Agroecological Urbanism Policy Design

AALU advocates for landscape-oriented design to address planetary urbanisation and its attendant environmental, racial, socioeconomic, and health crises. We examine how policies shape consequential landscapes under capitalism. By making visible the commodity chains and the ecologies of urban-rural and core-periphery dependencies, AALU’s agenda intends to build on the relevance of the landscape discipline. The selected projects focus on UK farming policies through an agroecological urbanism lens, critically advocating for progressive policies in the UK from a design perspective, such as Biobased Public Common Partnerships, Land-sharing Rewilding, Agroecological Enterprise Stacking, Wales’ One-Planet Development and a Land-use Carbon Emission Tax in Scotland. These theses foreground the contested landscapes, labour, and ownership behind urbanisation processes. These models challenge urban and rural binaries through organisational strategies and models, innovative regulatory plans, alternative relations to land, and visual decision-making tools within world-ecology frameworks.

Collaborating with public bodies in UK, think tank organisations, design practices and farms, we put forward a methodology that weaves critical thinking with cartographic technologies (including a drone and a microscope) and radical visualisation perspectives. Moving beyond historical landscape painting -which often validates and affirms certain nature-society relationships- sections, manuals, scenarios, and models challenge conventional landscape frames around community agency. Across the projects, a common multiscalar thread spans from anti-imperialist global perspectives towards just socio-ecological transitions, critical analysis of national landscape policies, bioregional management to soil care. Through this work, AALU reasserts the political and ecological relevance of landscape as a discipline, offering tools to imagine just futures.