Robert Steuteville

Garden Cities - a new book

David Crossley, Jul 26, 11.

Tagged with sprawl, agriculture, agricultural urbanism, agrarian, garden cities

[Note: this commentary is a review of a new book by Andrés Duany: Garden Cities: Theory & Practice of Agrarian Urbanism. A book by Andres Duany. The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, 2011, 94 pp., $20 paperback.]

Four years ago, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ) was hired to create a plan to develop an “agricultural community” on a 528-acre farm site near Vancouver, British Columbia. Andres Duany and his team worked with master farmer Michael Ableman and other experts: This creative fertilization produced a plan to build a town of 2,000 housing units on one-third of the site’s acreage while tripling the value of the land’s agricultural production.

The as-yet-unbuilt project, called Southlands, was unique in that it sought to integrate agriculture and urbanism at all levels, from high-density units with window boxes to medium-sized farms. Duany has since refined his thinking on the subject, designed a series of projects, and now calls this approach “agrarian urbanism.”

Duany explains the name: “rather than ‘agricultural,’ which is concerned with the technical aspects of growing food, the term ‘agrarian’ emphasizes the society involved with all aspects of food. Not long after Southlands, Duany declared that “agriculture is the new golf.” In other words, access to locally grown food and the culture by which it is grown and processed is an amenity that people will pay for.

Now, Duany has produced Garden City: Theory & Practice of Agrarian Urbanism, a little book that thoroughly explains the use of urban design to promote food and farming culture. The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, funded by Prince Charles, an early supporter of both traditional town planning and organic farming, is the publisher. The book is well illustrated by DPZ projects — most of them recent, but some dating back as far as 1994.

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