From Urban Agriculture to an Urban Political Agroecology praxis. Rethinking the urbanism of agroecological transitions

In recent years, urban contexts and urban-rural linkages have become important matter of concern 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 Holt-Gimenez & Shattuck (2011), in this seminar she will interrogate the way urban-rural links have been conceptualized in the CAS literature, and argue that an agroecology-informed food system transformation needs ‘radical’ approaches to make a dent into food-disabling urbanisms. 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 – I argue 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, illustrated by Schneider and McMichael (2010) as epistemic and ecological rift.

Building on insights from a current action-research project, she will attempt to reframe agroecological transitions as a paradigmatic change in biopolitical spatial relations, economic values and planning agency –what, together with her colleague Michiel Dehaene, she calls an ‘agroecological urbanism’ (Deh-Tor 2017).

About the speaker

Chiara is a critical human geographer and scholar-activist, with a background in politics, sociology and planning. After graduating in Political Science (2001, State University of Milan), she obtained her PhD in Applied Sociology and Social Research Methods (2005, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy), and a Postgraduate Certificate in European Spatial Planning (2006, University of Newcastle, UK).

She has been a lecturer and researcher at the Cities and Social Justice Research Cluster, in the School of Geography, University of Leeds (2008-2015); City of Vienna Visiting Junior Professor at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space (SKuOR), TU Vienna (2009); and Teaching Fellow at the Faculty of Sociology, University of Milano-Bicocca (2005-2008) and the Faculty of Architecture and Society, Politecnico of Milan (2008-09).

She is a member of the Steering Committee of the International Critical Geography Groupand Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), where she is affiliated to the Food Geographies working group.

Since 2006 she has been involved in a number of EU FP research programmes, and between 2013 ans 2016 she has co-chaired Working Group 5 (‘Urban agriculture metabolism’) within the EU funded COST Action “Urban Agriculture Europe”. As scholar-activist and engaged citizen she has been involved in establishing a number of food sovereignty/food policy initiatives, such as the Leeds based Edible Public Space, Tinwolf-LandShare, Leeds Urban Harvest and Public Healing Garden among others, and she is a member of the Reclaim the Fields pan-European constellation.

Recent key publications are: Tornaghi C. (2014), Critical Geography of Urban Agriculture, in Progress in Human Geography, 38 (4), 551–567 and contributions to a special issue on Political Gardening as co-editor (with Chiara Certomà) and as co-author (with Barbara Van Dyck).