All Welcome to the first Landscape Urbanism Lecture of 2016-17
Title: AGROECOLOGY AND THE FUTURE OF THE CITY
Presenter: Chris Smaje
Series: Landscape Urbanism Open Lecture
Date: 11th November 2016
Time: 14:00
Venue: 32 Bedford Square, First Floor Front
Our present urbanising world is heavily reliant on a high input cereal agriculture from the world’s continental grasslands, but its sustainability is questionable. Do agroecological approaches provide a better long-term model for agriculture – and if so, what are the implications for current residential and occupational patterns?
Chris Smaje runs Vallis Veg, a small farm in the southwest of England. It aims to explore in an engaged but open-minded way the case for small-scale farming, both in the richer and the poorer parts of the world. Chris is a social scientist by training, with degrees in anthropology, health planning and sociology. He is an occasional writer and researcher on farming and environmental issues, but is now a full-time grower/farmer at Vallis Veg where he has discovered that it’s a lot harder to do farming than to write about it, but probably more important and more rewarding (at least in a non-economic sense…).