14. Can the city be edible? Re-imagining the urban commons and urban ecology
Hema Vaishnavi Ale, Transitions Research; Vikrom Mathur, Transitions Research
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês
For decades, urban planners have envisioned and developed cities that has degraded and ignored agriculture and nature from the cities. Living urban infrastructures are only now being constructed and urban planners are now recognising the full potential of urban food systems for addressing social and ecological challenges in cities, in the form of urban agriculture, nature-based solutions and mapping more-than-human interactions in cities. Cities beyond living infrastructures are only now being re-imagined to include the edible, but the socio-ecological imaginaries that accompany growing food in the urban are yet to be charted for most cities.
Engaging with the urban commons has been an exercise filled with politics of care, identity, class relations and production of inequalities. Urban commons as spaces of nature/agriculture/growing are emerging environmental infrastructures which interact through processes, practices, interdependencies, instruments, and institutions on a variety of spatial and temporal scales.
Looking at urban infrastructure to conceptualise the idea of edible cities and rethink nature/growing food in the city would mean inquiring how the public and private space is organised within cities and how this relates to its social, political, economic and physical dynamics.
This panel welcomes papers from urban scholars that explore:
conceptual and historical explorations of the idea of urban ecology and edible-scapes in cities,
contributions, implications and influence of urban ecology and edible-scapes towards demographics and economic developments,
case studies focused on practices, speculative designs of concepts and methods that could help imagine cities with urban agriculture, edible commons/spaces,
empirical, theoretical and methodological papers that explore the social and political benefits of urban ecology and edible cities.
