Abstract
ABSTRACTIn recent years, urban contexts and urban-rural linkages have become central for scholars and activists engaged in agrarian questions, agroecological transitions and food system transformation. Grassroots experimentations in urban agroecology and farmers’ engagement with urban policies have marked the rise of a new agenda aiming to bridge urban and agrarian movements.Departing from the work of Eric Holt-Gimenez and Annie Shattuck, this paper argues that the way urban-rural links have been conceptualized is occasionally progressive, and that an agroecology-informed food system transformation needs radical approaches. Acknowledging that processes of urbanization are dynamic, driven by specific lifestyles, consumption patterns, and value orientations – producing ongoing suburbanization, land enclosures, farmers displacement and food-knowledge loss – the paper argues that thinking transitions through new rural-urban links is unfit to tackle the evolving nature of these geographies, and reproduces the distinction between consumers and producers, living on either side of what Mindi Schneider and Philip McMichael have described as an epistemic and ecological rift.Building on insights from four case-studies across global north and south, the paper reframes agroecological transitions as a paradigmatic change in biopolitical spatial relations, economic values and planning agency – what we call an ‘agroecological urbanism’. The paper articulates a transformation agenda addressing urban nutrients, peri-urban landuse, community food pedagogies and farmers’ infrastructure.
Highlights
In recent years, the centrality of urban contexts and urban-rural linkages for food system transformation, has become an important matter of concern for both scholars and activists engaged in agrarian questions and agroecological transitions (Tornaghi 2017; Vaarst et al 2018; Van Dyck et al 2017; Weissman 2014)
Departing from their work, this paper argues that the way urban-rural links have been conceptualized so far in most agroecological and food systems literature is largely reformist, and that an agroecology-informed food system transformation needs radical approaches able to see and engage with the challenge of ongoing neoliberal urbanisms and urbanizations
In section one we offer a brief overview of how critical agrarian studies and agroecology transition literatures have engaged with ‘the urban’, provide an overview of their shortcoming, and discuss why they cannot be considered ‘radical’ – to stay with Holt-Gimenez & Shattuck’s taxonomy
Summary
The centrality of urban contexts and urban-rural linkages for food system transformation, has become an important matter of concern for both scholars and activists engaged in agrarian questions and agroecological transitions (Tornaghi 2017; Vaarst et al 2018; Van Dyck et al 2017; Weissman 2014). Departing from their work, this paper argues that the way urban-rural links have been conceptualized so far in most agroecological and food systems literature is largely reformist (occasionally progressive), and that an agroecology-informed food system transformation needs radical approaches able to see and engage with the challenge of ongoing neoliberal urbanisms and urbanizations. We claim that a ‘prefiguration’ of such an approach – or, in other words, an illustration of action-oriented radical practices that build components of a desired future in the present – can be seen in the emergence of an urban political agroecology praxis. In section one we offer a brief overview of how critical agrarian studies and agroecology transition literatures have engaged with ‘the urban’ (urbanisms, urbanization, cities, urban-rural links, and rural-to-urban flows), provide an overview of their shortcoming, and discuss why they cannot be considered ‘radical’ – to stay with Holt-Gimenez & Shattuck’s taxonomy. In section four we analyze and summarize the radical messages that can be distilled from these practices as prefigurative of an agroecological urbanism
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
