Architecture and agriculture

The organization of this international study day on the concept of agroecology in urban planning in Europe represents an opportunity to move away from a Western conception that has contributed to an everincreasing separation between nature and humanity. By integrating the practical and theoretical contributions of agroecology as resources for renewed urban planning, the aim is to find a way to transform territories beyond the divide between urban and rural environments. In this context, taking the interrelationship between agriculture and architecture as a research perspective allows us to explore the question of the relationships that humans who inhabit these places have with the different entities that make up their environment. The perspective of subsistence, understood as the
set of conditions that ensure the continuation of existence, allows us to formulate the hypothesis that there is a link between the practic of subsistence agriculture and the care that inhabitants take of their nourishing environment. In this context, the way of life in rural and vernacular habitats is the subject of a thesis whose objective is to identify the ramifications of relationships with the living, the no-living, and sometimes the invisible.
Applying this reflection to the study of rural mountain communities, which are assumed to have maintained a high level of knowledge about their natural and cultural environment due to the very configuration of the territory they inhabit, the research focuses on three communities that have
maintained subsistence agricultural activities: the Amazighs of the High Atlas region in Morocco, and the Mayas of Chiapas in Mexico and the Altiplano in Guatemala. The notion of subsistence, which mobilizes all the vernacular knowledge and practices received or inherited within a community,
resonates with the Diáloguo de Saberes, a practice of transmission that aims to consider local knowledge and experiences as tangible knowledge, part of an alternative reality to the dominant capitalist model and intended to ensure the continuity of the knowledge necessary for the habitability
of a territory. This work intersects in several ways with Arturo Escobar’s research on a concept of postdevelopment that would allow us to move beyond the prism of development that is desired and desirable for everyone everywhere, by nurturing the idea of an alternative modernity as a tangible
and credible reality for territories, activated by the inhabitants themselves.
Associating the concept of agroecology with the field of urban planning is an opportunity that opens up several avenues of research and recognition: by helping to build a societal model that is more aware of the entities that make up the natural environment, by enabling the recognition of soil and natural resources as a common good necessary for the survival of humanity, by integrating resident and practicing communities as a source of vernacular knowledge and techniques derived from the territories and by considering this knowledge as tools necessary for supporting territorial development, among other things. The concept of agroecology therefore offers new practical and theoretical insights that should help to build a form of urban planning that embodies a valid and desirable alternative form of modernity.