2014 Iowa Hunger Summit

Creating holistic food systems through design: the Agricultural Urbanism Toolkit

The Agricultural Urbanism Toolkit, created by the ISU Community Design Lab (CDL) through a Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture grant, provides a decision-making and design process to transform localized projects into regional food systems. This workshop will include training on the opportunities created by the agricultural urbanism toolkit and will discuss the successes and challenges faced during the first year of the toolkit’s development.

The Agricultural Urbanism Toolkit uses design thinking to integrate the production, processing, distribution, and consumption of local foods while also creating a healthy, beautiful, and interactive physical environment. This approach connects people to their environment and to the food system through tactics such as school gardens, urban farms, food hubs, mobile markets, and farmers markets. As an engaged process, the toolkit involves a range of stakeholders and community leaders, promoting local food system revitalization and public interest design to a wide audience. It reduces dependence on an ecologically unsound and increasingly vulnerable global food system and creates a more sustainable regional community sector by building partnerships and connecting existing assets.

Participants will walk away with an understanding of how this is a revolutionary way to approach sustainable, local food system design within communities and how to use this as a transferable method of incorporating tactics of agricultural urbanism in various scales of communities; how to develop engagement practices for local food systems with communities as a public interest design model for various design disciplines and outreach professionals; and understand partnership opportunities and networking strategies.

About Dr. Carl Rogers:

Carl Rogers is a Co-Director at the Iowa State University Community Design Lab and an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Iowa State University.

About Dr. Nadia Anderson:

Nadia Anderson is a Co-Director at the Iowa State University Community Design Lab and an assistant professor of architecture at Iowa State University.

About Ms. Courtney Long:

Courtney Long is a Design Fellow with a dual appointment at the Iowa State University Community Design Lab and the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture.