Principles of designing the urban agriculture landscape based on Persian garden studies

The progressive approach to increasing the per capita green space in Iranian cities has not coincided with the socio-ecological approach. One of the main strategies to promoting the socio-ecological sustainability of urban landscape is urban agriculture, food forestry, and edible landscaping. But, the current desires in embedding the agricultural landscape into the urban spaces has been underestimated or ignored in Iran. Despite the significant role of urban agriculture and food forestry as a valuable strategy to address multiple sustainability challenges, and its contribution to health, and that it can be used to promote sustainable urban development through providing ecosystem services, the Iranian cities’ landscape and public spaces have not yet been studied and analyzed for the accommodation of the urban agriculture landscape. While the use of food trees in green public areas appears to be a financially valuable alternative for both a municipality and its local inhabitants, the question that would arise is how the edible and inedible plants can be integrated, what is the toolkit for landscape architects of the principles of urban public edible landscaping, especially in the cases such as Iran, where the particular formula and urban legacy has not yet been disseminated. In this paper, the author will try to demonstrate the significance of Persian gardens in envisioning the urban agriculture landscape in Iran. In fact, the simultaneous use of gardens as places for relaxation, administration, and agriculture, makes them an appropriate model to determine the specific codes and rules of the integration the edible plants into the contemporary landscapes. The methodology of this research is analytical, and the data has been gathered in library studies, interviews, as well as field studies in several Persian gardens. The field studies were conducted in summers 2014 and 2015 including gardens’ surveys, interviews with managers, consultants, and also gardeners. The results of this study demonstrate that there is a distinct differentiation between the viewer’s accessibility to the agricultural fields and the connection to the visually pleasing scenes. Thus, the central axis offers the visual-spatial continuity to the decorative greenery. But the physical accessibility to the edible plants is provided through the secondary and marginal paths. Furthermore, there are some distinct principles of integration the agriculture and recreation in Persian gardens, which are principle of separation the productive space from the recreational zones; principle of visual-aesthetic composition the agriculture with ornamental plants; principle of continuity the physical separation and visual integration in length and width of the built environment; and principle of access management which takes into consideration the access policies to the agricultural fields and fruits.

کلیدواژه ها:

Urban agriculture ، Persian garden ، urban landscape ، integration ، principles