Urban food production

How might food production and delivery be brought closer to the users in the urban environment? This is an issue that Professor Andre Viljoen and Katrin Bohn have recognised as increasingly pressing for the twenty-first century city and ten years of research is bringing important answers.

For centuries food has been produced away from the urban environment yet the research by Viljoen and Bohn contends that this could change, offering a more sustainable environment based on the interrelationship between sources of food production, in an urban setting. Their work, examining the architectural and design consequences of a sustainable and resilient urban food systems, began over a decade ago, and recent results have brought a President’s award for Outstanding University Located Research at the RIBA 2015, based on their 2014 book, Second nature urban agriculture: designing productive cities, this being the second of two milestone publications.

The 2014 work not only publishes advances in the theoretical research, it gives evidence of the original practice-based research and prototypes through which the design concepts have been tested and, importantly, offers practical steps towards their introduction into urban design practice.

The book was prompted by demand from cities, practitioners, activists, designers and planners, and is aimed at all those with an interest in developing quality urban spaces as part of a sustainable future. It reflects on the progress of the concepts that first introduced productive urban landscapes into cities, and demonstrates the growing appreciation for this as a necessity across the urban design community, with discourse driven by the imperatives of climate change, economics, demographics and resource supply.

According to reviewer Rob Hopkins, Founder of Transition Network and Transition Towns, "Second Nature Urban Agriculture is pretty extraordinary. If we are to create built environments which are ‘locked in’ to the radically low carbon future we need to be creating, we really can’t afford to build any new developments that don’t include urban agriculture. It needs to be everywhere, and clearly at the moment that isn’t happening fast enough."

A Continuous Productive Urban Landscape (CPUL) is an environmental design strategy that creates a network of food-producing space within developing towns. Key to their appeal and success is the development of outdoor space for food growing, leisure and commerce, characterised by non-vehicular circulation routes and ecological corridors.

While urban farming had long been practiced, and had been a topic of discussion from the late 70s, Viljoen and Bohn were the first to offer a coherent strategy for city design. The theory of CPUL stretches potentially narrow considerations of “urban agriculture”, one which considers the coordinated interrelationship between urban, rural and international agriculture. CPUL extends beyond planning issues, with relevance to all those reflecting upon contemporary urban living and urban community policy.

The practical implementation of CPUL seems simple: the connecting of existing productive green spaces and existing urban agricultural projects through supplementary arable areas such as grass verges, park fringes.

It’s a 21st Century idea, but not a new one. In a descriptive foreword to the book, William McDonough notes that civilisation evolved with agriculture at the heart of the developing communities: “true anomaly is the perceived dualism between nature and culture, food production and city life” (viii). There is a sense that civilisation has lost its way through attitudes to where food should best be produced. 

He continues, “Viljoen and Bohn … bring the architect’s principal skills – among them the ability to synthesise seemingly unconnected issues – to bear on a practical problem, and it is one that has moved, in the decade of their research, from being a quirky utopian ideal to a major feature of consideration for new generation planning.’

The authors explain their title to the work: “The term ‘second nature’ has a double meaning: on the one hand it describes embedded, normalised habits and customs that take place without a thought, and on the other it refers to the manmade, cultivated space surrounding us in a similar way to (first) nature. Can urban agriculture be part of a second nature to both people and cities in the 21st century? Or has it started to be so already? Why should it, and how?”

Their research questions benefit from Viljoen and Bohn’s early involvement with this new field and their development of it within the context of architectural research. In addressing their research questions Viljoen and Bohn have engaged with questions related to, for example, the environmental impact of different modes of food production, while also evaluating the benefits accruing to the built environment as a result of urban design interventions related to sustainable food systems.

Scholarly activity has spanned traditional text based academic research to the implementation of landscape scale interventions in Berlin testing via precise first hand evaluation of concepts in practice. This has included extensive and precisely targeted field work in Cuba and the USA, as well as the utilisation of exhibitions and public installation as tools for furthering research, gaining insights from specialists and the public.

Philipp Stierand (2014) in the Speiseräume: stadt/ernährung (blog) says, “What is noticeable in "Second Nature" is an understanding of CPUL as process. There is an urban design proposal showing how productive urban landscapes could look, but part of this proposal is also the design of those processes needed to anchor urban agriculture in the city. Bohn and Viljoen do not only visualise their ideas, they also illustrate graphically clear the processes they analysed."

Working in support of design strategies that coherently integrate productive landscapes within cities, to enhance urban qualities, food security and biodiversity, Viljoen and Bohn’s research is rapidly gaining favour with influencers of urban planning around the world. The 2010 Policy Report on the UN Convention on Biological Diversity at City Level, referred to Professor Viljoen’s urban design strategy as one, “….which represent a powerful urban design instrument for achieving local sustainability while reducing cities’ ecological footprints”.[1]

Viljoen and Bohn have had key roles in the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) activities and leading an AHRC-funded international research network to explore policy aspects of this expanding research domain. They have had interviews on European television and been part of national urban farming projects.

The importance of this research is in its reference to those pressing issues related to equitable development, natural resource consumption, climate change, food security, population growth and increasing urbanisation. Viljoen and Bohn have been instrumental in bringing these issues alongside work in architecture and urbanism, an approach which significantly puts architectural design thinking at the centre of the urgent and significant issues of food security and sovereignty, how the “urban” and the “natural” will in future be conceived and the new boundaries of architectural practice implied.