Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Urban-farming innovators such as Detroit and Cleveland offer an object lesson in how cities can transform disused land into tomorrow’s (healthy) dinner.

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All around the country, Americans are dreaming big. Their boldest ideas are changing their communities–and having a ripple effect throughout the world.

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Consider this paradox: 49 million Americans live with daily food insecurity, 23 million live in urban food deserts, and collectively we’re all getting fatter. Simultaneously vacant lots, concrete grooves, and other desolate, empty spots dot urban landscapes, while a quarter of traditional agricultural land is severely degraded according to the UN.

Enter the urban farm: a fast, smart, cheap way to bring healthy food closer to those who need it, transform ugly vacant spaces into lush gardens, and promote a healthier, greener, more connected urban community.

A recently released video by the American Society of Landscape Architects uses case studies from edible-city innovators, such as Cleveland and Detroit, to offer practical advice for bringing urban farms to your backyard (or corner lot or rooftop). Here are four helpful tips:

Plant a garden in your own yard (or farm the job out to someone else).

Acres of perfect green grass are both a hassle to maintain and, nutritionally speaking, useless. Inhabitants with yards in D.C. and Portland can even lease their yard to those with greener thumbs–and take a cut of the produce they yield.

Populate empty lots with crops.

Cities like Cleveland and Detroit are leasing abandoned lots to urban farmers for practically nothing–provided the lessees are committed to filling those spots with edible greenery.

If your lot’s soil is poisoned with lead or other contaminants, simply truck in new soil in raised beds. Even cheaper: Plant your veggies in burlap bags filled with clean soil. Roll the sacks up and fill with more soil as the plants grow, and you can transport them indoors when winter hits.

Use your roof.

ASLA’s video suggests restaurants harness their roofs to grow ingredients for their own meals. Big-box stores can lease or farm their own vast roofs and sell the proceeds in-store or via local greenmarkets. Rooftop farms use wasted space and lower your utility bill, too.

Fill up your food trucks.

Mobile trucks sell prepared foods–often unhealthy at that. Why not use them as fresh-fruit stands? Food truck legislation in many cities has relaxed in recent years. Opportunity knocks, suburban farmers: Coordinate with a food truck owner to sell your produce wherever there’s a need in your city–not just at the Saturday greenmarket. Hook the kids on juicy berries or watermelon in summer, and you may make a confirmed veggie fan year-round.

Image: Flickr user Joel Carranza

Maurice Sendak passed away this morning at the age of 83. He’ll be celebrated by millions of fans, and has already been memorialized with great writing all over the internet.

We wanted to take a minute to reflect on the example Sendak set for other creatives of all ilks. He was a fearlessly honest writer. He was a talented artist who illustrated over a hundred books, and designed opera sets, musicals, and television shows. His cultural commentary on pretty much any topic–from publishing and mental health to being a young gay Brooklynite in the 1960s–cut to the quick of human experience. He came of age during a period of cultural sanitization, and was often criticized for being “too” honest in his books, which spoke frankly to the sometimes-terrifying experience of being a child. Some of his best quotes on creativity, publishing, and children are collected below.

The Sanitization of Children’s Literature

Sendak, the child of two Holocaust survivors, refused to shy away from the realities of childhood; nightmares, monsters, rebellion, and arguments make frequent appearances in his work. Talking to Maus author Art Spiegelman in 1993, he described unsavory parental praise thusly: “People say, ‘Oh, Mr. Sendak. I wish I were in touch with my childhood self, like you!’ As if it were all quaint and succulent, like Peter Pan. Childhood is cannibals and psychotic vomiting in your mouth! I say, ‘You are in touch, lady–you’re mean to your kids, you treat your husband like shit, you lie, you’re selfish… That is your childhood self!”

Though he was routinely criticized by conservative groups for portraying what they saw as “adult” themes, he stood his ground, maintaining that parents (and authors) need to be honest with children. In his acceptance speech for the Caldecott Medal in 1964, he had this to say about how adults misrepresent childhood:

“From their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions – fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming wild things.”

