This essay proposes a history of urban form conceived through the spatial, ecological, and infrastructural implications of agricultural production. For those interested in the city as an object of study and subject of design, this suggests the need for further inquiry into the possibilities for an agricultural urbanism. While both of these remain viable and laudable goals, they shed little light on the implications of such transformations on the shape and the structure of urban form. Equally, this enthusiasm for urban agriculture has been based on the rededication of greenfield sites peripheral to the city, focusing valuable ecological assets on food production rather than suburban sprawl. Much of the enthusiasm for slow and local food in the context of urban populations has been predicated on the assumption that abandoned or underused brownfield sites could be remediated and repurposed with productive potential. While much has been written on the implications of these tendencies for agricultural production, public policy, and food as an element of culture, little has been written on the potentially profound implications of these transformations for the shape and structure of the city itself. These tendencies have been most clearly articulated through the so-called ‘slow food’ and ‘locavore’ movements. This renewed interest in food production and consumption has been shaped by a variety of authors and interests, but has been most forcefully felt as a call for more renewable or sustainable agricultural practices associated with local food production, reduced carbon footprint, increased public health, and the associated benefits of pre-industrial farming techniques including increased biodiversity and ecological health. Equally this renewed interest in the relation of food production to urban form has been made possible by increased public literacy about food and the forms of industrial food production and distribution that characterize globalization. Enthusiasm for agricultural production in and around cities has grown through an increased environmental literacy on behalf of designers and scholars. Across many disciplines, and for many centuries, the city and the country have been called upon to define one other through binary opposition.Ĭontemporary design culture and discourse on cities are, by contrast, awash in claims of the potential for urban agriculture. The agrarian and the urban are two categories of thought that have more often than not been opposed to one another. Its propositions encourage us to reconsider mobility, concentration, and the scale of architectural intervention in our own era of urban expansion. Hilberseimer's Gro?stadtarchitektur is presented here for the first time in an English translation. His proposal for a high-rise city, where leisure, labor, and circulation would be vertically integrated, both frightened his contemporaries and offered a trenchant critique of the dynamics of the capitalist metropolis. 9781883584757 Metropolisarchitecture 50.9000 NZD InStock /shop/books /shop/books/non-fiction /shop/books/non-fiction/art-photography /shop/books/non-fiction/art-photography/architecture In the 1920s, the urban theory of Ludwig Hilberseimer (1885-1967) redefined architecture's relationship to the city. In the 1920s, the urban theory of Ludwig Hilberseimer (1885-1967) redefined architecture's relationship to the city. Its propositions encourage us to reconside.
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