Katrin Bohn

University of Brighton · School of Architecture & Design

Urban agriculture (UA) plays a key role in the circular metabolism of cities, as it can use water resources, nutrients, and other materials recovered from streams that currently leave the city as solid waste or as wastewater to produce new food and biomass. The ecosystem services of urban green spaces and infrastructures and the productivity of spe...

In the last five years, European research and innovation programmes have prioritised the development of online catalogues and tools (handbooks, models, etc.) to facilitate the implementation and monitoring of Nature-Based Solutions (NBS). However, only a few catalogues and toolkits within European programmes are directly related to mainstreaming of...

In the last five years, European research and innovation programmes have prioritised the development of online catalogues and tools (handbooks, models, etc.) to facilitate the implementation and monitoring of Nature Based Solutions (NBS). However, only a few catalogues and toolkits within European programmes are directly related to mainstreaming of...

From an urban and landscape perspective, it is high time to design, plan, and build complex relationships between the urban, suburban, rural spheres in order to enable metabolic loops around food and make them compatible with environmentally sound agricultural production and socially sound urban food economies. To achieve this, we contend that it w...

Up to April 2020, we have developed the CPUL concept as described in numerous publications. Some of these publications, you can find here on ResearchGate. A complete overview of our work on the CPUL concept, you can find on our blog "Productive Urban Landscape research": http://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/pulr/

This chapter presents an overview of how urban agriculture can contribute to sustainable development while extending and developing the design theory underpinning this. Two new international Case Studies are used to ground theory in actual situations. Increased prominence is being given to the essential role that nature and landscape play in cities...

Up to April 2020, we have explored and tested the CPUL concept in the unique contexts of the following individual places: *Great Britain: London, Brighton, Letchworth Garden City, Bognor Regis, Eastbourne, Middlesbrough, Newhaven, Lewes; *Germany: Köln (Cologne), Berlin, Heidelberg; *Worldwide: France, Uruguay, Switzerland, Cuba, Japan. You can re...

Research and practice during the last 20 years has shown that urban agriculture can contribute to minimising the effects of climate change by, at the same time, improving the life quality in urban areas. In order to do so most effectively, land use and spatial planning are crucial so as to obtain and maintain a supportive green infrastructure and t...

A short lecture to be shown to an international audience of city planners, urban food practitioners and food and water researchers as part of the EU-funded project Edible Cities Network (EdiCitNet). The lecture uses knowledge gathered by Bohn&Viljoen over a number of years through their practice-based CPUL design research and condenses it into bite...

A short lecture to be shown to an international audience of city planners, urban food practitioners and food and water researchers as part of the EU-funded project Edible Cities Network (EdiCitNet). The lecture briefly introduces the CPUL design concept and the CPUL City Actions Toolkit in order to then highlight one particular tool of the CPUL Cit...

The influence of food has grown rapidly as it has become more and more intertwined with popular culture in recent decades. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Food and Popular Culture offers an authoritative, comprehensive overview of and introduction to this growing field of research. Bringing together over 20 original essays from leading experts, includin...

This article was invited by the editors of the Urban Design Group Journal for their special issue on "Food and the city". Lead by Bohn and co-written with Viljoen, the article reviews the development of urban agriculture during the past twenty years and highlights challenges in providing for urban food growing practice with reference to the emergen...

This article has been commissioned by Nueva Sociedad, an Argentinian-based journal with academic-political focus, as part of their special issue on food, agriculture and land use. Lead by Katrin Bohn and co-written with André Viljoen, the article gives an overview of urban agriculture practice and theory. The article is published in Spanish.

Urbane Landwirtschaft ist ein Thema, dass viele anspricht und dabei ständig neue AnhängerInnen gewinnt. Es scheint ein zutiefst menschliches Bedürfnis zu sein, sich trotz fortschreitender Urbanisierung mit der Herkunft und Erzeugung von Nahrungsmitteln auseinanderzusetzen und sich damit sowohl der Natur als auch einer nachhaltigen Zukunft (wieder)...

This chapter focuses on particular issues, driven by increasing urbanization worldwide, that are affecting the planning for (intra- and peri-) urban agriculture in the Global North and South. The chapter aims to draw out design and planning opportunities presented by, in the main, intra-urban agriculture referring to a repertory of state-of-the-art...

In urban agriculture, there is a direct connection between scarcity and abundance: with the threat of food shortages so often acting as an effective trigger for food‐growing enterprises. Produce can also be grown with few or limited resources. André Viljoen and Katrin Bohn of Bohn&Viljoen Architects juxtapose the experience of the organopónicos, or...

Cities across the world seek policy guidance, good practice examples and further evidence for the impact of urban agriculture, and its relationship to a viable and sustainable food policy. In Europe, the potential environmental and socio-cultural benefits of introducing productive landscapes into cities are now widely acknowledged, although not (ye...

Continuous Productive Urban Landscape (CPUL) proposes a coherent strategy for the introduction of interlinked productive landscapes into cities thereby creating a new sustainable urban infrastructure and supporting a re-definition of open urban space usages. The paper focuses on the environmental benefits of integrating urban agriculture into CPULs...

This paper defines Continuous Productive Urban Landscape (CPUL) as a strategy for the coherent integration of urban agriculture into urban space planning. The case is made for considering urban agriculture as an essential element of sustainable infrastructure. Recent and historic arguments are used to support the qualitative and quantifiable advant...

This paper is written from a U.K. perspective and uses London as an example of an expanding city. Experiences showing the beneficial effects, and in some cases essential benefits, of urban agriculture have been described in this magazine, other journals and websites. Most of these experiences show benefits related to food security and income, with...

Contradictory claims are currently made for the desirable density of sustainable cities. The prevailing view is that high densities are appropriate for sustainable cities. By contrast, authors assessing the environmental impact of remote food production suggest much lower densities. In this paper three design proposals for cities in the UK, at diff...