Urban farms as
city infrastructure.
An urban farm is more than a place to grow and enjoy vegetables.
Welfare, education, health care, disaster preparedness, community building, real estate.
Through both soft and hard sides, it can become a hub that connects society.
Good Luck aims to put the urban farm into practice in society as a "hub of social infrastructure." A farm can be a place where people gather, where care and learning arise, where we prepare for disasters, and where unused land regains its value. We are re-weaving, on a single farm, systems that have until now been built separately for each field, and we are creating the places where that happens.
How to read the circle
Top and bottom: Soft (people and daily life) and Hard (land, environment, and the city)
Left and right: Life (body, growth, nature, land) and Society (human connections, the city's systems)
Life on the right is in the colors of nature (young leaves and water), and Society on the left is in the colors of human activity (lamplight and brick). Soft at the top is painted pale, and Hard at the bottom is painted deep.
- LightThe warmth of people gathering. People gather around a light, and relationships grow
- Young leavesSprouting and growing. Nourishing the body and the strength of children to grow
- BrickThe systems that shape a city. Stacked up, they support daily life
- WaterThe cycle of water and soil. Nature circulates at the foot of daily life
View as a list (16 fields, with all themes and actions)
- Soft
Community / Culture & Creativity / Inclusion / Work & Stewardship
People connect and find their roles
Across generations, nationalities, and abilities, people learn from one another and teach one another. It becomes a third place and a safety net, where anyone can find their own role and work.
Themes and actions for each field (outlined items are actions)
Community
Neighborhood relationships begin with the plot next door
Being next to one another on adjacent plots leads to friendships without titles. As people water and weed together, familiar faces become companions, and the relationship grows into taking on the neighborhood's tasks together.
- Diverse human connections
- Addressing loneliness and isolation
- Intergenerational exchange
- Neighborhood associations
- Third place
- Civic pride
- Partnerships
- Self-governance
- Mutual aid
- Community weeding
- Harvest festival BBQ
- Potluck
- Seasonal events
- Operating member system
- Collaboration with neighborhood associations
- Partnership with NPOs and NGOs
- Farm cafe
Culture & Creativity
Working with your hands becomes expression
The very process of growing, making, and eating is material for creation. Seasonal handcrafts, prayer rituals, and art experiments mix together in the field and build up as a culture unique to the city.
- Self-fulfillment
- Skill sharing
- Passing on handcrafts
- Climate and seasonal sense
- Art and the community
- Prayer and shrines and temples
- DIY
- FabLab
- Art programs
- Workshops
- Skill-building classes
- Homemade soy sauce and miso
- Partnership with shrines and temples
- Music and film screenings
- Exhibitions
- Photo and record archive
- Collecting local history
Inclusion
An outdoor place where no one is turned away
In the city, there are few places that are outdoors, free, and open even without registration. Regardless of nationality, disability, or difficulty in daily life, the many steps of farm work become a place and a part to play for each person.
- Multicultural coexistence
- Safety net
- Gender equality
- Barrier-free access
- A place for people in social withdrawal or school refusal
- Families with roots abroad
- Recovery from addiction
- Rehabilitation and reintegration
- Partnership with university international studies departments
- Plain Japanese
- Multilingual guidance
- Universal plots
- Free community growing area, no registration required
- Partnership with drop-in space programs
- Peer support
Work & Stewardship
Participants become stewards
Those who were taught become teachers, and plot users become operating members. A field naturally has a staircase of roles. We can create paths where involvement grows into work, from volunteering to small businesses to farming as a career.
- Work experience
- Small businesses
- Diverse ways of working
- Developing stewards
- Volunteering and civic participation
- A role after retirement
- Side jobs and dual careers
- Supporting new vendors
- Farming training and support for new farmers
- Hosting corporate training
- Work experience and internships
- Welcoming volunteers
- Neighborhood teacher program
- Designing honoraria and paid volunteering
Good Luck in practiceKodomo shokudo community meals for children (since 2016), self-run by participants since 2014, a garden where people from age 5 to 80 take part
- Soft
Welfare / Health & Medicine / Education & Parenting / Food
A place for care, learning, and food
Agriculture-welfare collaboration, horticultural therapy, edible education, and food education. Working with senior facilities, medical institutions, and schools, we make the field a place for care of mind and body, for growth and learning, and for connecting to the dinner table.
Themes and actions for each field (outlined items are actions)
Welfare
A gentle safety net outside the system
Welfare services have limits on who and when they serve. A field lies outside them, where older adults, people with disabilities, and families facing difficulties can join the same work in the same place. It is also a site of agriculture-welfare collaboration.
