Agricultural capital,
The encounter between city and country is not a new issue. In 1873, the writer Edmond About already said about the transformation of lifestyles in his time: "You introduce the countryside into the dwellings of the city, and you urbanize the surroundings, the habits, the very labour of the country man. "Even before the Industrial Revolution, Paris and most of the large European cities had developed where there was fertile land and organized agriculture. Thus, if we are accustomed to opposing them, city and countryside are far from being the homogeneous and perfectly partitioned territories that the collective imagination, nourished by fine arts and literature, readily imposes on us. This book and the fascinating exhibition it accompanies are intended to help us discover these ancient, multiple and varied interactions, while inviting us to reinvent the age-old pact that unites them. Today, urbanization is an undeniable phenomenon that affects the entire world. It is also a reality that is experienced at the local level, reinforced by the advent of metropolises and by the migration crisis, which is having its first effects at the gates of cities. At the same time, our planet is facing a major ecological and food challenge. Finally becoming aware that the Earth's resources are limited and that climate change poses a great danger to our future, we are questioning our ways of producing and consuming. We have a civic and political responsibility to do everything we can to bequeath to future generations a world that is respectful of life and its environment. In this changing world, the opposition between city(s) and countryside(s) no longer seems appropriate, as it leads to imbalances between territories. We need to decompartmentalize spaces, make borders more porous and increase exchanges between urban and rural areas. The preservation of agricultural land, especially on the outskirts of cities, and an understanding of the issues at stake in agriculture are essential for the future of the planet and its inhabitants. Beyond this, we must rethink the Paris metropolis as a whole in order to make it a more intelligent space: a space where biodiversity can flourish, where urban and rural areas enrich each other through new commercial and non-commercial exchanges. Short circuits, the production of renewable energies, the development of agro-materials, bio-waste or arboriculture are huge sources of employment, bridges between territories and ways to fight against the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Often ahead of political decisions, many alternative solutions are emerging among farmers and civil society. They aim to restore balance, meaning and roots - diversification of production, product processing, reduction of phytosanitary treatments, Amap, urban agriculture, shared gardens in cities... Our responsibility is to encourage these initiatives and facilitate their large-scale implementation, in order to return to sustainable food, promote proximity, diversity and practices that respect the environment and the health of consumers and producers. This is what we have done in Paris by committing ourselves, at the beginning of 2017, to urban agriculture that creates new links between urban and rural areas, through the deployment of vegetalisation, the "Les Parisculteurs" call for projects, the "Cultiver en ville" programme and the Sustainable Food Plan, which makes our community the leading public purchaser of organic food in France. Citizen participation is at the heart of these projects, and essential to their success. Consolidating and rethinking our agricultural system, reinventing exchanges, transforming our cities and our lives: all these challenges cannot be met without the help of those who bring our territories to life. This event succeeds in immersing us in our roots while revealing new possibilities. Tracing a little-known part of our history that continues and renews itself today, it draws the future'.Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris
Utopias - Radical Visions (1930-2016)


Today, nature in crisis
Women are under-represented in proportion to their investment in our resensitization to life, and I regret that I was unable to find the right words to convince them to show their place. The other pitfall comes from the fact that almost all of these proposals come up against the law. They are often tolerated by the public authorities because they are obviously socially beneficial, but they only exist because of the conviction of their authors. A long process of political negotiation, in the noble sense of the term, remains to be carried out to establish these non-structural areas likely to bring about tomorrow's solutions. To this end, actors, citizens, decision-makers... and artists must be brought to the table. »Sylvain Gouraud
Tomorrow's agricultural planning
Recovering soils

Connecting for better nutrition

Reinventing farms

Cultivating nature
Tomorrow, change the rule
- In the face of blind urbanization, correlate land value and agronomic value of soils.
- 2- Linking practice and research, mobilizing technical means and promoting the knowledge necessary for the creation of metropolitan agricultural sectors and thus compensating for the ancestral drudgery of work and the lack of love for the profession.
- 3- To put an end collectively and definitively to the modern heritage that dissociates Nature conceived as a place of enjoyment and freedom and Agriculture conceived as a laborious space dedicated to production alone.
- 4- Convincing the city's decision-makers to integrate the long agricultural seasons so that an Urban-Agricultural policy can finally be implemented.
- 5- Undertake an agrarian and urban reform capable of leading to territorial de-zoning in order to frame agricultural housing in cultivated areas and all forms of cultivation in cities. The common regional capital of tomorrow will be largely agricultural. «