Doors 9 Conference : André Viljoen

André is an architect working on concepts for city design and adressing how we can make a case for urban agriculture to become an essential element of the urban landscape of cities?

There are 9 billion pounds that are spent per year to transport food.

Because of the shifts in political landscapes, they used Cuba as a laboratory for urban agriculture.The idea being to bridge the countryside into the city

Making this change isn’t expensive but also productive it is also effective in terms of yield, this is something that needs trying out but it’s been proven that most plots can expect to have 75% of yield.

We need to start thinking about horizontal urban architecture. There are ways to display this idea and exhibiting it that showed that people have a particular relationship to things growing as opposed to decorative displays.

Can this work in London? Even there, networks can be established and the idea of a continous landsacpe can start engaging people in the notion of a productive landscape.

There needs to be a coherent landsapce strategy and it needs to be part of a city’s essential infrastructure.

The next steps would be using Cuba as a testing ground and develop prototypes of CPULs that will involve a great number of stakeholder and thinking of the idea of a good life, and getting more experience with less consumption.