Episode 6 – Why do we need Urban Agriculture?
By Natasha Tennant, on 9 September 2021
In today’s episode, host Natasha Tennant is joined by co-host Marco Zunino, who after ten years of banking experience, eventually decided to study a master’s degree in Sustainable Urban Development at UCL, outside of his studies, he is also a regular volunteer at the Stepney City Farm and a passionate urban farmer.
Today we are lucky enough to be joined by two guests, Billy Styles, and Robert Biel. Billy has an MA in Sustainable Cities and is the lead grower of Stepney City Farm, which is a London-based city farm that develops an urban model in order to make land profitable whilst improving it’s biodiversity, promote future education and innovate through experimental garden farming. Robert has 24 years of teaching experience in the Bartlett’s Development Planning Unit, and specialises in international political economy, system theory, sustainable development and urban agriculture. Robert has recently published an open-source book ‘Sustainable Food Systems’. He holds UCL’s chair in political ecology and sustainable food, and is also a hands-on practitioner of Agroecology which brings together a range of collaborators between UCL’s engineering and anthropology departments.
In this episode, we ask; “Why do we need urban agriculture?”, discussing how communal agriculture could coexist in a dense urban context, the issues we are facing within the food production system, it’s main drivers, how to solve them, and how we can innovate on top of the current technology to create a communal template to achieve global sustainability.
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With special thanks to our guests Billy Styles and Robert Biel, hosts Natasha Tennant and Marco Zunino; music production by Lorenzo Angoli and graphic design by Ziyan Zhao