Sociology: The Agrarian Question: From Colonialism to Urban Agriculture

Abstract

Under 21st-century extended urbanization, architecture and spatial practices are increasingly intertwined with agrarian concerns. This course delves into the intersections of urbanization, architecture, and the agrarian question. It covers historical aspects like land enclosure, colonialism, and primitive accumulation, as well as contemporary topics such as urban agriculture and green initiatives.

Objective

Through this course, participants will cultivate a critical understanding of the agrarian question, its political economy, and urbanization in agrarian territories. Active engagement with recommended literature is expected, encouraging participants to present, discuss, and debate key concepts in urban and environmental humanities. The seminar aims to: 1. Foster a critical understanding of agrarian concepts, ecology, environmental humanities, and extended urbanization. 2. Enhance participants' skills in reading, presenting, and debating academic texts. 3. Inspire ideas for architectural and urban practices in agrarian territories.

Content

The introductory sessions will provide a world-historical perspective on urbanization and the agrarian question by examining land settlement during colonialism, revolutions and counter-revolutions in the global countryside. Subsequent sessions will delve into food sovereignty, food regimes, urban farming, and the future of food. Land and labor will be explored through themes such as global depesentization, migration, land enclosure, and primitive accumulation. The contemporary intersections of the agrarian question and urbanization will be investigated through global supply chains, carbon forestry, and urbanism in agrarian territories. Each thematic session will include recommended readings, podcasts, or lectures. Participants will present short group presentations based on these materials, followed by moderated discussions. Sessions: 22.02 Urbanisation and the agrarian question in the 21st century What is agrarian question and how is it relevant under 21st century urbanisation. 29.02 Colonial wastelands, settlement, and improvement This session will explore the colonial project of settling wastelands for agriculture in order to turn them productive and revenue generating. It will explore the infrastructures and ecological violence colonial wasteland settlement entailed. 07.03 Nature? This session will explore the production of nature and its deep entanglement with agrarian metabolism and urbanisation. 14.03 Food and the agrarian question: food sovereignty, hunger, and the future of food This session will explore the concept of agroecology which has been proposed as a solution to the intersectional food, climate, and biodiversity crisis. The session will explore and evaluate the diversity of paradigms that have emerged under the umbrella agroecology. 28.03 More-than-human agrarianisms This session will explore the ‘more-than-human’ ecology of agriculture. How soils are made and unmade, how assuming a more-than-human lens can allow us to see and imagine landscapes otherwise. Guest lecture by Luke Harris 11.04 Agrarian Urbanisms This session explores concepts of landscape urbanism that have been applied to the study of agrarian territories as hybrid or in-between, and surveys the long-legacy utopias of agrarian urbanism. 18.04 Land enclosure, fallows, and human-non-human conflict This session surveys how agrarian land has been subjected to intense forms of enclosure historically and under 21st century urbanisation. It further explores how these enclosures often result in human-non-human conflict. 25.04 Feminist agriurbanism This session explores the links between urbanisation and intense depesentisation in the global countryside, and the historic and ongoing suppression of wages of women and migrants workers that has upheld this condition. 02.05 Improvement: Energy, nature, and the climate This session explores historical and ongoing narratives around improvement of agriculture. From translocation and improvement of species to the ongoing enclosure of agrarian land and commons through greening programs and in the name of green-energy transition and climate action. Guest Lecture by Camila Medina Novoa 16.05 Urban and regenerative agriculture This session explores the rise of the urban agriculture paradigm as a sustainable alternative for localising food production and urban metabolism and urban agriculture’s inherent contradictions and limitations. Guest Lecture by Stefan Laxness

Resources