Winner of the 2015 RIBA President's “Award for Outstanding University-located Research”.
Top-ten best-selling title for 2014 from Routledge Landscape.
Co-authored and co-edited by Bohn, Second Nature Urban Agriculture updates and extends Bohn’s (with Viljoen) concept for introducing productive urban landscapes, including urban agriculture, into cities as essential elements of sustainable urban infrastructure. It reviews recent research and projects on the subject and presents concrete actions aimed at making urban agriculture happen.
The book is a companion volume to CPULs Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes: Designing Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Cities, published in early 2005, which is considered a milestone in the conceptualisation of designing for urban food production.
Second Nature not only publishes advances in theoretical research, it also provides evidence of the prototypes through which the design concept was tested, offering practical steps towards their introduction into design practice. The book was prompted by demand from cities, practitioners, activists, designers and planners, and reflects on the progress of productive urban landscapes. It demonstrates their necessity in urban design, driven by the imperatives of climate change, economics, demographics and resource supply.
The term 'Second Nature' is being practically explored in 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 man-made, cultivated space surrounding us in a similar way to (first) nature.
The book starts by engaging a series of urban design thoughts and theories that may hold keys to the successful implementation of a food-productive city and that contextualise the subject area from a variety of experts' view points. Part two of the book presents the CPUL City Actions, Bohn's planning and design guide for implementing more localised urban food systems based on urban agriculture. The book concludes with a Repository of CPUL-relevant resources presenting a snapshot of the international discourse from the time of writing.
>>> For further details see: * this website's publications listing; * this website's Repository; * the book's blog.