More-than-farming Madrid

2021
Team Point of View
A garden can change the life of a person. Farming can change life in the city. Urban agriculture, as a caring practice, can repair ecosystems, strengthening local food supplies and constructing commons. But it must overcome an anthropocentric vision, fostering a symbiotic metabolism that enhances biodiversity. It needs to be more-than-farming. Implementations should be site-specific as well as network-specific. Taking San Blas neighbourhood as an environmental unit, we consider latent resources expanding the activities around farming such as processing, distributing, recycling or cooking. Diverse farm-forms adapt in a "seed-stem" to various sites, members or schedules. Rooted in place, three scenarios emerged: caring neighbour-food, growing local livelihoods and biodiversity front yard.

Jury Point of View
The project proposes strategies coming from the world of agriculture with a clear vocation to plant a new seed in the urban fabric of Madrid. The project understands the scales of the territory, the temporality, the complexity of the urban substrate and the necessary actors to warrant a specific, precise, and metabolic implantation. Thanks to its lightweight and transportable materials, it solves multiple situations with a low budget, offering a reversible condition that turns it into a powerful urban transformation tool. It is worth highlighting its ability to adapt to different contexts through flexible tools, which allow to imagine resilient scenarios.