Politics & Governance / Public Policy / Urban Planning & Governance

Cities Are Vampires: The Radical Plan to Farm the Concrete

Progettare parchi agricoli nei territori intermedi

Look out your window. The modern city survives like a thermodynamic vampire, ruthlessly devouring resources from the countryside while turning suburban fringes into forgotten, asphalt-choked wastelands. For over a century, we separated where we live from where our food is grown, and now our concrete jungles are suffocating on their own expansion. Drawing from French historian Fernand Braudel’s critique of parasitic urbanism and the architectural research in Progettare parchi agricoli nei territori intermedi (Designing Agricultural Parks in Intermediate Territories), this presentation explores a revolutionary blueprint for the Florence metropolitan plain. Instead of building passive decorative parks or giving in to commercial sprawl, urban planners propose creating aggressive, high-yield agricultural parks right on the city border. Walk through five boundary-pushing scenarios: tearing up airport tarmac to stop catastrophic floods, reviving prehistoric lake basins as urban sponges, weaving functional farms directly into apartment courtyards, utilizing municipal land banks to block predatory real-estate speculation, and breaking global commodity dependence through hyper-local processing. Learn why ancient peasant polyculture powered by modern satellite hydrology offers the ultimate defense against ecological collapse, and see how redefining the boundary between soil and concrete can save our cities from mutual destruction.