Urban Productive Landscapes and Infrastructural Ecologies

• Jacques  Abelman    Asst. Professor, Landscape Architecture, U. Oregon
• Mathew Pryor    Assoc. Professor (Teaching), Landscape Architecture, HKU

This working group will continue to explore the shift in urban agriculture based on a model of productive urban ecologies, and specifically the notion of landscape infrastructure at the intersection of the spatial, social, and ecological. This model expands the notion of urban agriculture from disparate small-scale projects and re-conceptualizes it as an integration of productive typologies within the urban fabric, moving toward a renewed vision of green infrastructure as an integral and productive part of the fabric in future cities. This work aims to shape potential urban and landscape futures of equity, access and health in a context of landscape democracy, environmental justice, and food security.

Urban agriculture, if it is to become integrated into the city, needs landscape architectural thinking in order to be woven into the larger urban fabric. Thinking at the scale of ecosystems running through a city creates a framework for spatial change. We are now at a point where rapidly evolving social and environmental pressures threaten, transform, and shape cities. In response, re-thinking green infrastructure in cities as productive, resilient, and living systems opens pathways of design thinking towards emergent forms of ecological urbanism. These designed systems redefine the notion of productivity to encompass both the ecological and social. Thinking in assemblages of stakeholders, actors, and spaces creates a framework for social investment and development.