The City

Sendak was fascinated by the city he grew up in, and portrayed it often as a sometimes hellish, often wonderful riddle. Though he’s obviously most famous for Where the Wild Things Are, he wrote frequently about his native Brooklyn. As the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson notes today, In the Night Kitchen is one of his most mesmerizing books, telling the story of Micky, a little boy dreaming over Brooklyn (taking cues from the classic turn-of-the-century Little Nemo comics).

Davidson writes that Sendak was unceasingly honest in his portrayal of life in the city: “he found the images and words to let children know that he recognized that their lives had cryptic alleyways.”

On Creative Success

Sendak was honest about struggling to succeed early in his career. He took a job at FAO Schwartz doing window installations, telling NPR’s Terri Gross that eventually he ran out of steam. “I was too frightened. I just lost it.” A friend paid for his first therapy session, and he made it a fixture in his life. He talked often about feeling pressure from his parents and peers: “Everyone said, ‘Oh, you’re so talented and you’re going to get a book and you’re’ — and, of course, nothing happened as soon as I wanted it to.”

Talking to the AP, he described his sucess as mundane, saying “I didn’t sleep with famous people or movie stars or anything like that. It’s a common story: Brooklyn boy grows up and succeeds in his profession, period.”

A Book is a Book is a Book

Sendak was a firm believer in the universality of stories. He laughed at the idea that children’s literature is a separate genre from literature in general. In the same 1993 New Yorker piece with Art Spiegelman, he said “Kids books… Grownup books… That’s just marketing.”

In an era of iPads and Nooks, he dismissed the digital readers an ultimately unimportant fad, telling the Guardian in 2011, “I hate ebooks. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of book! A book is a book is a book.”

On Living and Dying

In 2011, he talked about being preoccupied by death (his long-term partner passed away in 2007): “I have nothing now but praise for my life. I’m not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more. … What I dread is the isolation. … There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready.”

One last quote from this 2011 interview speaks to both his life and work: “I can’t believe I’ve turned into a typical old man. I can’t believe it. I was young just minutes ago.”

What was the last thing you made out of papier-mâché? A model of the solar system? A pinata? An embarrassing halloween costume? Brooklynite Lauren Clay is using the humble medium to create raucous hallucinatory art that pokes fun at the history of modernism.

Beginning with a simple wood frame, Clay meticulously crafts her pieces out of wire, paint, and papier-mâché. After many rounds of painting, sanding, and re-sanding, the objects evolve into sculptures whose provenance is, well, unclear. Both Sides in Equal Parts (2010) looks like an alien cornucopia, dripping globs of teal paint; Granny Takes a Trip (2011) explodes with clusters of geodes and unidentifiable fruit. The pieces jump off the gallery wall, inviting viewers to cross that ever-present line between art and audience.

Clay sees her work as a way of critiquing modern art using humor. Using the basic language of modernism (the grid, the plinth, the monochromatic plane) in repetition, she creates lushly detailed pieces that seem wildly unlike anything that came out of the heavily masculine modernist canon. The pieces draw on ’60s psychedelia, Taoist philosophy, and traditional decorative arts, remixing historical eras and symbols with ease.

“I think it’s impossible to ignore the awkward, fumbling feeling that comes along with any philosophical pursuit,” she told Nastia Voynovskoya last fall. “I think it’s healthy to admit how silly and awkward it feels to address the infinite or our own history.”

The default to emotion is part of the human condition.

To better appreciate the role of emotion and what it allows an audience to do, we need to take a brief detour into evolutionary biology. The human brain can be understood as three separate brains working in tandem, if not completely integrated with each other.

The primitive brain and the limbic brain collectively make up the limbic system, which governs emotion. Within the limbic system, there is a structure called the amygdala, which leaders need to understand.

When faced with a stimulus, the amygdala turns our emotions on. It does so instantaneously, without our having to think about it. We find ourselves responding to a threat even before we’re consciously aware of it. Think of jumping back when we see a sudden movement in front of us, or being startled by the sound of a loud bang. We also respond instantaneously to positive stimulus without thinking about it: Note how we tend to smile back when someone smiles at us; how we are immediately distracted when something we consider beautiful enters our line of sight.

