Agriculture + rural architecture = agritecture

By Krista Hulshof, Founder of VELD architect

Architecture is about more than pretty buildings.
As a young architect, my training was really about problem solving,
design thinking, sustainable technical training, and yes, aesthetics.
Rural spaces can benefit from these skills, too.

When I tell people I am an architect I usually get a response of awe. Most people associate architecture with building tall flashy buildings, and although some “starchitects” get those projects and those roles, I want to work in my childhood communities, with farmers and the rural community.

I grew up on a dairy farm and loved it, but for some reason I always knew I wanted to be an architect. So I went to the “big” city of Waterloo to study at one of Canada’s premier architecture schools. Upon completing my undergrad degree and starting my masters, there were a lot of ideas and projects in the architecture world focused around food and urban farming. Being a farm girl, I was disappointed with the lack of knowledge about farming and where people’s food comes from, so I set out to create a sustainable farm project that started with an actual rural farm. My colleagues were designing vertical farms that I thought were “pie in the sky”, but those city slickers had one thing going for them: no preconceived notions. I spent many months breaking out of my box of what farming “had” to be, so that I could create a sustainable farm. 

Woven Lea Farm from author's "agritecture"thesis

My goal for my thesis was to apply my new background of architecture to my old understanding of agriculture. Having spent four years learning how to design energy efficient buildings, I was amazed that this technology was not being translated to the rural construction industry. But sustainability means more than energy—it also relates to the economic, cultural, and ecological aspects of agriculture.  I spent 12 months researching, diagramming, calculating and of course designing my sustainable farm. 

Through those 12 months I dreaded the approach of graduation and the real world. I wanted to make a career out of designing farms, but what farmer hires an architect? There were only a few agriculture projects that I knew of that involved an architect, such as fifth Town Cheese, and the University of Guelph Diary research farm. 

Inventing the role of "agritect"
 
Nevertheless, after graduation, I took the leap and started my own architecture firm that specializes in “agritecture”. My goal is to bring passive heating, cooling, ventilating, and lighting technologies to farmers and rural communities, to reduce energy costs, and create more sustainable farm buildings. I bring an outside view and big picture thinking to a farmer. I strive to help find efficiencies and wasted possibilities, and help with long term planning. I want to create a more sustainable agriculture industry one barn at a time.

Mason Lane Farm (from deLeon & Primmer Architects)

Farmers are meeting more stringent building codes, municipal regulations, and policies that need navigating and negotiating. I also know that many rural policies are not up-to-date with the realities nor the needs of the communities and farmers they serve. Architects are trained to assist with precisely these issues, helping farmers creatively negotiate and design to minimize burdens, and meet standards. 

I also feel there is a role for me to play in agritourism. Agritourism is about creating a brand and an authentic experience for visitors, with limitations. Just because the farm smells does not mean the general public wants to experience the full force of the manure tank! Designing an agritourism experience to be fun, exciting, safe, efficient, and unobtrusive is important, and putting this puzzle together is the role of the architect. The rural community has a great opportunity now to present themselves in the best possible manner to the general public and urban culture.

As an architect I would be remiss if I didn’t mention aesthetics. You might be thinking to yourself, “here comes the artsy fartsy part”, but there is a reason we all draw a red gambrel roof barn with a green tractor and fences when we think of "rural" as children. There is a collective understanding of the rural landscape as a place in harmony with nature, beautiful, and peaceful.  As we continue to lose traditional bank barns, we destroy our own rural culture and the rural landscape. 

Building for the future

 

My design intent is to create buildings that are true to materials, site specific, and culturally sensitive. I combine traditional and contemporary architecture to both tie our rural landscapes to history and show off our modern future. Farmers, through every barn they choose to design and build, shape the image of the rural landscape. With the help of good design they can leave a legacy for many generations just as past generations have left us a rich history.

Architecture in my practice is about the design of buildings, big or small, and helping people live and work in effective, beautiful, and sustainable spaces.

 

While many people worry that the rural population is declining, I am one example of farm kids that are coming back to their communities with more creative and professional skills than ever before. It is a great time to be involved in the rural communities, where young professionals can have a bigger impact in a smaller pond. 

Krista Hulshof is an architect with a strong interest in agriculture and sustainable building design. She is an avid cyclist as a way to enjoy the rural landscapes on Ontario, Canada. Check out her services at http://www.VELDarchitect.com. You can follow her on twitter @VELDarchitect, keep up with information, ideas and trends at theagritect.wordpress.com, like VELDarchitect on Facebook, or be inspired on Pinterest.

Visit RUPRI and the Rural Futures Lab for more research, policy papers, and news.

Images provided by the author.

One year at the Rural Futures Lab blog

By Jennifer Jensen, RUPRI Research Analyst, Rural Futures Lab

I have been managing this blog for just over one year (happy birthday, RFL blog!), and I wanted to take a break from our usual programming to take a look back at... our usual programming.

