Young Indonesians are breathing new life into their polluted concrete capital city with little more than buckets of soil and seeds. A group of mostly young professionals, known as Gardening Indonesia, has joined the global urban farming movement, converting vacant patches of land between Jakarta’s skyscrapers into lush green vegetable gardens. “There’s concrete, concrete, everywhere. But if we look hard enough, there is vacant land we can farm,” said Sigit Kusumawijaya, 30, watering freshly planted

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Rapid urbanization has effectively separated people from the food they consume, which results in a majority of people in big cities being unfamiliar with how their food is grown. A small group in Jakarta, however, has been trying to reverse this trend and decided to grow its own food. Armed with scraps of borrowed land and little knowledge about farming, these people are trying to do almost the impossible: become urban farmers. One such hopeful

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From the seed of an idea floated on Twitter in November, a new social movement that encourages urban farming in the capital has finally bloomed with its official launch on Sunday. Ridwan Kamil, a prominent architect who started the group with the hashtag #jakartaberkebun, spoke at the launch at Springhill Golf Residence in Kemayoran, Central Jakarta. He said the Jakarta Berkebun (Jakarta Gardening) movement aimed to turn thousands of hectares of abandoned and vacant land

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