Climate Tucson

Tackling the Inequities of Tucson’s ‘Food Deserts’

May 5, 5:30 p.m.
Zoom Access Below
Guests Welcome
Q&A Following the Presentation
Climate Tucson welcomes architect and architecture professor Courtney Crosson, author on an urban farming study with a promising finding: We have both the land and the water to satisfy the need.
Easy access to healthy food is out of reach to 18 percent of Tucson’s population, or 94,000 of our fellow residents, because of where they live: in low-income neighborhoods without grocery stores located within a mile of their homes — full-service markets where they can buy nutritious food and fresh produce rather than rely on fast food or convenience stores. The U.S. Department of Agriculture calls these underserved urban areas “food deserts.”
According to a recent UArizona study, there may be local solution for our food desert inequities and a fully sustainable one: Not only does Tucson have the public land to create a network of small urban farms, our region provides enough naturally sourced water to keep the fruit and vegetables growing year-round: Think rainwater harvesting.
Join Climate Tucson on May 5 to learn more about the study, the solution and an upcoming pilot farm with author Courtney Crosson, architect and assistant professor at the University of Arizona.In alignment with Pima County’s Sustainable Action Plan, Crosson’s food desert study identified 711 acres of available land in Tucson’s food deserts and more than 1,500 acres that are within the one-mile boundary. It also compared reclaimed water, already used for irrigation, with rainwater. The latter won; not enough piping doomed the former. According to the research, Tucson gets enough rain, even in a dry year, to irrigate all the farms in the study’s model, if collected properly.
Crosson, who teaches classes on water in the built environment, will also introduce us to her City Works Collaboration projects, which focus on water and sustainable urban infrastructure, among them “Tucson Adaptive Streets: Designing for Mobility, Water, and Community” and “TUCSON 2050: A Vision for a Future Downtown.”
About Courtney Crosson
Crosson holds a Master of Architecture from Yale University and an Art History BA from Duke University and has won numerous awards for her teaching, outreach and research, including the national President’s Award for Educational and Environmental Collaboration and Excellence from the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS) in 2017 and the national Practice and Leadership Award from the Association for Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) / American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 2018.
Before teaching, Crosson worked on sustainable and energy-efficient building design for Buro Happold Engineers in Los Angeles, Foster + Partners in Hong Kong, Muf Architecture/Art in London, Multiplicity in Milan and UN Habitat in a Nairobi informal settlement called Kibera. Her first net zero design has been in operation since 2009: a seven-acre secondary boarding school for girls in Muhuru Bay, Kenya, for which she was the project manager and lead designer.
Links
Courtney Crosson website: https://www.courtneycrosson.com/
UArizona story on the study: https://news.arizona.edu/story/neighborhood-farms-could-be-answer-tucsons-food-deserts

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83957710930?pwd=dnE4ZWl5ZG5iQkNwK2VMZEdmMEJCZz09

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