We have been proud to publish posts on a wide variety of topics of interest to rural American communities. The blog has featured researchers, students, policy experts, and community development practitioners of all stripes.

In the past 13 months, the blog has attracted readers from every state in the union except one (anyone have advice on how to break into the elusive Rhode Island market?), and from all over the world. Especially Canada.

Rural Futures Lab Director, Brian Dabson, laid out our vision for rural America in our very first post. We believe that rural America will continue to be an important contributor to national prosperity, but there is lots of work ahead to fully engage and develop our rural assets.

And what are our "rural assets"?

Photo courtesy of Jeff Yost and the Nebraska Community Foundation.

Many of our blog contributors have made the point that rural Americans themselves are a major asset. In particular, rural youth and young adults are the hope for our collective future. Our bloggers tackled this topic from many angles.

• Craig Schroeder of the RUPRI Center for Rural Entrepreneurship notes that supporting youth entrepreneurship is actually a successful economic development practice.
• Mary Snow and Noah Wilson (Rural Support Partners) and Darryl Birkenfeld (Ogallala Commons) offer personal accounts of how communities can invest in the next generation of rural leaders, right now.
• Katie McCaskey, a young entrepreneur shares her Micropolitan Manifesto.
• And Tim Collins (Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs) envisions rural schools as a vital tool for community development.

Photo courtesy of David Kay.

Another asset in rural America is our vast and diverse base of natural resources. A key question that the Rural Futures Lab is asking is how we can better manage the use and stewardship of our natural resources to benefit rural Americans, the national economy which relies on those resources, and the environment itself.

This question has led to an interesting mix of blog posts that feature the intersection between natural resources and economic development, energy, and governance issues:

• Research on economic issues ranges from how to quantify the "New Natural Resource Economy" to how the "green economy" is faring.
• In two posts, my colleague at Cornell, David Kay, explores how energy development questions get to the heart of democracy in the U.S.
• Shanna Ratner (Yellow Wood Associates) argues for new stewardship approaches across the rural-urban divide.
• A student blogger relives his research trip to West Texas and wonders how the growth of the wind industry affects community development there.

Agriculture is as important to rural America as any other industry. These days, food system research, policy, and practices are innovative and vibrant, as our bloggers have shown:

• Rich Pirog (C.S. Mott Group for Sustainable Food Systems) documents the emergence of the local food movement.
• Young farmers find a chance and a voice through the work of Jan Joannides and Renewing the Countryside.

Resources and ideas

An important feature of the blog is acting as a place to share workable ideas for communities. Our own RUPRI colleagues are a wealth of resources on the future of healthcare, defining "rural", rural-urban interdependence, resilience, and why rural America matters to the national economy.

Some of our most encouraging (and popular!) blog posts came from the rural philanthropy crowd. They have good news to offer:

• Jeff Yost (Nebrask Community Foundation) explains how "rural places have an unprecedented opportunity to transform their communities by harnessing the massive transfer of intergenerational wealth".
• Racheal Stuart (Neil and Louise Tillotson Fund) describes how social connections are making philanthropy work better in rural New Hampshire.

Are you looking for connections with movers-and-shakers in rural policy at the national level? Two of our guest bloggers offer an "inside the beltway" perspective:

• The National Association of Counties (NACO) has a Rural Action Caucus that is one voice for rural counties in Washington DC.
• Sandra Rosenblith (Stand Up for Rural America) discusses a challenge for rural communities: senior housing.

Other rural-specific resources featured on the blog include:

• The Entrepreneurship Fund offers professional support for small businesses in rural America.
• Have you heard of the Internet? Tim Collins has, and he's trying to make it work for rural community building.
• Rural places are unique, and Dewey Thorbeck sees the need for a new design discipline for rural America to call its own.

Overall, it's been a great year, and we look forward to the next one. Thank you to all our guest bloggers, and to you, our readers!

If you have an idea for a blog post, please let me know (jensen@rupri.org). In the meantime, keep on reading. And please consider commenting on how your own work or community relates to work and ideas you see featured here.



About the Author

Jen Jensen grew up in suburban Washington State but fell in love with farm life as a kid during yearly summer visits to the Champlain Islands in Vermont. Later, two years in a village as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, West Africa, forged the link for her between community development and rural issues. Working at RUPRI as a graduate student and now a research analyst has taught her even more reasons to admire and support the diversity, beauty, and resilience of rural people and places.


Visit the Rural Futures Lab website to download informative papers on many of the issues you read about here.

Rural Design: A New Design Discipline

By: Dewey Thorbeck, Director, University of Minnesota Center for Rural Design

Rural design and urban design both embrace "quality of life" as a primary goal. Rural design is, however, fundamentally different: It incorporates the unique characteristics of open landscapes and ecosystems. Buildings and towns are components of the larger landscape, rather than shaping community infrastructure and public space.

