Bohn and Chu publish article on food-productive green infrastructure

We are pleased to announce that, two weeks ago, the open-access article Food-productive green infrastructure: Enabling agroecological transitions from an urban design perspective by Dr. Dong Chu and Katrin Bohn was published in the Wiley journal Urban Agriculture & Regional Food Systems, edited by Prof. Sarah Lovell. The peer-reviewed article is part of the journal’s Special Issue Planning food system transitions which features selected papers presented in 2019 at the 9th international conference of the Sustainable Food Planning Group at AESOP (Association of European Schools of Planning).

In the article, we argue that, from an urban and landscape perspective, it is high time to design, plan, and build complex relationships between the urban, suburban, rural spheres in order to enable metabolic loops around food and make them compatible with environmentally sound agricultural production and socially sound urban food economies. To achieve this, we contend that it will be of ecological, economic, and social advantage for cities, towns, and countryside if existing green infrastructure (GI) concepts embraced the food subject. Green infrastructure, if food productive, can enhance nature-based solutions and be the spatial enabler of agroecological processes. Selecting the spatial landscape typology of the greenway as our example, we propose a design research pathway to explore the suitability of a ‘food-productive greenway’—theoretically based on the design concept of ‘Continuous Productive Urban Landscape’ (CPUL)—which expands the ecological capacity of traditional GI by reorienting it toward food production and urban food system activities. We discuss this new hybrid infrastructure looking at three major space-planning functions—ecology, economy, and social impact—with a focus on landscape ecology. In the form of a 10-step plan, we include recommendations for urban planners and designers of how to consider food-productive GI as key toward an urgently needed, livable postcarbon city.

The paper by Katrin Bohn and Dong Chu is fully titled Food-productive green infrastructure: Enabling agroecological transitions from an urban design perspective. It has been published in the journal: Urban Agriculture & Regional Food Systems, vol. 6, issue 1 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1002/uar2.20017 and can be found here.

For more information on the journal Urban Agriculture & Regional Food Systems see here.

Image: Ten-step recommendation for urban designers, planners, and local decision makers supporting development of green infrastructure with an agroecological focus (source: Katrin Bohn 2019)