Michiel Dehaene

The emancipatory and civic pedagogic space of urbanism of the past 200 years has been designed and written in political-economic ink, defining the urban interplay of public and private interests and the collective benefits that may be derived from its coordinated and integrated development. That political economic perspective has contributed to a project which progressively constructed nature as unproductive and literally outside of the project of urbanization. Against this background, agroecological urbanism appears a speculative effort which mobilizes the biopolitical imaginary of political agroecology as a transformative perspective to challenge the current role of urbanism in the social reproduction of dominant urban relations and to speculatively articulate the possibility of a post capitalist urbanism.
What does it mean to think agroecology as part and parcel of an urbanizing society.
And why hold on to ‘urbanism’ when engaging with agroecology?
In this talk I will start from an interpretation and critique of urbanism that makes room for agroecology and go in search of historical precedents in the Belgian productive inhabited landscape.