Around the world, as more people move into urban areas, they bring with them a myriad of ways of connecting with nature. Urban foraging, the human practice of collecting useful plant and animal material from natural surroundings, is one such practice that is gaining much attention in the realm of social-ecological research. During my PhD research journey across South Africa, I found that urban people forage almost as much as their rural counterparts. City dwellers often forage for edible fruit on their transit between home and work or school, but they prefer to forage in ‘wild’ places, rather than in parks and gardens. Concomitantly, urban planners and land managers are interested in the idea of people foraging in urban green spaces, but have not witnessed this phenomenon in formal spaces like parks or gardens. Both foragers and urban managers agree that while people could derive significant economic, health, and social benefits from urban foraging, there need to be some norms to protect foraging spaces from over extraction and mismanagement.
In mid-2019, as part of my final thesis chapter, I decided to investigate what these norms would be, and what these foraging spaces could look like. This endeavour stemmed partly from my interest in applying a scenario planning methodology. Some time in the future, I would love to be a landscape architect, but presently, participatory design sounded like a fine plan. During surveys and interviews, stakeholders had mentioned different landscapes in which foraging occurs, and may and may not pose risks to other land uses. I characterised four landscape archetypes based on this information, which I would discuss with urban planners and managers, and if possible, with foragers in the same room. I sent out invitations to all my forager contacts and various municipal departments that are involved in landscape management, in the study area. I wanted to discuss the implications of promoting urban foraging in each of these landscapes, and then rank them for each municipality.
Although there was interest in this exercise, eventually, things didn’t quite go to plan. Most foragers that I had visited close to their residences could not travel to meet at the municipal offices in far-away city centres. Small municipalities who had fewer officials in charge of multiple services could not find time to attend a scenario planning workshop. In the bigger municipalities, although many officials had agreed to attend these workshops, several had to pull out due to unforeseen flood events at the beginning of spring. We did manage to have some small meetings, though, where officials delved into their very strong convictions on what constitutes management for green infrastructure and biodiversity conservation. We also had one meeting in eThekwini (Durban) metropolitan municipality with foragers and officials in the same room, which was a short but productive exchange of perspectives.
With my thesis due at the end of spring, I had no option but to forsake the methodological exploration. I decided instead to use this material as qualitative supplementation and synthesis of my previous chapters. I started writing out what would have been a ‘scenario’ for each landscape archetype, and added caveats and citations to the claims. I whittled out any long-term speculation, and focused only on what I had strong evidence for. I framed the research question around community-based natural resource management and commons theory. If foraging was a widely practised livelihood activity in a given urban social-ecological system (landscape archetype), what would the design principles be, and who would be involved in implementing them? To my surprise, I wrote up these descriptions in one bright spring morning at a kitchen countertop. A reader of this chapter conferred upon me a most generous compliment: I wish I could write like you.
Soon, I submitted the thesis, the pandemic began, I started work as a postdoctoral researcher in an agriculture department, and this chapter receded to ‘to do’ status on my long list. I edited an international compendium of research on urban foraging. Being a visually inclined person, I had always wondered what an illustrated summary of my thesis would look like. One bright autumn weekend in 2023, I decided to paint at least one part of it. I thoroughly enjoyed expressing with watercolours what I had elaborated in words. My pragmatic supervisor warned that such illustrations may not be welcomed by the scientific community, but allowed me to keep them in the manuscript. The article spent seven months at the journal, during which reviewers and Editors patiently asked questions to help refine the narrative. Reviews were divided as to whether the article lacked detail (“enjoyable, but…”) or contained too much information (idiosyncratic). What started out looking like a promising but complex manuscript was honed into a condensed but holistic picture of my entire PhD effort, without having to read all of it. I am grateful to the Editors for shepherding this work to publication. Did the illustrations make it? Head to the article to find out.
The research indicates that creating dedicated parks and gardens for foraging was most favourable given that such spaces can be governed to protect the interests of people and nature in urban landscapes. Verges and servitudes came second, for their well-defined management and open access to the public. Specific considerations need to be taken into account when planting in these spaces to avoid ecosystem disservices and social discord. Building on this research, we have suggested options for urban land managers, proposed locally appropriate species for urban greening, and trialled the design of designated foraging spaces in peri-urban areas in the study area. I am now one step closer to my dream of designing landscapes.