URD1507
Instructor: Joshua Harskamp

This seminar series examines greenbelts as a spatial, political and ecological project. Beginning with the metabolic rift—industrial society’s structural separation of humanity from its ecological support—we will follow the historical and legislative approaches that have enclosed, cultivated and regulated land at the city’s edge. The greenbelt will not be approached as a cure-all, but as a legal structure: a tool to fix urban limits, mediate the impacts of climate breakdown, and buttress the prosperity of the urban core. 

Through critical readings, mapping, precedent studies, reviews of contemporary policy and the emerging discourse of ‘degrowth’, we will seek to situate the agricultural landscapes of the ‘Golden Horseshoe’ as a site of regeneration and extraction, of exploitation and resistance.