University of Arkansas Community Design Center

Food is absent in American planning. Agricultural urbanism envisions foodsheds as ecological municipal utilities featuring green infrastructure, public growscapes, and urban spaces related to food processing, distribution, and consumption. Agricultural urbanism reclaims a missing middle scale of agricultural land use between the individual garden and the industrial farm. What kind of infrastructure would a city have to develop if it cultivated a local food system?

Farming is an energy system. Agricultural urbanism devises a model agroecological vocabulary to address the next stage of urban agriculture involving large-scale production and conservation, scaled nutrient management (building soil health), and upcycling of municipal waste. This transferable set of planning tools not only embeds high-quality food production into American urbanism, but shows how urban infrastructure can also deliver important ecosystem services, even beyond food production.