The prefigurative power of urban political agroecology: rethinking the urbanisms of agroecological transitions for food system transformation

In recent years, urban contexts and urban-rural linkages have become central for scholars and activists engaged in agrarian questions, agroecological transitions and food system transformation. Grassroots experimentations in urban agroecology and farmers' engagement with urban policies have marked the rise of a new agenda aiming to bridge urban and agrarian movements. Departing from the work of Eric Holt-Gimenez and Annie Shattuck, this paper argues that the way urban-rural links have been conceptualized is occasionally progressive, and that an agroecology-informed food system transformation needs radical approaches. Acknowledging that processes of urbanization are dynamic, driven by specific lifestyles, consumption patterns, and value orientations - producing ongoing suburbanization, land enclosures, farmers displacement and food-knowledge loss - the paper argues that thinking transitions through new rural-urban links is unfit to tackle the evolving nature of these geographies, and reproduces the distinction between consumers and producers, living on either side of what Mindi Schneider and Philip McMichael have described as an epistemic and ecological rift. Building on insights from four case-studies across global north and south, the paper reframes agroecological transitions as a paradigmatic change in biopolitical spatial relations, economic values and planning agency - what we call an 'agroecological urbanism'. The paper articulates a transformation agenda addressing urban nutrients, peri-urban landuse, community food pedagogies and farmers' infrastructure

Building Design for safety and sustainability

The issue of sustainability in the building industry is prominent, as this industry causes large impacts on the environment but also it contributes greatly in a socioeconomic perspective of growth. In line with sustainability the purpose of this report is twofold: to provide a comprehensive description of the current state-of-the-art building assessment methods and to contribute towards sustainability and building design optimisation through the introduction of a comprehensive design approach. In the first part of the report the role of the Environmental methods and Footprint schemes is examined, with a further analysis in the Footprint (PEF, OEF) methods introduced by the European Commission, in ascertaining building sustainability. Footprint schemes provide an environmental assessment on a product-level approach. However, a building is better described as a process rather than a product, while considering the interactions involved in the building life-cycle it seems inappropriate to consider building components in isolation. Current environmental assessment methods evaluate buildings over their life-cycle at a later design stage to provide an indication of their environmental performance. The sole aspect of environmental performance cannot provide comparable building solutions, while at this stage the information cannot effectively used in the general design process. A more effective way of achieving building sustainability is to consider and incorporate environmental issues in the early design stage, where the principles of durability, probabilistic reliability and safety of structures are involved. Since these parameters are part of the same whole they need to be designed together. To move towards sustainability, a new integrated-design approach is deemed essential that will allow building assessment in a multi-performance perspective. In the second part, the Sustainable Structural Design (SSD) methodology is presented built on environmental and structural performance parameters based on a life-cycle approach. Emphasis is put on integrating environmental results in the structural performance, which is treated in a probabilistic manner through the introduction of a simplified Performance-Based Assessment method. A global assessment parameter as the result of ecological costs and structural repair and downtime losses is obtained, which allows diverse stakeholder categories to make decisions in a multi-dimensional perspective. The final part of the report is devoted to further research insights. Both resource efficiency opportunities in the building sector and a respective Communication launched by the European Union in July 2014 are discussed.JRC.G.4-European laboratory for structural assessmen

A relação entre renda per capita e a variação da área de cobertura florestal em escala global entre 1990 e 2015

O aquecimento global e as consequentes mudanças climáticas geram custos econômicos e de qualidade de vida em escala sem precedentes. Dentre as ações para desacelerar o aquecimento, assim como as para mitigar suas consequências, a preservação e expansão de área florestal têm um papel importante sob vários aspectos. Elas interferem nas realidades locais de forma complexa, mas também interferem no clima global. O desmatamento leva a emissões de gases de efeito estufa, assim como o aumento de área florestal leva a absorção de CO2. A evapotranspiração da floresta, e a sua capacidade de reter água no solo, modificam os fluxos hídricos interferindo nos regimes de chuva e na disponibilidade de água tanto local como em regiões distantes da floresta. Foram observadas as variações anuais das áreas de cobertura florestal de 187 países entre 1990 e 2015. Dentre países que tiveram um saldo total negativo área florestal no período, é possível verificar que existe uma correlação entre quantidade de desmatamento e renda per capita. Dentre os países com saldo positivo, não foi possível verificar essa correlação. Um breve levantamento dos processos específicos do Brasil, Indonésia, Sudão e Nigéria (grandes desmatadores) assim como da China, EUA e Índia (grandes reflorestadores), nos permite observar alguns dos elementos que levaram às variações de área de cobertura florestal

