Paper presentation at the 9th AESOP Sustainable Food Planning Conference

Katrin Bohn presented their joint paper written with Dong Chu at the 9th international conference of the AESOP Sustainable Food Planning Group held at Universidad Politecnica de Madrid in Spain from the 6th to the 9th of November 2019. Researchers, practitioners, students and guests from all over Europe and further afield came together to discuss their works around the conference’s  theme of Agroecological transitions confronting climate breakdown: Food planning for the post-carbon city.

Dong and Katrin’s contribution is titled ‘Food-productive infrastructure: Enabling agroecological transitions from an urban design perspective’. Here some extracts from our paper’s contention:

‘We contend that it will be of ecological, economic and social advantage for cities and countryside
if green infrastructure concepts embraced the food subject.
Green infrastructure concepts are at the forefront of the European discourse on revaluing the roles of “nature” and “space” within urban ecological and metabolic processes. Green infrastructure, if food-productive, can enhance nature-based solutions and be the spatial enabler of agroecological processes.
From an urban design and landscape design perspective, this means to build through
food-productive green infrastructure a complex relationship between the urban and the suburban and the rural that progressively interweaves spatial design and ecological processes around food in order to construct and maintain closed metabolic loops and make them compatible with environmentally-sound agricultural production and socially-sound urban food economies.’

Focussing on the intrinsic relationships between ecology, agriculture and landscape and selecting – from a variety of existing infrastructural concepts – the spatial landscape typology of the Greenway as our example, we explored a “food-productive greenway” theoretically based on our design concept of Continuous Productive Urban Landscape (CPUL). We propose a pathway to assess our contention by referring to landscape ecology criteria.

For the book of conference proceedings see here. Our abstract is on pages 42-46.

For further information on the AESOP Sustainable Food Planning Group see here.

Image: Positioning the paper’s subjects – greenways and CPULs – within key green infrastructure types and concepts (source: Katrin Bohn and Dong Chu 2019)