The amygdala is the key to understanding an audience’s emotional response, and to connecting with an audience. It plays an important role in salience, what grabs and keeps our attention. In other words, attention is an emotion-driven phenomenon. If we want to get and hold an audience’s attention, we need to trigger the amygdala to our advantage. Only when we have an audience’s attention can we then move them to rational argument.

I have become somewhat notorious in the programs I teach at NYU for the way I start each class. I teach all-day sessions on Saturdays, and as the 9 a.m. start time approaches, most students are still milling about, getting settled, and chatting with each other. At precisely 9 a.m. I touch a button on my remote mouse and play a sudden blast of very loud music. Most of the time it’s the chorus of “Let’s Get It Started” by the Black Eyed Peas, but to keep the element of surprise I sometimes vary the selection. After a 10-second burst of very loud music, I have every student’s undivided attention. I then lock in the connection: I smile, welcome them, thank them for investing a full Saturday in developing their careers. Only then do I begin the class. I have hijacked their amygdalas. We need audiences to feel first, and then to think.

Five Strategies for Audience Engagement

When leaders are speaking to audiences that are under stress–even if the audience is merely tired or distracted–the leader can take the amygdala into account in determining how the content is structured and how the audience is engaged. Here are five ways to engage effectively:

1. Establish connection before saying anything substantive. And remember that the connection is physical. Techniques to connect include asking for the audience’s attention, if only with a powerful and warm greeting, followed by silence and eye contact. The key is to make sure the audience isn’t doing something else so that they pay attention.
2. Say the most important thing first once you have their attention. The most important thing should be a powerful framing statement that will control the meaning of all that follows. Remember that frames have to precede facts.
3. Close with a recapitulation of the powerful framing statement that opened the presentation.
4. Make it easy to remember. Keep in mind how hard it is for people to listen, hear, and remember. One way is to repeat key points. I often hear from clients, “But I’ve already said this. I don’t need to say it again.” Or, “I don’t want to say it again.” Or, “If I have to say this again, I’ll throw up. I’m tired of repeating myself.” But leaders need to constantly repeat the key themes, within any given presentation, and in general as a matter of organizational strategy. It doesn’t matter if they’re bored with saying it. The audience needs to hear it, again and again. And again. As a general principle, people need to hear things three times if they are to even pay attention to it. And because any given audience member at any time may be distracted or inattentive, he or she is unlikely to hear or attend to everything that is said. So leaders need to repeat key points far more than three times to be sure that everyone has heard it at least three times. One of the burdens of leadership is to have a very high tolerance for repetition.
5. Follow the rule of threes. Have three main points. But no more than three main points; no more than three topics; no more than three examples per topic. Group thoughts in threes; words in threes; actions in threes. (See how I just used the Rule of Threes in that sentence?) Think of Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address: “We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.”

The default to emotion is part of the human condition. The amygdala governs the fight-or-flight impulse, the triggering of powerful emotions, and the release of chemicals that put humans in a heightened state of arousal. Humans are not thinking machines. We’re feeling machines who also think. We feel first, and then we think. As a result, leaders need to meet emotion with emotion before they can move audiences with reason.

The following is an adapted excerpt from The Power of Communication: Skills to Build Trust, Inspire Loyalty, and Lead Effectively by Helio Fred Garcia, printed with permission from FT Press, a publishing imprint of Pearson.

Image: Flickr user Howie Le

This is a big deal, as the firm’s philosophy is to focus on only the 10 or 15 companies it thinks are going to matter in the long run. (See: Facebook, Airbnb, and Groupon, among others.)

Back in December, we told you about Belly, a Chicago startup that created a new digital-based loyalty program for small businesses. At the time, it was just one of a jumble of startups crowding into the local commerce space. Today, though, Andreessen Horowitz is announcing it’s putting $10 million into the company. That’s notable since the firm’s philosophy is to focus on only the ten or 15 companies it thinks are going to matter in the long run. (Facebook, Airbnb, and Groupon are all in its portfolio.)

