Productive Urban Landscapes

Research and practice around the CPUL design concept

Map of Berlin showing urban agriculture projects with an educational focus from the exhibition CarrotCity and Die Produktive Stadt. (source: FG Stadt & Ernährung (Prof. Bohn) TU Berlin, 2011)

Conference panel “Mapping the Edible City” attracts highest number of submissions

We are pleased to announce that our conference panel to this year’s Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present, and Future conference did attract the highest number of submissions of any of the proposed panels! This shows not only that “the urban food question” has secured an important place as a subject of research and critical…

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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…

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Artist Åsa Sonjasdotter enfolds Bonnie Fortune and Brett Bloom's Deep Map of Prinzessinnengarten during the 'communal ritual for the end and a new beginning' in December 2019. (source: Bohn&Viljoen 2019)

H A P P Y _ N E W _ Y E A R _ 2 0 2 0 !

For the new year and new decade, we wish you all the best! If you have time between the years – or as a new year resolution, we would like to recommend a recent radio program and a visit to one of our favourite 2019 locations: The Prinzessinnengarten in Berlin, on the 7th December, celebrated…

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Co-installing the Mathare Shamba in the Mathare neigbourhood in Nairobi became part of a practice-based Masters’ thesis at the course. (source: Katherine Cashman, Community Gardening in Mathare, Nairobi (Masters’ thesis) 2018)

Guest lecture to international Master’s course at the TU Berlin

Yesterday, Katrin Bohn gave a talk about food-productive urban landscapes and the CPUL City concept to Masters’ students at the Technical University (TU) of Berlin’s independent Masters’ in Urban Management. Apart from introducing key concepts of the international urban food design and planning debate, Katrin presented international architectural and urban design case studies. Lively discussions…

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

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…

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Aerial drawing showing the extend of urban sprawl in Kigali, Rwanda (source: Rapid Planning project www 2019)

Katrin Bohn convenes researchers-experts-audience colloquium on urban food

Under the seducing name “Tasty Cities”, the Fachgebiet Landschaftsarchitektur. Freiraumplanung [Department Landscape Architecture . Open Space Planning] led by Prof. Undine Giseke held a day of presentations and discussions on urban food systems at the Technical University in Berlin. Starting off from a Global-South perspective, aim of the colloquium was to converge knowledge gained in…

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Chart of the Red Sea mapping transportation routes and loading/unloading points (source: Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) www 2019)

Panel accepted at next year’s “Anthropology and Geography” conference

We are pleased do announce that our proposal for a panel at next year’s international conference Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future has been accepted! The Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future conference is jointly organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI), the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), the British Academy, the…

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View of Bohn&Viljoen’s exhibit at Cuba. La singularidad del diseño (source: Jimena Acosta 2019)

CPUL work exhibited at Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City

Tomorrow, the art and design exhibition Cuba. La singularidad del diseño will open in the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. Photographs from Bohn&Viljoen’s project Laboratories of Urban Agriculture are shown in this exhibition co-curated by Mexican curators Jimena Acosta and Inbal Miller. Cuba. La singularidad del diseño opens as part of Mexican Design…

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Extract from the Urbal project’s website (source: Urbal www 2019)

Urbal: Urban-driven innovations for sustainable food systems

Last week, Katrin Bohn participated in a workshop of the international research project Urbal: Urban-driven innovations for sustainable food systems. Urbal uses participatory research in eight cities to develop and test a holistic methodology to map the impact pathways that go from urban innovations to all dimension of sustainability of food systems. More than 35…

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The Edible Playground and the Sacred Fields: spatial imaginary for the Bagmati riverbanks in Kathmandu (source: Mitchell, M. and Iglesias, A.R. www 2019)

Productive Urban Landscapes for Kathmandu, Nepal

This month saw the pre-publishing of Urban agriculture in Kathmandu as a catalyst for the civic inclusion of migrants and the making of a greener city, an article by Maurice Mitchell and Amara Roca Iglesias from the CASS School of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University. It is a wonderfully illustrated piece of…

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Extract of the book cover of the Urban Agriculture Book Series at Springer (source: Springer www 2019)

