Mission Statement

Why the Median Strip?  
The Median Strip has a unique if not (yet) glorious position in the urban landscape.  Median Strips are technically the property of the city, or “public property,” but are in stewardship of the nearest property  owner.  They are a sort of border land between the public and the private.  The lawn as we know it now, is the inheritance of various enclosure movements in which common grazing land has been increasingly fenced off into private ownership.  This movement from public to private has had huge implications, good and bad, for the political and social life of Western civilization.  In his famous essay The Tragedy of the Commons, Garrett Hardin uses the example of a communal grazing area as a parable that illustrates that a commonly held resource is inevitably depleted by the selfish economy of individuals.  Or as Aristotle said “that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.”

The central concept of Median Farms is to reject the inevitability of the Tragedy of the Commons. Changing our relationship to and stewardship of common resources is THE challenge that our century must rise too.  In the Torah or Old Testament law, there is an agricultural practice of leaving the borders of one’s fields unharvested.  These border crops are left for the poor to gather in a practice known as gleaning.  Median farms is envisioned in the tradition of gleaning and in the tradition of commons.