Vol. 29 No. 1 (2025): BEYOND DECARBONIZATION toward a Climate Neutral urban environment
Essays and Viewpoint

Feeding cities: new trans-scale scenarios for Urban Agriculture

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  • Leonardo Zaffi,
  • Michele D'Ostuni
Leonardo Zaffi
Dipartimento di Architettura, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italia
Michele D'Ostuni
Dipartimento di Scienze e Tecnologie Agroalimentari, Università di Bologna, Italia
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/techne-16601

Published 2025-07-31

Keywords

  • Urban agriculture,
  • city utopias,
  • food security,
  • sustainable urban regeneration

How to Cite

Zaffi, L., & D’Ostuni, M. (2025). Feeding cities: new trans-scale scenarios for Urban Agriculture. TECHNE - Journal of Technology for Architecture and Environment, 29(1), 79–88. https://doi.org/10.36253/techne-16601

Copyright (c) 2025 Leonardo Zaffi, Michele D'Ostuni

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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Abstract

Yona Friedman’s vision of employing Urban Agriculture to eliminate the city’s dependence on the countryside by liberating agricultural land from exploitation is more pertinent than ever. In a world where cities are sustained by food produced in increasingly remote locations and the environmental impact of the agri-food supply chain grows ever more unsustainable, it is imperative to reconsider the relationship between urbanised areas and food production. Advances in soil-free cultivation technologies present new opportunities to integrate productive vegetation into urban and residential spaces. If deprived of utopian connotations, this approach invites reflection on the need for innovative design paradigms that integrate the built environment with cultivated spaces, fostering widespread and symbiotic interactions to promote sustainable regeneration.

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