* green infrastructure | Productive Urban Landscapes

Bohn&Viljoen's public lectured about their urban design concept Continuous Productive Urban Landscape. (source: IAAC/B&V 2021)

Bohn&Viljoen present their work at IAAC Barcelona

The week before last, Katrin was invited to give a talk at the Institute for advanced architecture in Catalonia (IAAC) Lecture Series which, due to the Covid pandemic, happened online. In the first part of the event, Katrin reflected on the development of urban agriculture as a subject within urban design and architecture using the…

Roxana Triboi, one of our winners, shared details of her project on Urban Pastoralism. (source: Petrut Calinescu From the Series 'Living on the edge: Bucharest' 2017)

Productive Urban Landscapes blog celebration: The winners are…

Last month, we celebrated the publication of THE 100TH POST on this blog which happened somewhen in August 2020. We had invited our readers to send us their answers to the question “What is a productive urban landscape?” Thanks to everybody who responded with their thoughts or congratulations! It has been (is) a pleasure to…

Parzelle X specialises in landscape architecture and nature pedagogy. (source: Parzelle X 2020)

Berlin Senate competitive tender for community garden strategy

We are pleased to have heard today that a team led by landscape architecture practice Parzelle X and comprising Katrin Bohn as consultant was selected into the last round of a competitive tender by the Senate of Berlin. If successful, the team will be working for the next one and a half years with local…

Four aspects of the urban metabolism will be linked in COST Action Circular City: water, food, resource recovery and the built environment. (source: COST Action Circular City 2019)

First virtual meeting of COST Action Circular City

On Monday 29th June, COST Action Circular City held its first virtual workshop with 60 people from 29 countries participating. The day-long meeting was dedicated to starting the joint development of a Catalogue of Technologies for providing/recovering resources through nature-based solutions (NBS). Aim of the catalogue is to support efforts by municipalities and initiatives to…

A resilient food system will be distributed and evenly spread, so that, if shocks occur, small amounts of food from many produces can be sent to places in need. The Kato Farm in Nerima City, Tokyo, is a good example of how this resilient urban landscape may look and how it can be used. Socially embedded food systems working as part of a larger network, like this one, have much to offer as we rethink post Covid 19 and in the midst of climate change adaptation and mitigation. (image: Bohn&Viljoen 2019)

Thoughts on Covid-19, food and urban design

One month into the Covid19 lockdown It is now a month since the UK went into lockdown as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic. Germany started a short while earlier and is now experimenting with a targeted relaxation of some measures. Nevertheless, we are all still socially isolating and no longer travelling, working patterns have…

Resource streams in urban metabolism. This diagram, drawn for the participatory PHVision project in Heidelberg, shows how food and the food system are located as part of other resource streams into and out of the city. (source: Katrin Bohn with Rachel Shotliff 2016)

New paper on urban agriculture published !

As part of COST Action Circular City, Katrin Bohn has co-published a new paper on urban agriculture as a keystone contribution towards sustainable cities in the journal Blue-Green Systems by IWA Publishing. The paper contends that ‘research and practice during the last 20 years has shown that urban agriculture can contribute to minimising the effects…

Presentation of the results of one of the discussion tables by an urban gardener (source: Beatrice Walthall 2019)

First public presentation of the Platform Productive Urban Green

More than 30 people came to the first public presentation of “Platform Productive Urban Green – Design and planning of open green space” [Plattform Produktives Stadtgrün – Gestaltung und Planung des öffentlichen Grüns] which happened last week in Berlin’s Alte Zollgarage. After a brief welcome by a representative of Berlin’s (Germany) Senate Department for the…

Participants discuss the potential use and usefulness of the new platform in several break-out sessions. (source: ScholzConstructors 2019)

“Platform Productive Urban Green” starts in Berlin

Thursday, 28th March 2019, marked the official beginning of Berlin’s new Platform Productive Urban Green [Plattform Produktives Stadtgrün]. This new website and communication format aims to engage the public and city officials in discussing the future of the capital’s open (green) urban spaces by focussing on distinct spatial typologies. The first of those is dedicated…