This book explores how lessons from past urban planning experiences can inform current debates on urban agriculture. Productive landscapes today have been posited as instruments for the positive transformation related to territorial fragility and abandonment, promoting social cohesion, food security and wider environmental and economic benefits. 

The book will re-map the way in which seeming landscape limitations and challenges can be turned into potential, innovation and a new lease of urban-rural life. It does so by drawing on significant past urban agricultural experiences in planning as vectors for new critical reflections relevant to re-igniting ideas for future envisioning of urban scenarios in which productive landscapes play fundamental transformative roles. The focus is on planning ideas and the roles of key individual planners, all of which have designed agricultural strategies for the city at some point in their careers. It intends to help us today reimagine urban-rural relationships, and the transformation of under or mis-used urban open spaces, peri-urban areas, fringe conditions and in-between spaces.

Chapter 1. Rethinking the urban-rural relationships and productive urban landscapes(Fabiano Lemes de Oliveira and Carla Brisotto)

Part 1: Urban-Rural relationships
Chapter 2. Paths to the green city: On the work of Fritz Schumacher(Dirk Schubert)
Chapter 3. Land-Nature and its economic and cultural value: The case of the Zuiderzee Reclamation(Herman van Bergeijk, Denise Piccinini)
Chapter 4. Sharp´s Town and Countryside(Izaskun Aseguinolaza Braga)
Chapter 5. Tinctured polarities: town and country planning for post-war London(Fabiano Lemes de Oliveira)
Chapter 6. The roots of the city-countryside relationship: A lesson from post-war town planning in Italy(Luca Lazzarini)
Chapter 7. Étienne de Groër: Planning the Lisbon Garden City-Region(Teresa Marat-Mendes)
Chapter 8. City and countryside: a historical landscape system to enhance. The case of the territorial plan of Sorrento-Amalfi Peninsula by Roberto Pane and Luigi Piccinato, 1968-1987(Paola Branduini, Andrea Pane)
Part 2: Productive urban landscapes
Chapter 9. Dynamic Usonia: Evolving Wrightian organic principles for community sustainability(Cecilia Muzika Klein)
Chapter 10. The Future without centralities: "New Settling" by M.Okhitovich and his proponents(Fedor Kudryavstev)
Chapter 11. The City in the landscape: Alfred Caldwell's vision and experiment for an ecological city(Kristin Jones)
Chapter 12. From rural lands to agribusiness precincts: Agriculture in metropolitan Sydney in 1948 - 2018(Joshua Zeunert, Robert Freestone)
Chapter 13. Brøndby Allotment Gardens: Building social cohesion in Danish peri-urban spaces(Kathryn Terzano)
Chapter 14. In a crisis, re-start from... patch! Possible learnings from P.M.'s social ecological utopia bolo(Silvio Cristiano)
Chapter 15. Thinking utopia: a resilient approach to productive landscapes by Yona Friedman(Carla Brisotto).