Urban Agriculture and the Right to the City: A Practitioner’s Roadmap

This essay approaches urban agriculture from the perspective of an architect and urban farmer/beekeeper practicing bottom-up, participatory design in Oslo. It discusses the motivations for the co-creation of livable, experientially rich, place-making, and inclusive urban agriculture in public space to complement to compact city development. It touches on a few critical dimensions of urban agriculture in public space, which relate to the private and corporate claim on these landscapes, and their potentiality as multifunctional and abundant contributors to sociocultural and ecological diversity, food security, health, and democratic discourse. It also critiques its current aesthetics of impermanence and temporality and questions the notion that the joy and a sense of freedom urban agriculture brings to a community should be built upon and enriched by future development and policy. Rather than a replicable model of urban gardening, what emerges from this essay is a rich collection of stories of regeneration and change and of collective action and cultivation.