Places for people, places for plants: Evolving thoughts on continuous productive urban landscape

This paper reviews the role of urban agriculture within the context of the Continuous Productive Urban Landscape (CPUL) design concept. CPUL proposes a coherent strategy for the introduction of interlinked productive landscapes into cities thereby creating a new sustainable urban infrastructure. The paper focuses on urban agriculture as one of the major components of CPUL. Making reference to recent high-profile international exhibitions and publications, the paper traces urban agriculture's remarkable shift from a fringe interest to one at the centre of contemporary urban/architectural discourse. The paper discusses examples of recent and emerging research with respect to greenhouse gas emissions, behaviour change and urban design, to further inform our understanding of the potential impact of CPUL and urban agriculture on the city. The paper concludes that, while urban agriculture is receiving a great deal of attention, the theory underpinning its design and the rationale for developing policy to support its practice will require sophisticated cross-disciplinary research to articulate the concept's full potential as an element of essential infrastructure within future sustainable cities. The case for CPUL has to be made by taking into consideration multi-faceted and crossdisciplinary arguments, which collectively provide strong evidence in support of CPUL and urban agriculture.