Youth urged to initiate designs integrating agriculture to urban setting
BAGUIO CITY April 15 – City officials recently encouraged youth organizations in the city to initiate and network with partners in developing innovative, transformative, and futuristic designs that integrate agriculture into urban setting.
Under Resolution No. 176, series of 2021 that was signed by Mayor Benjamin B. Magalong, local legislators stated that the agriculture department enjoined local chief executives in urban areas to promote the development of green and eco-friendly buildings and communities by issuing appropriate legislations governing the same to help sustain the good state of the environment while addressing food security in the urban centers of the country.
Further, the agriculture department continues to aggressively promote urban agriculture during the prevailing pandemic to ensure that there will be available food on the table for the people who had been heavily impacted by the serious negative effects of the Corona Virus Disease (COVID) 2019.
The council stipulated that concerned government agencies and local governments had been encouraging households to transform rooftops and virandas as well as vacant lots into vegetable gardens that could provide families steady supply of fresh, nutritious and affordable food since bare rooftops absorb and radiate heat, and making them into gardens will also help cool houses and buildings.
The body claimed that ‘RE-TERRA 2021,’ funded by Arch. Kathleen Incorporado, is a national design competition urgently calling upon students and graduates of architecture, design and planning to conceive of innovative, transformative and downright ingenious proposals to re-terra form the expository sites in Pasig City back to their inmate fertility and abundance.
According to the body, the same could be replicated in the city where individuals and organizations could actively participate in such endeavor that will be undertaken by the local government to bring out the best among the youth and for them to be able to contribute in continuously bringing the city to greater heights.
Moreover, the council emphasized that considering that the city is an educational center in the north and an artists haven, bright creative designs can be generated from the youth and other sectors that are interested to join the same to help in providing added attractions for visitors once the city will open for tourists in the future when the situation will get better.
Earlier, the local government and the agriculture department embarked on the aggressive promotion of urban gardening among residents that caused the establishment of the so-called survival gardens by the different households from the various barangays during the implementation of the various levels of community quarantine to contain the spread of the Corona Virus Disease (COVID) 2019 in the city.
Thousands of households joined the urban gardening and survival garden contest that was spearheaded by the city to empower people to maximize the use of available or limited spaces within their homes to produce steady food supply for their families for them to be able to survive the negative impact of the pandemic to their employment and economic activities that were impacted by the ongoing pandemic for over a year now.
By Dexter A. See