Rural regions in America and around the world are experiencing considerable stress in responding to global issues, changing demographics, changing agricultural practices, population growth, and urban expansion. However, the design schools and professions have generally ignored rural issues by concentrating on urban issues because that is where most people live. And, when involved in a rural issue, they generally bring an urban perspective to the endeavor.

To rectify this omission I founded the University of Minnesota Center for Rural Design in 1997 as a program jointly sponsored by the College of Design and the College of Foods, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences.

Design is a powerful tool for integrating knowledge and making connections across disciplines, and rural design brings the problem-solving process of design to rural issues. If urban design is one side of a coin then rural design is the other.

Community Design & Engagement

It is essential that urban and rural issues be considered together without concern for boundaries. The well understood notion of community design as a methodology for community engagement may be an effective vehicle to bridge the gap between urban and rural issues.

Community design is often considered as design involvement with a single urban community. However, the “community” can have many different definitions in rural regions, ranging from an agricultural production group in one region to a cluster of small towns working together for economic advantage in another. Rural design can use community design to resolve a rural (or regional) problem by seeking to connect the dots, cross borders, and create synergy.

An Example of Rural Design in Action

The City of Roseau, Minnesota, is located near the Canadian border on the large, flat geographical area formed by glacial Lake Agassiz 11,000 years ago. On June 8, 2002, fourteen inches of rain fell on the surrounding area. The flood damage to the city was enormous, with significant damage to 150 commercial buildings and over 50 homes destroyed.

Roseau, MN, during the flood of 2002.



The leadership in the city wanted to engage citizens in the reconstruction process. They called on the Center for Rural Design to help develop a community-based vision for the future. The vision plan was the result of a broad-based steering committee consisting of community leaders representing the city, county and township working closely with the Center for Rural Design. The power of community-based planning and citizen participation in identifying values and making choices as stakeholders in the planning process proved to be very successful.

Eight years after the flood, Todd Peterson, the Community Development Director, described what happened:

The City of Roseau could not have achieved success in reconstructing the community without having public buy-in of the vision plan prepared by the Center for Rural Design. The City did 100 years of building in 6 years because the plan had strong public support.

Symbolic of the reconstruction is the new Roseau City Center building
constructed on top of new levees adjacent to the river.
It replaced the destroyed city hall, county museum, and library,
along with a new ice arena.

An Emerging Design Field 

My book, Rural Design: A New Design Discipline, recently published by Routledge, is the first ever book on rural design as an emerging new design field. The book establishes the theoretical base for rural design and outlines ways that rural communities can work together to resolve issues and shape their future. The impact of rural design, however, is yet to be determined.

As defined in the book, the guiding ethic of rural design is not imposing a vision or solution on a community, but rather to:

• Provide the tools, information, and support that rural communities need to address their problem;
• Help rural citizens manage change caused by economic, cultural, or environmental reasons;
• Assist in connecting the dots to create synergy for environmental wellbeing, rural prosperity, and quality of life;
• Clearly envision and help citizens achieve the quality of rural future for their community that they deserve.

Rural design, as a new design discipline, can help rural communities manage change through the lens of spatial arrangement. In the process, it provides a link between science and society to improve rural quality of life.

The principles of rural design, as evolved by the Center for Rural Design and outlined in the book, can help in understanding, analyzing, and creating solutions for sustainable rural environments worldwide. These rural design principles include:

• Social, cultural, artistic, and environmental diversity is rewarding for all people who live, work, and play in rural communities and their quality of life. The arts can become a vehicle for learning, social interaction, entertainment and inspiration and an integral aspect of economic development.
• Empowering women to become community leaders is more likely to provide effective resolution of the complexity of rural issues.
• Making connections between human, animal, and environmental health is crucial to understanding wellness. Keeping people, animals, and environments healthy is economically preferable to taking care of them when they are sick.
• Sustainable rural development is directly connected to sustainable rural production. It is finding and enhancing the connections between them that will best impact social, economic and environmental issues.
• Design of sustainable buildings and landscapes must reflect uniqueness of cultural and landscape character—form follows function, climate, and place.
• Food, including its supply, production, distribution, and security, is an interdisciplinary rural design problem. Rural food systems can be mapped and their interactions studied to develop strategic plans and farming practices that are unique to place, helping to ensure safe and adequate food supplies in the future.
• Economic and community viability is crucial for short-term as well as long-term rural design endeavors; however, long-term objectives must take precedence over short-term gain.
• Renewable energy from solar, wind and biomass can be considered as an integral aspect of rural agriculture by “harvesting” the sun and wind. This includes using agriculture for carbon sequestration and reduction of greenhouse gases.
• Improving rural quality of life is the primary goal of rural design.

