The Agroecological Niche: Towards a Cultivated LandscapeThibault Marghem, Caleb Mitchell, and Michaela Prunotto

Given today’s global challenges of externalised extraction, uneven development, and ever more severe ecological disequilibrium, the role of urban agriculture must be reimagined not as nostalgic myth or techno-fix, but as a critical site to contest the ecological interdependencies sustaining urban life. Taking Zurich’s Wollishofen neighborhood as a case study, this project proposes resident-led urban agriculture as a means to generate localised knowledge and resilience. Drawing from existing resident-led, ecologically-minded community gardening practices of Land in Sicht and Garten am Grenzsteig we envisage the stealthy unfurling of a new landscape: The Agroecological Niche.

This category emerges from a set of site-specific social forces, especially grassroots actors engaged in agroecological placemaking. By way of propagation, an Agroecological Niche Network may subsequently grow, connecting fragmented green spaces through socially and ecologically productive uses. The Network is unusual given its principally agricultural land use, managed bottom-up by members of the local community. This approach reframes landscape not as decorative scenery, but as living infrastructure, capable of adaptation, food production, inclusion and transformation. Specifically, we propose that the new Schipferhof Farm leaseholder play a central role in expanding Zurich’s ecological network by leveraging Switzerland’s Ecological Compensation Area system to steward dispersed green spaces.