How do we move away from forms of urban development that make food production impossible, because fertile soil is systematically destroyed or withdrawn from agriculture, because soon there will simply be no farmers left in the urban fringe, because agricultural activity is cut off from the landscape and literally locked into isolated and fragmented plots, because city dwellers follow a diet that hardly corresponds to what is produced locally, etc?

While cities doubt whether agriculture belongs in urban policy, a there is a clear reason to work on an urban vision of agriculture just now. The following three drivers shape the trajectory:

Urban food policy and its contradictions

With Gent en Garde, Ghent worked its way into the spotlight. Ghent won several awards with its urban food policy. The policy was elaborated by the Ghent environmental department and formulated specific fields of action to make the urban food system more sustainable. Urban agriculture is supported as part of this food policy. But a real vision of agriculture is lacking. This became clear in recent years following the fierce debate on the sale of publicly owned agricultural land. That sale was mainly to raise money for other urban purposes, and housing policy and food policy were played off against each other.

Beyond nature versus agriculture

Even in urbanised open space, the opposition between agriculture and nature development is acute. The policy on urban open space helps to strengthen the green structure in the agglomeration. While the realisation of that green structure tries to spare agriculture, it reinforces the opposition between wet nature in the stream valleys and agriculture on the dry fields. The policy respects the contours of the reconfirmed agricultural area but does not build a future-oriented framework in which new forms of urban-oriented agriculture could flourish. How can a city help create the conditions in which such agriculture can thrive rather than stand idly by as farmers systematically disappear from the city outskirts?

Urban metabolism and the city as a cultural landscape

Cities are building green-blue networks that tie together objectives around open space services and ecosystem services. These networks pull the natural structure of the region back into the city. This natural structure is at the same time the underpinning of the historical geography of agriculture. More so, parts of that ?natural structure? have their origins in historical cultural landscapes made and maintained by agriculture. Agriculture can be more than a loss leader in the quest for sustainability and biodiversity, but could be the starting point in rethinking the city as a cultural landscape that develops in caring relationship with the ecosystems and metabolic flows of which it is inherently part. How do we extract drinking water in areas where agriculture is also practised? How do city and country work together again in a nutrient cycle that contributes to the reproduction of living and fertile soils? How do we organise the necessary solidarity between the city and the farmers who must provide the necessary soil care?