Sustaining Cities: Urban Policies, Practices, and Perceptions

4. Notes Toward a History of Agrarian Urbanism

63 The agrarian and the urban are two categories of thought that have more often than not been opposed to one another. Across many disciplines , and for many centuries, the city and the country have been called upon to define each other through a binary opposition. Contemporary design culture and discourse on cities are, by contrast, awash in claims of the potential for urban agriculture. Enthusiasm for agricultural production in and around cities has grown through an increased environmental literacy on behalf of designers and scholars . 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. 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 preindustrial farming techniques including increased biodiversity and ecological health. These tendencies have been most clearly articulated through the so-called slow food and locavore movements. Although much has been written on Charles Waldheim Notes toward a History of Agrarian Urbanism i 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. 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. 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 on suburban sprawl. Although 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. For those interested in the city as an object of study and subject of design, further inquiry into the possibilities for an agricultural urbanism is needed. The present essay proposes a history of urban form conceived through the spatial, ecological, and infrastructural implications of agricultural production. In the projects that form this tentative counter-history, agricultural production is conceived as a formative element of the city’s structure, rather than considered as adjunct to, outside of, or inserted within traditional urban forms. Although such a counter-history may remain alternative or even marginal, it may be found useful as architects and urbanists grapple with the implications for urban form attendant to their renewed interest in the agricultural. This alternative history of the city seeks to construct a useful past from three urban projects organized explicitly around agricultural production as inherent to the economic , ecological, and spatial order of the city. Many projects of twentieth-century urban planning explicitly aspired to construct an agrarian urbanism. Often these agrarian aspirations were an attempt to reconcile the seemingly contradictory charles waldheim 64 impulses of the industrial metropolis with the social and cultural conditions of agrarian settlement. In many of these projects, agrarianism came to stand as an alternative to the dense metropolitan form of industrial arrangement that grew from the great migrations from farm village to industrial city in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cities of Western Europe and North America. The agrarian aspirations of many modernist urban planning proposals lie, in the first instance, in the relatively decentralized model of industrial order favored by Henry Ford and other industrialists as early as the 1910s and 1920s. Following Ford’s organizational preference for spatial decentralization, industrial organizations tended to spread horizontally and to abandon the traditional industrial city. In part as a response to the social conditions of the Depression, agrarianism came to be seen as a form of continuity between formerly agrarian populations based on subsistence farming and the relatively vulnerable industrial workforce of the modern metropolis. By mixing industry with agriculture, many modernist urban planners imagined, there could be a rotational labor system in which workers alternated between factory jobs and collective farms. Most often, these new spatial orders were understood as vast regional landscapes , and their representation conflated aerial view and map. The emergence of these tendencies in...