European Federation of City Farms Conference

The conference was excellent, very well organised with a great mix of lectures, workshops, trips to city farms and free time. There were around 70 people there, from Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Norway. The conference was held in English, but I had plenty of opportunities to speak German and Italian! The lectures were on:

The relevance of city farms to nature conservation fitted in with similar research that was done recently in the UK.

learning about history and nature by playing focussed on the role archeology can play in farm related education, farm museums are very popular in Germany. City farms in the UK are generally less likely to play a museum role.

the city seen as a playground was a slideshow demonstrating how different parts of a city can be play areas for children.

The workshop I attended was on creating youth exchanges between city farms in different countries.

The lectures and the workshops were held at the Panama City Farm and Adventure Playground. One of the things I liked about this project was that even the animals had adventure playgrounds! (Look at the goat!).

There were of course bunnies too, who I visited every coffee break.

German city farms are often combined with adventure playgrounds and also often have a Bauspielplatz (construction playgrounds where children build huts). In the UK, we are much more concerned (over concerned many of us would say) with risk and so we have fewer adventure playgrounds and those we have are less adventurous that the German ones.

We also visited four other projects which I'll post about in the next couple of days.