Interior design students worked with the community-based nonprofit Harlem Grown to reimagine two urban farms in New York City.

All of the student groups incorporated Harlem Grown’s guiding philosophy: to grow healthy children through urban farming.

Pratt News
School of Design
March 28, 2023

Excerpt:

This past fall, a group of Pratt undergraduate students worked with the community-based nonprofit Harlem Grown to imagine ways to enhance access to nutritious food for families near two urban farms located in food-scarce neighborhoods. In Harlem Grown: Cultivating the Urban Food Desert, a studio taught by Visiting Assistant Professor of Interior Design Charles Newman, students investigated the spatial, infrastructural, and technological challenges faced by Harlem Grown and worked with them to improve their sites.

For more than a decade, Harlem Grown has transformed vacant lots into agricultural hubs, learning centers, and community gathering spaces, but resource pressures such as lack of reliable access to water and electricity, along with an absence of expensive amenities such as cold storage units, have limited its ability to expand.

“The studio let students grapple with real-world complexities,” Newman said. “We had an external partner that put forward a series of constraints and desires and had a history that we needed to understand. From there we needed to work together to define a path forward.”

Throughout the course, Newman emphasized the importance of community participation, transparent processes, interdisciplinary collaboration, and encouraged students to consider a range of questions. How would their designs enable Harlem Grown to better serve the wider Harlem community? How would their work help children who spent their afternoons and weekends at the community gardens excel and grow as citizens of their community? How could they develop brainstorming workshops that included and empowered the participants?

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