Agriculture through the city

International Conference

In the last few years a lively scientific international debate, along with a variety of institutional and community practices, started to pay increasing attention to the role of Agriculture inside and through the city. Being Agriculture a strategic source of food, energy, social and environmental services, unusual questions have started to be asked to Urban Design and Planning.

Traditionally, farming spaces are identified by the Urban Planners within hybrid situations where “the city meets the countryside”, referred to as urban fringes, urban-rural margins, peri-urban territories. Nowadays, researches and practices, from urban agriculture to “food planning”, do instead highlight the fact that the farming space goes through the morphologies of the contemporary city frame – compact city, urban fringes, urban-rural continuous, urbanized countryside, “rural” territories – occupying an increasingly relevant space in contemporary urbanization and disurbanization processes.

Can Agriculture through the city become a shared device to redefine the contemporary city itself? Can the agricultural space stimulate new spatial approaches, techniques and policies? How could one engage Agriculture and food supply in Spatial Planning and Design? How could farming and food supply become an effective tool to regenerate the contemporary city? Which kind of agriculture might be effective and fair in highly urbanized metropolitan territories?

Invited European scientists will shed a light on this complex matter in two conference sessions:

• “Agriculture and City Forms” about re-thinking the contemporary city in the light of the “rediscovery of Agriculture” by Urban Design, Planning and Policies
• “Feeding the Metropolis”, about considering food supply and safety as a strategy of spatial planning and regional development.

During the movie section a short video on Rethinking Happiness will be projected. Rethinking Hapiness is the research project presented by CibicWorkshop at the last Venice Biennial of Architecture.

Speakers at the conference: Silvio Barbero, Katrin Bohn, Gianluca Brunori, Catherine Darrot, Richard Ingersoll, Mariavaleria Mininni, Arnold van der Valk, René van Veenhuizen, Roland Vidal.

For further informations:
www.iuav.it : conference official web page
www.rethinkinghappiness.info : Rethinking Happiness by Cibicworkshop