop and built something that could last after the festival finish.

I think that there was a miss understanding at the beginning: before we had our first meeting, the organizers though that we need some physical conditions: a place for the 4 days workshop and soil! and imagine what? they got us a place! uau:) a real place with+- 450m2 in the middle of a city.. applause!! refarm has always demand for sun, not soil. that’s why our farms were small and have wheels. the cities are always moooving… for the first time re:farm will have a permanent spot inside a city, what a great opportunity to develop a good planning through the year and build an environmental education center with a city focus and a more balance use of the local resources and global knowledge.

this is a work in progress so if you want to give us a hand you are more than invited :)

check here the updates

came to gijon this weekend to another ecolab meeting. it’s amazing how much work has been done in 7 saturdays..

this weekend we build the lake, took care of the plants, draw some diagrams and worked on the cartography of the space.

keep following this co-work here

here we are in madrid with a perfect framework for this project.

we have a big team, (12!), we have beers and tapas and it’s F. hot! they give 42º for today…

if you want to know more of what and how we are cooking here, check here the wiki of medialab_prado.

leave here some of our drafts.

ops, think I’ve forgot to tell you :p this afternoon I’ll be speaker on Culture|Futures: Transições para uma Era Ecológica.

I’m here in são paulo invited by the spanish cultural center in SP and last week we had a fantastic workshop. check here some fotos.

having a great time, the food is familiar, culture and language too but the most amazing was see this tropical climate up-cycling all this nature, vegetables and people.

kirsten from faircompanies made this videos from the refarm the city project, have a look and don’t make funny of my english and spanish :p

english:

ok, see you soon in tarragona and them madrid ;)

we have been working on this our A3 re:farm. everything fits on a A3 envelop ;)

we need to change our strategy over the electronics. the arduino platform is to expensive and truth to be said is like that guy that as a big car to drive on the island. we really don’t this that much electronics or processing capability of the ATMEGA.. so let’s shrink the design of the board and reduce the bill :)

finally the spring is here.. I think I’ve never desired a spring so much as this one!

after freezing my brains with the beijing group in january ;) I came home to start the grants applications.

this year we apply to this one, this one and this one.

only the visualizar’11 was approved (and we are very happy/exited about it:)  the other 2 grants didn’t work.. the one for fecyt that we were making with matadero we steep on some slow procedures and we miss the deadline.. the other from bilbao, the proposal that we sent was miserable.. mea culpa.. didn’t have time to work that text or ask for more help inside the community..

I’ve also went bankruptcy (hey if in our days countries went bankruptcy what do you expect from a guy like me? :) bad governance? maybe yes.. this idea of maintaining the re:farm project open and free, costs money, and my totally dedication to it also left me without regular incomes.. the unemployment here in spain, the fact that we are only funded by public institutions and on a project basis, personal clients that still owe me money.. all summed  result on my bankruptcy :( I’m not complaining, I’m documenting. this is my personal the blog of the project and my personal stories are part of it hehehe but has michael said: “this project is more open than our personal gardens” and many things have occurred on the last months so here is an update of the most relevant:

interview from technikart here

andreas in paris is doing a fantastic research, go and check is blog and the prototyping process on ecolab page.

tarragona group has started! follow here all the updates.

madrid group will sprout soon.

that’s it for now. stay tuned with your vegetables :)

F.. long time that we’ve been struggling to have it and now we were invited to use it as much as we can :D

refarm the city project was invited to participate on the development of ecoLAB, an initiative of plantaformacero born at LABoral art center of gijon. it’s a one year collaborative project were we are going to develop some tools for urban farmers. but the best part is that we will not be alone :) great guests were invited: andy gracie, susanna tesconi, the guys from zoohaus, cova dos ratos, our friends maki, rubén and other collectives from spain.

here is our canvas

we will dedicate a page to these developments, go and check it :)

today we (the brand new re:farm beijing group) meet at the 3rd beijing farmers market organized by the Country Fair Team. quite an experience for me since the barrier of the language makes so hard to have a fluid talk. luckily vivian was there and help me (tks vivian;)

despise the great food and strange vegetables my interest on this farmers market is (as always) how can improve re:farm tools to address farmers and consumers concerns. the bridge between food and people is huge and I really think that re:farm tools are here to make this distance shorter and the journey of food to our table a pleasant walk.

the problems that farmers and consumers have in beijing are more or less common to other cities:

on the consumers side we have: the concerning about food safety, the price, the availability of vegetables and the almost inexistent relation with nature.

on the producers side we have: geographic and seasons constrains, sustainability technical support, seeds, connecting with the consumer, transportation, money to begin a season, pests and soil quality.

one of the best systems that I’ve been leaning about since I’ve started this project are the csa systems but there are no hardware or software tools for them. that’s why we are here and we are fully committed to build them ;)