The edible city: envisioning the Continuous Productive Urban Landscape (CPUL)

Continuous Productive Urban Landscape (CPUL) proposes a coherent strategy for the introduction of interlinked productive landscapes into cities thereby creating a new sustainable urban infrastructure and supporting a re-definition of open urban space usages. The paper focuses on the environmental benefits of integrating urban agriculture into CPULs as one of their major spatial and occupational components. Making reference to recent high-profile international exhibitions and publications, the paper also traces urban agriculture’s remarkable shift from a fringe interest to one at the centre of contemporary urban and architectural discourse. The paper concludes that, while urban agriculture is receiving a great deal of attention, the theory underpinning the design of productive landscapes and the rationale for developing policy to support its practice will require sophisticated cross-disciplinary work to articulate the full potential of concepts, such as CPUL, to make essential infrastructure within future sustainable cities.