In his essay “Towards an Agrarian Urbanism” Charles Waldheim looks at a few historical visions of future cities – all centered around the theme of a decentralized agrarian urbanism. Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Broadacre City” in 1935, Ludwig Hilberseimer’s “New Regional Pattern” in 1949 and Andrea Branzi’s “Agronica” in 1994 are all social critiques of their times and consider agricultural production to be inherent to the economic, ecological and spatial order of the city. What was posited in these projects was the idea of “The City in the Landscape” – that a decentralized agrarianism offered an alternative urban form to rapidly densifying cities of the early 20th century. Essentially, here agriculture was proposed to be developed in vast tracts of landscape alongside of infrastructure and industry.

It’s amazing that we’ve come so far that now agriculture is starting to be understood as infrastructure! Kubi Ackerman’s report (referred to in the interview) assigns 4 major benefits to urban agriculture (food security, stormwater retention, energy efficiency, and waste reduction) – with 3 of them directly applying to green infrastructure.