McGill University
IN-1: Innovation 1

The Edible Campus is the product of a true community-university partnership between McGill’s Minimum Cost Housing Group, and two NGOs (Santropol Roulant and Alternatives).  Alternatives is a Canadian NGO involved in the field of development. Alternative’s team from their Rooftop Gardens Project is dedicated to the greening of cities. Their aim is to encourage the physical activity of youth, support their interest in organic food, and involve the elderly. In addition tothese three groups, they are linked with the volunteers who either live in the neighborhood or are students of McGill and other local universities. A mailing list is maintained by Santropol Roulant to notify them of the garden’s activities and to welcome everyone to participate in them.  The Minimum Cost Housing Group is a research and teaching entity of McGill University’s School of Architecture. Since 2003, it has been foocusing on integrating productive planning in cities on permanent basis as a part of a long-term “Making the Edible Landscape Project.”  Santropol Roulant, a NGO based in Montreal, focuses on food security. Its mission is to use “food as a vehicle to break social and economic isolation between generations and to strengthen and nourish” a local community. Their nonprofit and voluntary mode of operations makes them ideally suited to receive and share the garden’s harvest. Project synergy: While University has available spaces to grow its academic calendar and the growing season in Montreal do not match. Majority of students leave during summer months, the ideal time for growing, and return only in the fall. Similarly, local NGOs have their own strengths and weaknesses: They are well connected with the community and have strong outreach programs, however lack spaces to grow or have limited design skills. The three partners together developed strategies for increasing food production in the city by exploiting underutilized and neglected spaces, such as urban corridors, rooftops, balconies and terraces, common in cities and involving the local community in this process. Since the edible campus’s inception, the garden has grown considerably and has emerged as a permanent feature of the University campus involving all.