- Agriculture-welfare collaboration
- Places for older adults
- Preventing the need for nursing care
- Support for people in financial hardship
- Single-parent families
- Young carers
- Living with dementia
- Community-based inclusive society
- Partnership with senior facilities
- Partnership with after-school day services
- Partnership with workshops for people with disabilities
- Partnership with continuous employment support
- Employment preparation support
- Partnership with the Council of Social Welfare
- Partnership with welfare commissioners
- Partnership with community comprehensive support centers
- Dementia cafe
- Neighborhood watch network
Health & Medicine
Prescribe a field, not a pill
Sunlight, exercise, soil, and conversation. Simply visiting a field brings together what is good for body and mind. This field aims for a future where medical and care-prevention settings use fields as places to refer people to. There is no practice yet.
- Well-being
- Horticultural therapy
- Social prescribing
- Frailty prevention
- Mental health
- Exercise habits
- Preventing lifestyle-related diseases
- Isolation and health
- Children's physical fitness
- Partnership with medical institutions
- Partnership with link workers
- Partnership with public health nurses
- Corporate employee benefits
- Health check events
- Care-prevention classes
- Farm meditation
- Phytotherapy
- Aromatherapy
- Dietary healing and traditional Chinese medicine
- Medicinal herbal tea
- Medicinal herb garden
- Postpartum care
Education & Parenting
A field closes the experience gap
We open the experience from seed to dinner table to every child, regardless of family circumstances. Working with schools, after-school programs, and kindergartens, the field serves as a place to spend after school and on holidays, and as a place that eases parents' isolation.
- Edible education
- Closing the experience gap
- After-school programs
- Isolation in parenting
- Kindergartens and nursery schools
- Learning together
- Inquiry-based learning
- Learning outside school
- Non-cognitive skills
- ESD
- Partnership with educational institutions
- Partnership with after-school childcare
- After-school children's classes
- Support for school gardens
- Hosting Integrated Studies classes
- Children's medicinal herb garden class
- Parent-child farming experiences
- A space for parenting circles
- Children's currency
- Child shopkeeper and small business experience
- Adventure playground
- Growing instruction
- University field practicum site
Food
From growing to the dinner table
Harvested vegetables become a meal on the spot, and a table to share. Food education, fighting food poverty, and cutting food waste can be tackled as one continuous effort because the field and the kitchen are side by side.
- Food education
- Addressing food poverty
- Reducing food waste
- Local production for local consumption
- Food safety
- Food diversity
- Children's cafeterias
- Food pantry
- Partnership with food banks
- Cooking classes
- Cooking together and shared kitchens
- Making preserved food
- Sharing the harvest
- Local vegetables for school lunches
- Heirloom vegetables and regional food
- Stone oven
- Craft beer
Good Luck in practiceChildren's cooking classes that start from seeds (since 2012), creating places for older adults, work support for people with disabilities, handmade soy sauce and a stone oven
- Hard
Environment / Resources & Energy / Farming & Soil / Real Estate & Housing
Circulate the environment and resources, and put land to good use
Biodiversity and heat island countermeasures, compost and rainwater cycles, and farming techniques that protect soil and seeds. We turn unused land and aging buildings from interim use into places that raise asset value.
Themes and actions for each field (outlined items are actions)
Environment
Bring a home for living things back to the city
In a paved city, a field is one of the few surfaces with soil, water, and plants. Even a small area helps the urban environment through biodiversity, heat mitigation, and rainwater infiltration.
- Biodiversity
- Heat island effect
- Climate change adaptation
- Green infrastructure
- Nature positive
- Urban greening
- Edible street trees
- Biotope
- Wildlife surveys
- Green curtains
- Planting native species
- Shade trees and uchimizu water sprinkling
- Beekeeping
- Certification as a nature-coexistence site
Resources & Energy
Return the city's leftovers to the soil
Manure from ranches, pruned branches, scrap from demolished buildings, rainwater, and sunlight. The field takes in what the city has to spare and circulates it as resources. It becomes a place where the cycle is visible.
- Resource circulation
- Water circulation
- Carbon neutrality
- Renewable energy
- Zero waste
- Composting
- Using local organic resources
- Using fallen leaves and pruned branches
- Reusing scrap materials
- Rainwater use
- Water storage in soil
- Solar power
- Using firewood and biomass
Farming & Soil
Become a window connecting the city and farmland
We connect the farmland that remains in the city and nearby farmers with life in the city. Small fields serve as an entrance that sends people to places of farming, so that urban agriculture and farmland can be passed on to the next generation.
