Planning Urban Foodscapes

First paragraph: One of the most exciting new areas of planning and development involves innovative strategies to reintegrate food production and distribution into our communities. Agricultural Urbanism, edited by senior planners at HB Lanarc, a Vancouver-based planning and design firm, is a collection of planning, policy, and design concepts to do just that. The book outlines a program — a manifesto, really — for "building a place around food" (p. 9). This requires rethinking the role of food in cities, transforming the messy elements of food production and processing functions that have been relegated to the "back of the house" to the "front of the house," and making food systems visible in communities so that people become reconnected to the sources of their food and better understand the nature of food production. In describing the contours of agricultural urbanism, the authors ambitiously discuss the whole gamut of the food system, including food access, the food economy, infrastructure, education, place-making, policy, and environmental protection....