A Renaissance of Agri-(Culture): An investigation into peri-urban agriculture as a catalyst for sustainable development through the integration of human behavious, natural processes and technology

Abstract

Self-reliant communities allow for the stimulus of local economies, employment opportunity, and poverty alleviation. They also encourage the sustainable use of natural resources, energy harvesting and generation, and climate resilience. In order to ensure food sovereignty and environmental sustainability, society needs to move away from purely industrial agriculture and reintroduce agriculture to communities, allowing people the opportunity to engage directly with healthy, nutritious, locally produced food. There is an opportunity to investigate the potential for agriculture in the peri-urban environment to provide these solutions through the development of architecture and agriculture hand in hand.

This project investigates the relationship between peri-urban agriculture and the urban environment and its potential to combat these issues through the design of an agricultural precinct hosting a dairy, deli, and resource centre. It aims to investigate the role of Architecture as a trans-disciplinary facilitator in the achievement of regenerative and self-reliant communities through sustainable urban, environmental and spatial design; and seeks to investigate the merging of three focal areas in order to successfully achieve a regenerative environment: human behaviour and community processes; natural processes, and technology. This project therefore proposes a break away from the design and developmental typologies of today's consumerist and disposable society by challenging the conventional farm and the conventional urban development by creating an intervention that acts as a social device, becoming a filter between the environment/farm and the city/community.