Re-Inventing the Midslope: Diversifying Cultivation Through Collaborative Farming TechnologiesCatherine Cibeira Lachmann, Eunsol Jo, and Iliade Sakr

The Säuliamt is a hilly region to the south-west on Zurich. Historically, farming was mostly concentrated on cereals, and the slopes were dotted with orchards. Not yet pre-alpine, but also not flat, its rolling hills have changed significantly throughout the last century. While highly valued as a countryside for metropolitan living close to the city centre of Zurich, agriculture is caught between the internal pressures of intensive mechanization and the external encroachment of suburban sprawl. Especially the terrain between 18 and 35 percent slopes seems suspended, and have been relegated to a passive visual backdrop, consumed by residents but decoupled from human labor and ecological intimacy.

This chapter reveals the systematic homogenization of the midslopes, tracing how historic state policies like the Baummord and modern industrial agriculture have flattened a diverse, textured mosaic into a single-use territory.

Despite pervasive homogenisation, there is agricultural resistance on Bonstetten's midslopes that operates by different logics. We visited three farms to find out what else is possible: the Rotenbirben farm involves the village community, while the Wettsteins farm pursues diversified crop production for direct local sale and Stiftung Solvitas Götschihof demonstrates the inclusive and therapeutic potential of agriculture.

The reclamation of the midslope is ultimately an act of social repair, a deliberate rewriting of the contract between an expanding suburban community and the territory.

This section unfolds the transformation of the hillside into a vibrant canvas of collective care, where technology ceases to be an engine of exclusion and instead becomes a quiet liberator. By shifting the physical burdens of the slope to adaptive machinery, we clear a temporal sanctuary for human touch, intergenerational learning, and the patient rhythm of manual cultivation.

In this shared space, scale-appropriate technology, suburban community life, and ecological care completely interlock, transforming the edge of the slope into a permanent sanctuary for collective slowness and regional identity.

This chapter envisions how technology can be used to build a diverse landscape mosaic, following and highlighting the topographical condition of the valley. Linear interventions create ecological continuity and mediate between different land uses and actors. New cultivation patterns diversify production and manage microclimates along the slope's changing section. The project aims to establish an attentive, conversational landscape where context-adapted technology allows to amplify human knowledge, reward patient manual care, and sustain a living framework rooted in collective slowness.

The reinvented midslope landscape is finely woven by the farmer’s patient gaze and the slow, attentive reading of the soil. Here, a vibrant communal mosaic thrives, weaving together the casual walker and the professional hand into a shared, living agrarian heritage. Where efficiency yields to attentiveness, technology stays occasional, serving a rich complexity that only human devotion and deliberate slowness can sustain.