The world is changing very rapidly, with most people living in cities that are expanding and adapting to global impacts. Likewise, rural regions are changing, with people who are passionate about rural life and their connections to the land. Managing change is critical to rural futures and the time is right for rural design to emerge as a new design discipline.

Do you see ways that rural design principles can be applied in your home community? Do you use arts to promote community participation in planning and visioning for the future?

Dewey Thorbeck founded the University of Minnesota Center for Rural Design. He has a new book out, which you can find here, if you want to learn more about rural design and its applications.

Visit the Rural Futures Lab home website here.

Photos and images provided by the author.

Senior Housing Policy: "Tomorrow Is Another Day"

By Sandra Rosenblith, Director, Stand Up for Rural America

Do you follow media coverage of national officials and policy makers dealing with an issue you know? Lots of folks in Washington, DC get paid to do this. Way too often we wind up wondering: "What are these people thinking? Don't they know ....?"

I'm an Inside the Beltway veteran. I’ve got decades of experience helping local nonprofits across the country mount comprehensive efforts to create healthy, prosperous, equitable communities that stand the test of time. They have developed tens of thousands of affordable homes and apartments. In recent years, most of my work has taken me to rural America.

Along with my smart, engaged 90 year old mother, I’m increasingly distressed by the country’s failure to confront reality when it comes to adequate affordable housing for our aging population, many of whom do and will need it. Like it or not, 76 million Baby Boomers are coming! Every day this year and for the next 19 years, 10,000 Americans will turn 65. By 2020, there will be 10.2 million new households headed by individuals aged 55 to 74. By 2030, one in five Americans will be 65 or older. By 2050, nearly five percent of us will be 90 or older.

A tenant tends her plot at Desert Gardens, the first affordable apartments ever built for retired farmworkers, developed by the Coachella Valley Housing Coalition in Indio, CA.

Seniors aren't all rich or even financially comfortable. An Urban Institute study shows that in 2009, 34 percent, or one in three seniors, were poor or near poor. That's more than 13 million seniors. According to federal standards, housing is affordable when it costs 30 percent or less of income. Using this standard and the 2011 poverty line, a single poor senior should pay $361 or less per month. Are there many ‘decent homes in a suitable environment’ at this price where you live?

The Great Recession took and continues to take a heavy toll on older Americans. Retirement accounts have recovered some, but these shrank by 20 to 30 percent. Seventy percent of seniors own their own homes; about one in five owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. It's no accident that Florida and Nevada, retirement meccas, are ground zero for foreclosures.

Even when foreclosure isn't the issue, many seniors are trapped in homes they can't afford. They can't refinance or renovate because they can’t get loans. They can’t sell because buyers can't meet newly stringent credit criteria and appraisal standards. The rental market has tightened and rents are rising. Unemployment for workers 55 and more is usually lower than the rates for the rest of the workforce. While this is still true, rates for this group have doubled and it takes over 55s more time to find new jobs than other workers. Also, pension benefits are declining or disappearing.

Yet senior housing barely gets a mention, much less serious consideration, in high level discussions about the deficit. It's all about cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Where are seniors supposed to live? What is it going to cost? Who is going to make it happen? You can bet your bottom dollar that the for-profit private sector isn't going to meet the housing needs of poor and near poor seniors absent significant public incentives and subsidies.

This oncoming train wreck will damage rural people and places most. The proportion of seniors in the population is higher in rural than urban areas. It is growing due to an influx of retirees, many of whom are seeking lower cost living. Incomes are low and so are wages. More rural than urban seniors depend on Social Security and food stamps for their livelihoods. The supply of appropriate affordable housing falls far short. Rural seniors have a hard time ‘aging in place’, meaning ‘staying’ in their homes. More of their homes are isolated. Public transportation is sketchy or nonexistent. So service delivery is a bigger problem, everything from medical care to meals on wheels. Younger family members are often away in cities seeking better opportunities.

Do you ever wonder why people in Washington go around in circles? One big reason? They don't ask the rest of America for advice on their communities’ priority needs and how these can best be met. They don’t invest in the people’s ideas. There are literally thousands of nonprofit community developers and service providers ready, willing and able to tackle senior housing issues. Many have already proven what works in their communities. They pursue innovative solutions. But no-one calls, writes or sends money. Do you think we can do anything about this situation? After all, sooner or later, we hope that we all need senior housing.

Sandra (Sandy) Rosenblith, a lawyer, has worked for and with community-based developers across this country, delivering information, training, technical assistance and advocacy support and providing and monitoring grants, low cost loans and access to equity capital. She has also worked for every level of government as well as major foundations, including a federal stint helping draft the original Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) regulations. Of special note, she founded and managed the national Rural and Mid-South Delta programs for the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC). Currently, she directs Stand Up for Rural America, an advocacy initiative designed to help rural community developers gain the attention, resources and policy support their work deserves.