Food‐productive green infrastructure: Enabling agroecological transitions from an urban design perspective

From an urban and landscape perspective, it is high time to design, plan, and build complex relationships between the urban, suburban, rural spheres in order to enable metabolic loops around food and make them compatible with environmentally sound agricultural production and socially sound urban food economies. To achieve this, we contend that it will be of ecological, economic, and social advantage for cities, towns, and countryside if existing green infrastructure (GI) concepts embraced the food subject. Green infrastructure, if food productive, can enhance nature-based solutions and be the spatial enabler of agroecological processes. Selecting the spatial landscape typology of the greenway as our example, we propose a design research pathway to explore the suitability of a ‘food-productive greenway’—theoretically based on the design concept of ‘Continuous Productive Urban Landscape’ (CPUL)—which expands the ecological capacity of traditional GI by reorienting it toward food production and urban food system activities. We discuss this new hybrid infrastructure looking at three major space-planning functions—ecology, economy, and social impact—with a focus on landscape ecology. In the form of a 10-step plan, we include recommendations for urban planners and designers of how to consider food-productive GI as key toward an urgently needed, livable postcarbon city.