Selected Projects
Design Principles and Values
By 2150, the food system of North-Western Europe will shift from intensive agriculture to a regenerative, small-scale, and collective agriculture system with diversified and rotational land use, closing nitrogen cycles, thus reducing the strain on the climate and giving soil the space and time to regenerate so nature can thrive. Food and bio-based materials will be produced locally and seasonally, making food and material consumption more transparent and integrated into the daily lives of communities, transforming peri-urban and rural structures and the way we live in them. This regenerative food production system will provide affordable food for all, while being more circular, organic, sustainable, and fit for the future world we envision.
We want to achieve this through a multiscalar approach, with collective farming as the foundation. To enable diversified farms, farmers will share facilities, tools, and land to enable soil-based crop rotation. This will not only affect the local diet (through the vegetables and fruits that are grown) but also the products produced (through the bio-based materials that are grown). Focusing on local production also means reducing some of our international infrastructure while introducing other collective infrastructures, increasing local and regional flows. Finally, at the heart of the strategy is the conservation of nature, which will shape the boundaries of the newly structured peri-urban-rural agricultural landscape. The existing boundaries of the built environment will remain, with the focus on densifying and transforming our current structures rather than expanding them.
Vaibhav Bansal, Thijs de Boer, JP Boersma, Jelle Schotanus, Wiebke Stadtlander
Quarter 3, Urbanism, TU Delft, 2024
Supervisors: Birgit Hausleitner, Alex Wandl,
Verena Balz, Marcin Dąbrowski, Nikos Katsikis, Caroline Newton, Roberto Rocco