Rooftop Gardens Pop Up in Beijing and Hong Kong

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Urban farming reaches new heights in the latest video from The Perennial Plate, a web series about sustainable food. This episode introduces Osbert Lam at City Farm in Hong Kong and Guichun Zhang in Beijing, who have created leafy green escapes among the high rises of their respective cities. Beijing has over 90 million square meters of empty rooftops, Zhang says, and Daniel Klein and Mirra Fine, creators of the series, say urban gardening has become "a burgeoning movement" in China. The New York Times attributes the trend in Hong Kong in part to a desire for organic produce and a distrust of farming methods in mainland China. The Perennial Plate's video seems to suggest that above all, gardening is just a pleasure; Zhang takes visible delight in his vegetable patch and Lam says, "it's relaxing hobby, growing something. It's like a tranquilizer for city people." 

For more information about The Perennial Plate, visit http://www.theperennialplate.com/.

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Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg is a senior associate editor at The Atlantic. She curates the Video channel. More

Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg's work in media spans documentary television, advertising, and print. As a producer in the Viewer Created Content division of Al Gore's Current TV, she acquired and produced short documentaries by independent filmmakers around the world. Post-Current, she worked as a producer and strategist at Urgent Content, developing consumer-created and branded nonfiction campaigns for clients including Cisco, Ford, and GOOD Magazine. She studied filmmaking and digital media at Harvard University, where she was co-creator and editor in chief of H BOMB Magazine.

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