What is the future of the manifold agricultural territories across the world that support contemporary cities? While discussions on urban sustainability have focused on cities and urban regions, agricultural territories are equally exposed to rapid and far-reaching urban transformation processes with massive social and environmental implications, opening a research gap for agroecological territorial design.

Through the analysis of case studies situated in different agrarian regions, the project aims to address the gap and better understand processes of extended urbanisation in agricultural territories, exploring their urban challenges and transformation potentials. By analysing selected processes in these territories, namely 1) operationalisation of agriculture; 2) peripheralisation of mountain regions; and 3) enclosure and fragmentation of agricultural landscapes, we aim to enrich the vocabulary with which we describe and conceive novel patterns and processes of extended urbanisation.

The research part of the project NEW URBAN AGENDAS UNDER PLANETARY URBANISATION— Agrarian Change and Agroecological Transitions, embedded in the Food and Territories cluster of ETH Future Cities Laboratory Global –an interdisciplinary research programme that seeks to address the worldwide circumstances of rapid urbanisation.

Focusing on the agrarian shift and the transition toward agroecology in the Metropolitan Region of Zürich, this research employs a combination of detailed qualitative analysis and quantitative geospatial analysis and modelling, thereby linking urbanisation's social, political and cultural aspects to transformations in land use patterns, soil ecosystems and nature's contributions to people (NCP).

Building on analytical investigations, the project aims to emphasise nature-based design solutions that counter the prevailing reliance on technological fixes and challenge the attempts of agroecological priorities in spatial planning and equitable governance across the functional and ecological metropolis.

The research "Agroecological Design for the Zürich Region" is part of the project NEW URBAN AGENDAS UNDER PLANETARY URBANISATION— Agrarian Change and Agroecological Transitions project, embedded in the Food and Territories cluster of ETH Future Cities Laboratory Global –an interdisciplinary research programme that seeks to address the worldwide circumstances of rapid urbanisation.

This project investigates the unprecedented patterns and pathways of extended urbanization in six world regions, foregrounding the contemporary urban struggle: Eastern Amazonia (Brazil), Arcadia (Greece), Pearl River Delta (China), the West African Corridor (Benin), the North Sea, and the Midwest Corn Belt (USA).

The Urban Theory Lab presents Data-Spheres of Planetary Urbanization at the 17th International Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Hashim Sarkis and titled, How Will We Live Together?
Image: Data-sphere visualising the “used Area” of the Planet in the Early 21st Century. Cities constitute only a miniscule percentage of the planet’s operationalized landscapes, which are mostly devoted to primary commodity production (cultivation, grazing, forestry), resource extraction, logistics and waste disposal.

Throughout history, cities have functioned as centres of political and economic power, from which the agricultural and resource-rich hinterlands were controlled. From the nineteenth century onward, new technologies, transportation modes and the opening of trade have introduced a remarkable complexity to the relationship between cities and territories. Today, it is often thought that cities rely decreasingly on surrounding territories for supply and subsistence. Instead, they seem emancipated from the constraints of geography, operating in a global web of dependencies. By contrast, this research is based on a hypothesis that an understanding of the city-territory relationship, the ability to conceptualize it in qualitative terms, and to influence it by means of planning and design strategies, is central in addressing urban sustainability.

Our research starts from the proposition that inherited frameworks urban knowledge must be radically reinvented to illuminate emergent forms of twenty-first century urbanization. As scholars struggle to decipher current forms of urbanization, they are forced to confront the limitations of inherited approaches to urban questions, and consequently, to face the difficult challenge of inventing new theories, concepts, methods and cartographies that may better illuminate emergent spatial conditions.

By comparing eight large metropolitan areas, this research project
elaborates the processes of urbanization to explain how general
tendencies are materialized in specific places. The particular processes
to be compared and the categories of comparison themselves
are not pre-given. We analyse the urbanization processes in the
individual cities on the ground and bring them conceptually in
conversation with each other.