Urban gardens

Most of us living in the cities these days don't have the luxury of having a big garden to grow whatever we want to. We either live in apartments or in independent houses with hardly any place to have greenery.
On the other hand, there are plots of vacant land all around the city on which the owners have not yet constructed anything. There was a program on the Discovery channel sometime back which showed a solution to this problem. Machester city (not the club) rents out vacant parcels of land to its citizens for a nominal fee. Citizens who take this land on rent have the opportunity to grow whatever they want on this land. This would give those who want to try out their 'green thumbs' a place to try it out in.
Maybe this model should be replicated in other cities and see how successful it is. This idea is two pronged - firstly, it gives citizens an opportunity to maintain gardens; secondly, it adds to the greenery of the city thus not only making it more beautiful, but by also adding to the green cover hence lessening the carbon dioxide levels in the city. There would be unscrupulous elements who try to use this for building a house/ renting it out etc all in the name of a garden, but classifying vacant plots under a different zone which a very low Floor Area Ratio (FAR) might help. The land can be changed over to a zone with a higher FAR once the land is required for construction. When the actual owner wants to use this land for construction, he will have to inform the authorities a couple of months in advance. The authorities can in turn inform the land lessee who can then take away his prized plants - either to replant somewhere else, or...
Even though the plants might not be in the plot forever, they'll atleast help the city during that little while that they're around!
I feel this can be tried out in Bangalore.

~k