Katrin Bohn joins editorial board of Urban Agriculture Book Series

It is an honour for Katrin to have been invited onto the editorial board of the Urban Agriculture Book Series at Springer by the editors Christine Aubry, Éric Duchemin and Joe Nasr. The Urban Agriculture Book Series at Springer is for researchers, professionals, policymakers and  practitioners working on agriculture in and near urban areas. Urban…

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Cover of the publication (source: Urban Design International www 2019)

New publication Urban Design for Food Systems out now

We are happy to share the announcement (on 7th July) of a special issue of Urban Design International on “Urban Design for Food Systems” that June Komisar and Joe Nasr guest edited. Extract from the issue’s introduction: The focus of this special issue of Urban Design International is […] the food system, recognizing that this…

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Cover of the publication Urban Food Sharing (source: Anna Davies / Sharecity www 2019)

Urban food sharing in the 21st century: Come dine with us!

Last week ended with Katrin meeting Dr. Ferne Edwards from RMIT Europe, the Royal Melbourne Institute’s European branch. Amongst the various subjects they explored was the recent (May 2019) publication Urban Food Sharing: rules, tool & networks compiling the results of SHARECITY, a European-funded research project led by Prof. Anna Davies at Trinity College Dublin,…

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Opening slide from Prof. Howard Davis’ presentation at the 26th ISUF  (source: Howard Davis 2019)

Continuous Productive Industrial Landscapes

During “Cities as Assemblages”, the 2019 International Seminar on Urban Form (ISUF) held in Nicosia, Cyprus, in early July, Prof. Howard Davis from the School of Architecture and Environment at University of Oregon presented a new concept for Continuous Productive Industrial Landscapes. Reflecting on the needs for large vibrant cities like London and New York…

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Bohn&Viljoen's Cuba exhibit at Hands On Urbanism (source: Elke Krasny 2013)

INVITE: On Critical Care for a Broken Planet, Lecture by Elke Krasny on 26th June

Professor Elke Krasny will be coming to the University of Brighton on 26th June to give a lecture titled  On Critical Care for a Broken Planet –Architecture and Urbanism beyond the Capitalocene, an event sponsored by the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics. In medical terms, critical care, also known as intensive care, is…

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Architect and food thinker Carolyn Steel refers to CPUL concept in her new article

“Food is the tissue of civilization, weaving cities and countries together. In her essay, architect and food thinker Carolyn Steel provides a powerful prompt for us to reconsider the geographic and societal interdependency of urban centers and food-providing ecosystems and to find a way to move beyond the perils of the modern industrial food complex.”…

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(Spatial) opportunity map for London's Eastern expansion zone, the Thames Gateway (source: Bohn&Viljoen 2004)

Knowledge on opportunity and food mapping to be shared internationally

Katrin Bohn has prepared two short lectures to be shown to an international audience of city planners, urban food practitioners and food and water researchers early next month. The lectures use knowledge gathered by Bohn&Viljoen over a number of years through their practice-based CPUL design research and condense it into bite-sized information indented to trigger…

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Fridays for Future Global Climate Strike in Berlin (source: Bohn&Viljoen 2019)

INVITE: Do join us for the Global Climate Strike!

This Friday, 15th March 2019, the first Global Climate Strike will happen in many countries of the world. It is inspired by and part of the Fridays for Future movement which, since months, sees school children and young people in many towns and cities take to the streets every Friday to demonstrate for urgent and…

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Female Firsts, one of three exhibitions accompanying the symposium (source: aia brighton www 2019)

INVITE: Fielding Architecture Symposium

We are pleased to announce the call for papers for the international symposium Fielding Architecture: Feminist Practices for a Decolonised Pedagogy to be held at the University of Brighton on June 24th and June 25th 2019. Led by our academic colleagues Dr Catalina Mejia Moreno and Dr Emma Cheatle, the 2-day symposium will be held…

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2010 United Nations’ policy report more relevant than ever!

One of the first publications Dong and Katrin looked at in their joint research is the United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies’ policy report on cities, biodiversity and governance published in October 2010. Given the current urgency of climate action, this report could not be more timely. Already in 2010, it made reference to…

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