All of which leads to an important question: How did a startup, that’s barely a year old, that only has 1,400 customers, and whose founder is a first-timer become in a mere 12 months a company that the experienced hands at Andreessen Horowitz not only believe is going to be a game changer, but will be a leader in its class?

Would-be super startups, listen up:

Choose a big problem

Local stores are in a quandry. Customers can walk into their stores today, take a look at what they’ve got, and then, thanks to smartphones, figure out if someone else has their stuff for cheaper. “The Internet has enabled incredible transparency on pricing,” Andreessen Horowitz partner, Jeff Jordan, who’s joining Belly’s board, tells Fast Company. “There are a whole bunch of models that are providing pricing pressure, particularly to small merchants.”

If stores can no longer compete on price, they have to compete on something else. Both Belly and Andreessen Horowitz believes that means relationships–giving people a reason, other than price, to keep choosing particular merchants over cheaper alternatives elsewhere.

Don’t boil the ocean

There are myriad ways of strengthening the merchant-customer relationship, but Belly founder Logan LaHive, who started working on the business a year ago, didn’t try to tackle everything at once. Instead, he chose to focus on just one aspect: loyalty programs.

He’s come up with a system where merchants can get creative with the kinds of rewards they offer. It’s no longer the generic “buy 10, get one free.” Rather, merchants can choose to offer something unusual they think their customers would actually like. Some actual examples: A sandwich store will name a sandwich after you. A grocery store will let you cut in line. And a comic book store will let customers who make 50 purchases punch a store employee in the gut. (We’re assuming that’s been cleared with OSHA.)

But build in the foundation for a wider play

The Belly service is powered digitally–through an iPad in the merchant’s store and iPhone and Android apps for customers. (Customers without smartphones can track their purchases on a paper card.) That means Belly has a built-in launching pad for adding more services later that can further fuel the merchant-customer relationship–and further solidify its appeal to merchants.

“A by-product of what Belly is doing is putting a connected computer into soon-to-be tens of thousands of small merchants,” Jordan says. “We think that has very interesting potentials for strategic applications down the road.” (He declines to elaborate, though, saying, “We don’t want to telegraph where we’re going.”)

Gain traction quickly

Once investors bet on you, they’re going to expect you to be able to scale faster than you ever expected. A lot of the technology and ideas that are being developed today aren’t defensible on their own. It just doesn’t take that long to build a lot of the apps coming into the world today.

So investors are looking for other indicators that you’re going to be able to own your market. Getting rapid uptake is one slice of evidence that you’re the person they’re looking for. It means that you’ve developed an offering that’s appealing (as opposed to one that’s just OK or, worse, doesn’t actually work very well) and that you’ve figured out how to get people to adopt it rapidly.

Belly has 1,400 merchants using its system so far in six cities, with two more being added today. That’s impressive considering, again, that the system was barely a flicker of an idea 12 months ago. “We think the most important thing in this market is to be the first mover and to get out there fast,” Jordan says. “These guys probably added more merchants last month than any of the competitors have in aggregate.”

Take up residence with some of the hottest investor-operators of this generation

LaHive, who previously was in charge of new business at Redbox, got himself hired as a Founder-in-Residence at Lightbank, the venture firm belonging to Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, the original investors in Groupon and former entrepreneurs themseles. As part of the deal, he got to move into their offices and hammer out his idea while sitting mere feet away from Keywell.

LaHive says that helped him move faster. There were various things about getting a startup off the ground that he didn’t have to figure out on his own. He could just ask.

Plus, his proximity to Keywell and Lefkofsky gave Andreessen Horowitz confidence to invest in the otherwise unproven first-time entrepreneur. “Brad and Eric grew Groupon out to hundreds of thousands of merchants incredibly quickly,” Jordan says. “That DNA is critical in this model.”

Image: Flickr user Oregon State University

E.B. Boyd is FastCompany.com’s Silicon Valley reporter. Twitter | Google+ | Email