The opportunity of rural space with urban relationships: Urban agriculture as contemporary cultural landscape for resilience by design

Abstract

Urban Agriculture has emerged as a key practice and interdisciplinary subject in an increasingly urban world. Its work ranges from climate and landscape dynamics to new infrastructures including changes in food system, public health, energy model, and urban planning and management. However, it still presents a contradiction between the healthy well-being of the rural realm identified with "nature" and cities as "parasites" and urban phenomena as an assault on nature. The conflict has given room to responses sticking on the division between rural and urban space. What do we mean by urban agriculture? What is its space and how to work on it? What do we assess? The results of recent practice and research seem to show no relevant spatial features. What "makes the difference" would be the continuity of the resource, the spatial pattern or land mosaics, in time. We do not value the place as much as the relationships the place provides. The chapter introduces the discussion on the future role of agrarian space in the conurbation of Barcelona to present and discuss urban agriculture as a key meaningful activity to reshape and rethink old land mosaics as new contemporary cultural landscapes: the opportunity of rural space with urban relationships. From a "city region perspective", the model could allow for important implications for resilience by design, combining landscape architecture, infrastructure planning, civil engineering, urban ecology, economics and the arts.