In Flourishing Foodscapes — Designing City-Region Food Systems, the authors Johannes and Saline combine social science and urban design to offer another composed lens to better illustrate all visible and invisible dynamics related to transforming the soil nutrients into food. The book confronts the notion of what the boundaries of the agrifood systems are, questioning the ideas of an appropriate scale for analysing and improving food sustainability 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 most segments of spatial 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.