The prefigurative power of urban political agroecology: rethinking the urbanisms of agroecological transitions for food system transformation

In recent years, urban contexts and urban-rural linkages have become central for scholars and activists engaged in agrarian questions, agroecological transitions and food system transformation. Grassroots experimentations in urban agroecology and farmers’ engagement with urban policies have marked the rise of a new agenda aiming to bridge urban and agrarian movements. Departing from Holt-Gimenez & Shattuck (2011), this paper argues that the way urban-rural links have been conceptualised is occasionally progressive, and that an agroecology-informed food system transformation needs radical approaches. Acknowledging that processes of urbanisation are dynamic, driven by specific lifestyles, consumption patterns, and value orientations –producing ongoing suburbanisation, land enclosures, farmers displacement and food-knowledge loss – the paper argues that thinking transitions through new rural-urban links is unfit to tackle the evolving nature of these geographies, and reproduces the distinction between consumers and producers, illustrated by Schneider and McMichael (2010) as epistemic and ecological rift. Building on insights from four case-studies across global north and south, the paper reframes agroecological transitions as a paradigmatic change in biopolitical spatial relations, economic values and planning agency –what we call an ‘agroecological urbanism’. The paper articulates a transformation agenda addressing urban nutrients, peri-urban landuse, community food pedagogies and farmers' infrastructure.