Modernist Projects of Community-Based Urban Farms in Residential Areas—A Review of Agrarian Cooperatives in the Context of Contemporary Urban Development

Aleksandra Nowysz

doi:10.3390/buildings11080369

Abstract

This paper concerns the issue of food systems in the context of urban development. It describes relevant residential area ideas that integrate cities with food production, such as agrarian cooperatives. In the first section, modernist projects of residential areas linked with urban farms are reviewed, considering cooperative movement and the Industrial Revolution. This review shows that the aim of these historical projects was self-sufficiency and sustainability, based on local food production and broad areas covered by vegetation. They are considered to be a contemporary residential model. The second part of the paper discusses contemporary projects of farms within estates. The study demonstrates that the production of goods under urban agriculture goes beyond private goods, such as food produced for market or own use. The examples discussed show that urban farming performs key functions in residential architecture.

Highlights

The current review examines a wide range of literature related to urban agriculture, architecture, and urban design, in addition to cooperativism
A turning point in reports that focus on shaping the urban–rural dichotomy is the Industrial Revolution and the resulting separation between agrarian land and cities [31,75] the time line defined by industrialization is extremely important in the debate about cities, it does not necessarily describe the actual break in the continuity of Urban agriculture (UA)
A quick reaction to the disappearance of farming from cities was the appearance of new types of UA

Summary

Introduction

Urban agriculture (UA) has become a commonly discussed topic in recent years with regard to sustainable development [1,2,3]. It is worth noting that this impact is variable depending on the geopolitical context. The largest differences are generally seen between the countries of the Global South and the Global North, or between cities in which agriculture was introduced for purely pragmatic reasons, i.e., lack of food and presence of poverty, and cities in which agriculture, or more commonly horticulture, was used to create sites attractive for the local society [14]. The issue is not unambiguous, and the real, overall impact of UA depends on the policy of local governments and spatial solutions

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