- Promoting urban agriculture
- Partnership with suburban farming
- A window between farmland and the city
- Connecting city and countryside
- Using idle farmland
- Food self-sufficiency rate
- Multifunctional roles of farming
- Organic
- Preserving seeds
- Soil health
- Rental plot gardens
- No pesticides or chemical fertilizers
- Natural farming
- Saving seeds of native and heirloom varieties
- Partnership with nearby farmers
- Farm support volunteers
- Farmland visits and harvest experience tours
- Trials and demonstrations of urban cultivation
- Matching idle farmland with new farmers
- Partnership with agricultural cooperatives and farmer groups
Real Estate & Housing
Bring value back to unused land
Vacant lots, vacant houses, aging buildings, and the empty spaces around housing complexes. Starting with interim use of land that owners struggle to manage, we raise the value and sense of security of the surrounding area. This is a field where we work with landowners.
- Asset value
- Vacant houses and vacant lots
- Inherited land
- Aging buildings
- Interim use
- Housing complex revitalization
- Homes with farming
- Area management
- Use together with adjacent vacant houses
- Using vacant storefronts
- Interim farms on sites awaiting demolition
- Free-of-charge lending from landowners
- Partnership with UR and housing developers
- Housing with a farm
- Sorting out the treatment of property tax
Good Luck in practiceFormer housing and public bath sites turned into gardens (Kitakagaya), plots with no pesticides or chemical fertilizers, reuse of ranch compost and demolition materials
- Hard
City / Local Economy / Disaster Preparedness / Public-Private Partnership & Policy
Equip the city, set it in motion, and connect it to policy
Disaster-prevention open spaces in dense urban areas, city parks, and area renovation. We serve as a base in disasters, keep the local economy moving through markets and sixth-sector industrialization, and tie the issues we see on the ground to government partnerships and policy.
Themes and actions for each field (outlined items are actions)
City
Propose ways to use the city's empty spaces
Parks, spaces under elevated tracks, station fronts, and interim vacant lots. We open up the city's undefined empty spaces through the small experiment of a field, and show the city how to make the most of public space.
- Area renovation
- City parks
- Urban sponge phenomenon
- Making the most of public space
- A walkable city to live in
- Landscape
- Tactical urbanism
- Ecovillages
- Semi-public spaces
- Farms inside parks
- Using station fronts and spaces under elevated tracks
- Social experiments
- Managing and operating open spaces
Local Economy
Run a small economy from the field
Markets, direct sales, processed goods, and pop-up shops. The vegetables and people from the field connect with shopping streets and restaurants, creating a system where money and trust circulate within the community.
- Sharing and gift economy
- Local economic circulation
- Local currency
- Tourism and exchange
- Related population
- Farmers' markets
- Markets
- Pop-up shops
- Partnership with shopping streets
- Sixth-sector industrialization
- Partnership with restaurants
- Direct sales and regular deliveries
- Issuing a local currency
- Hosting visits and exchanges
- Farm stays and experience tours
Disaster Preparedness
An everyday field becomes a base when it counts
By continuing to use open spaces in dense urban areas as fields, we keep a place ready in ordinary times that can serve for evacuation, communal cooking, and storing supplies. Kobe's disaster-prevention open spaces are a real example.
- Disaster-prevention open spaces
- Dense urban areas
- Mutual help
- Sheltering at home
- Supporting people who need special consideration
- Pre-disaster recovery planning
- Everyday use
- Disaster drills
- Communal cooking drills
- Disaster supply storage
- Rainwater tanks
- Stove benches
- Wells and hand pumps
- Emergency toilets
- Registration as a temporary evacuation site
- Registration as disaster-cooperation farmland
- Local agreements for disasters
- Partnership with volunteer fire corps and community disaster-prevention groups
Public-Private Partnership & Policy
Translate on-the-ground wisdom into policy
Agreements with government, UR, and landowners, recommendations to committees, and publishing cases and data. We turn the issues and possibilities seen in the field into the language of policy and systems, and pass them on to the next city.
- Public-Private Partnership
- Using public land
- Conserving urban farmland
- Dividing roles between public and private sectors
- Evidence and policy recommendations
- Municipalism
- Taking part in municipal planning
- Citizen green space system
- Using productive green zones and urban farmland leasing
- Urban planning proposals
- Public-private partnership proposals
- Legal system design
- Concluding agreements
- Publishing cases and data
Good Luck in practiceTurning disaster-prevention open space in a densely built-up area into a garden with Kobe City and UR, running a garden on city-owned land in Kobe, member of the Osaka Prefecture committee on agricultural spaces
Let's put it into practice in society, together.
To make urban farms part of the infrastructure, one organization is not enough. We are advancing collaborations in various places that connect gardens with each field: welfare, education, and healthcare settings, local governments, owners of land and buildings, companies, and researchers.