Urban agriculture involves many actors, consists of many growing techniques producing a great variety of products, taking place in all kinds of places, using many organizational arrangements, serving multiple functions. How does one make sense of this overwhelming array, how can it be classified into understandable types, how do these typologies of urban agriculture intersect typologies of urban form? Dr. Joe Nasr will explore these questions, using a quarter century of involvement in the urban agriculture movement globally. He will draw on his personal experiences, from his early writing on the subject in the early 1990s to his co-leading the Carrot City initiative for the past decade.

Joe Nasr is an independent scholar, lecturer and consultant based in Toronto who has been exploring urban agriculture and food security issues for over a quarter century.  He holds a 1997 doctorate in urban and regional planning from the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on postwar response and reconstruction in Europe.  As associate of the Ryerson Centre for Studies in Food Security, he co-curated the traveling exhibit, book and website Carrot City: Designing for Urban Agriculture (www.carrotcity.org), co-organized the growTO speakers’ series, helped initiate Ryerson Urban Farm, and coordinated the programming for the 2012 Urban Agriculture Summit in Toronto.  Joe is co-founder of Toronto Urban Growers (www.torontourbangrowers.org) and member of the Toronto Food Policy Council (www.tfpc.to).  He is co-author or co-editor of four books and dozens of articles, including the seminal book Urban Agriculture (www.jacsmit.com/book.html); he is also co-editor of an Urban Agriculture Book Series (www.springer.com/series/11815).  Joe teaches regularly at Ryerson’s Chang School courses on urban agriculture and food security; he has taught at a number of universities and held several fellowships in multiple countries over the years.

This event is organized by Dr. Carolin Mees and is taking place in context with her Intro to Food Design class. 

This event will be recorded and shared afterwards.