The edible landscape: rethinking urban-rural divides in the age of climate change

Source abstract

Climate change unsettles the spatial, institutional, and epistemological boundaries that have long separated the urban and rural in planning thought and practice. Floods, droughts, heatwaves, salinity, and food-system disruptions expose the infrastructural interdependence of city and countryside. Yet, food-producing landscapes in climate-vulnerable regions continue to be treated as residual to urban development, rather than as central to climate adaptation and food security. This paper develops the concept of the edible landscape as a theoretical and methodological proposition for reimagining how land, food, water, and ecological life are governed across the urban – rural continuum. Drawing on urban political ecology and planning theory, and grounded in ethnographic and historical research on rice cultivation in Egypt’s Nile Delta, the paper argues that edible landscapes offer a strategy for planning food-water systems as interconnected infrastructures of climate resilience. It reframes everyday farming practices as planning knowledge needed for climate adaptation and food security across the urban – rural continuum.