The starting point of the Master Thesis Atelier trajectory on public agricultural land as a policy instrument was that the current way of urbanisation, in Ghent and elsewhere, excludes sustainable food production and is systematically moved elsewhere. In this perspective, a sustainable urban food system presupposes a reorganisation of the city. This point of view is the reason to question the city from the perspective of sustainable agriculture.
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forms of urban development that make food production impossible, because fertile soil is systematically destroyed or withdrawn from agriculture, because soon there will simply be no farmers left in the urban fringe, because agricultural activity is cut off from the landscape and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 becomes trapped in isolated and fragmented plots, because urban dwellers follow a diet that hardly corresponds to what is produced locally, etc.?
The central goal of this Master Thesis Atelier was to explore possibilities to develop policy with public agricultural land on the basis of historical and contemporary cases. By ‘policy’ we mean the policy-based use of the (potential) use value of public agricultural land. We delved into the historical and current use and management of these agricultural lands, mapped the long-term history of the lands, studied the positioning of various actors in the social debate about the user value of public agricultural lands, and finally focused on exploratory research to explore and describe a potential, different way of dealing with public farmland. The outputs were developed into several master theses.
Organisers: dr. Esther Beeckaert en dr. Hans Vandermaelen
