The growing challenges of urban expansion into agricultural land open a critical research gap in agroecological territorial design, calling for new strategies to guide the necessary agrarian shift within extended urban regions. This research explores how agroecological principles can transform spatial planning and governance, fostering resilient food landscapes beyond short-term technological fixes. Using the Zürich metropolitan area as a model, it investigates how agroecology can reshape land use, governance, and urbanization—paving the way toward a more sustainable and equitable future.

By combining qualitative and geospatial analysis, the project examines the social, political, and ecological dimensions of land transformation. Led by an interdisciplinary team, it develops a territorial-scale thesis, offering integrated governance strategies and concrete design solutions to support sustainable agrarian futures.

What is the future of the manifold agricultural territories worldwide that support contemporary cities? While discussions on urban sustainability have focused on cities and urban regions, many agricultural territories are equally exposed to rapid and far-reaching urban transformation processes with massive social and environmental implications, opening a research gap for agrarian questions under planetary urbanisation. 

The project is part of the research module NEW URBAN AGENDAS UNDER PLANETARY URBANIZATION—Agrarian Change and Agroecological Transitions at the ETH Future Cities Laboratory Global (FCL).

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.