“To my delight I found serviceberry trees in several places, as well as mulberry bushes and trees, two cherry trees I didn’t know about, and even a plum tree!”
The people behind the awesome blog La Casa Urbana were surprised to come across such a lot of fruit trees in public space in their neighbourhood. The Urbana-Champaign Fruit Map is a result of their findings, presenting a nice collection of all places to go for your dose of free fruit. Everyone can add new locations to this community map on Google Maps.
This online community project is an interesting 2.0 form of Usufruct, which stands for “the legal right to use and derive profit or benefit from property that belongs to another person”. The blog article even taught me a new conception which perfectly covers the movement this initiative could be considered part of: ‘sidewalk harvesting’.
—Source: La Casa Urbana
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See also the Fallen Fruit project, including maps:
Fallen Fruit began in 2004 as a response to a call by The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest for artists’ projects that addressed social or political issues but did so in the form of proposing some kind of solution rather than raising a critique. Burns, Viegener and Young created a map of what they call “Public Fruit”, fruit growing in or over public property such as streets and sidewalks, in the neighborhood of Silver Lake in Los Angeles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Fruit
Hey, thanks for the link. We’ve added lots of trees and changed all the icons to little fruits. The project has moved forward steadily as the summer progressed. To a future of free fruit!
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[...] * Mapping the Fruit! Die “Urbana-Champaign Fruit Map” von La Casa Urbana zeigt alle Fruchtbäume (Äpfel, Kirschen, Pflaumen etc.) in der Region an. Wäre auch eine tolle Sache für deutsche Großstädte! Via [...]