Daniel Boris (Planting Solidarity Co.) presents this reflection for the LINA Library 2025 curation.

Flourishing Foodscapes — Designing City-Region Food Systems, by Johannes S.C. Wiskerke & Saline Verhoeven

Ammonium Nitrate (NH4NO3). On 4th August 2020, almost five years ago, this chemical compound, commonly used to fabricate fertilisers and pesticides, was responsible for perhaps the biggest non-nuclear blasts in modern history, in the port of Beirut, Lebanon. It is incredible to imagine that similar crystalline salts uphold such a specific, borderline ironic, range of usages. On one side, drivers for most commodified agrifood productions and international economic growth. Elements naturally found in the soil, integral to any socio-ecosystem. But flip the dice and you see some of the main ingredients for producing missiles, explosives and other destructive weapons. This paradox served as a conductor for one of the latest projects of Romea Muryń and Francisco Lobo, founders of Locument, a research studio mixing architecture and filmmaking, which previously collaborated with the LINA Members’ MAXXI National Museum. The duo, alongside Grandeza Studio, directed and produced ‘Strata Incognita’, a short film commissioned for the Spanish Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura 2023. From the countless microscopic lives veiled in the underground to the prominent impacts of the often careless anthropocentric approach to the planet, the movie sets an intricate and partially fictional narrative to expose multilayered tales between humans and the soil they stand, nest and feed on.

This next book for the ‘Speaking With Our Mouth Full’ presents a significant resemblance and complementarity with some of the core environmental and political matters depicted in ‘Strata Incognita’. In Flourishing Foodscapes — Designing City-Region Food Systems, the authors Johannes and Saline combine social science and urban design to offer another compound lens to better illustrate all visible and invisible dynamics related to transforming the soil nutrients into food. The book confronts the boundaries of agrifood systems, questioning the appropriate scale for understanding the relationship between food and places and denying any simplistic and illusory division between city and countryside.

From proposals reshaping farms and rural landscape layout in Brittany, France, to bottom-up planning reclaiming green edible public parks in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and the reimagination of the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area foodshed, both authors echo the call for ever-growing agency and visibility over food sustainability. Flourishing Foodscapes transmits that for  spatial design and planning, food can (and should) play a leading role in channelling possible utopias. Vivid and tangible utopias where food and everything it depends on are no strangers to architects, designers, planners, and decision-makers.