Building prefigurations of an agroecological urbanism: the case of public farmland in Ghent (Belgium)

The development of local food policies in Flanders has shed light on the possible strategic value of public farmland. This contrasts sharply with the large-scale sale of public agricultural land by local authorities that has been ongoing at the same time. This contradiction brings local authorities in an awkward position and continues to undermine the possibility to discuss the strategic use of public farmland in urban food policy. The result is a very trivial and sometimes counterproductive spatial food policy, which contributes to the continuation of food-disabling urbanisation processes. In Flanders, this debate has so far been conducted without an overview of the land owned by different public institutions. Using Belgian Land Registry data, we produced this missing cartography. It allows to explore and question some of the issues and contradictions in the current discourse on urban food policy. For this, we focus on the award-winning food policy of the city of Ghent, and we adopt a politicising agroecological farmers perspective. The research not only exposes a number of contradictions in current local food policy, but also highlights an untouched value for initiating an agroecological urbanism and bridging the deep rift between urban and rural worlds

From agriculture in the city to an agroecological urbanism : the transformative pathway of urban (political) agroecology

In this article we capture three things at once: the reason for this special issue of UAM on Urban Agroecology, the thinking behind the 8th Annual Conference of the AESOP Sustainable Food Planning (SFP) group (Coventry, 2017) and the core mission of the International Forum for an Agroecological Urbanism. The Forum and the Magazine will be launched at the AESOP SFP conference whose theme this year is “Reimagining food planning, building resourcefulness: Food movements, insurgent planning and heterodox economics

Applicability of the Sustainable Structural Design (SSD) method at urban/regional/national level

The alarming data on world climatic change, resources impoverishment and increasing human diseases caused by environmental pollution has encouraged the modern society to feel committed in reducing the environmental issues and to adopt a sustainable approach to every human activity. Sustainability is an ambitious challenge for Europe development and European policy is addressed in investing massive resources for achieving sustainable goals. Construction is one of the most impactful industrial sector because of the high consequences it generates on the society, the environment and the economy. Indeed, building constructions involve social aspects, as safety and comfort, economic aspects, as construction investments and maintenance, and environmental aspects, as energy consumption and emissions. The present study derives from the development of a building design method, called Sustainable Structural Design (SSD) Methodology. This methodology is based on a multi-performance and life cycle-oriented approach, which includes the environmental aspects, related to energy consumption and CO2 emissions, in structural design, performed with a simplified Performance Based Assessment (sPBA) methodology, in order to obtain a global assessment parameter in monetary terms. Moreover, the study derives from the awareness about the structural condition of the European building stock, which is old and, in some cases, far from the structural safety required by the European codes. Thus, a simply applicable methodology, allowing the identification of the territorial areas which need a more urgent intervention is necessary. The application of the SSD methodology at territorial level could allow the inclusion of the main aspects of sustainability, identifying the areas which an intervention could reduce the energy consumptions, the CO2 emissions and the structural losses of the included buildings. Thus, this report aims at studying the applicability of the SSD methodology at territorial level, considering three different area dimensions, as countries, regions and cities, and identifying the right approach for each of them. Consequently, an SSD methodology at territorial level is developed and illustrated.JRC.E.4-Safety and Security of Building

Hydrodynamics and Rheology: Key Factors in Mechanisms of Large Landslides

When checking the behaviour of large landslides, deterministic stability analysis has little sense. Stability coefficients can only be seen as the relationship between acting and reacting forces. In fact, large landslides simply move in any case, more or less quickly. When stable, the displacements are actually so small that they aren\u27t detectable. Thus the so called security factor could always be set to unity, and the computations performed as back analysis. The transition from a very slow viscous displacement to a catastrophic failure is better described in a change of rheological behaviour than in an overtaking of a stability coefficient. Actors of such changes are in most cases the hydrodynamic and hydrogeological conditions, related to external factors such as climatic changes, weathering, natural or artificial deforestation, etc. Two cases located in the south Alps, one in Switzerland and the second in Italy, involving weathered metamorphic rocks are taken as illustrating examples