The Agricultural Heritage: A Climate Change Answer for the Metropolis

The relationship between agricultural heritage and climate change is embedded in urban agricultural landscape since centuries. In many European cities, ingenious water management systems have been created to cultivate land and live in the cities: agricultural land provided food for people, for animals (cows and horses for the citizen’s transfers) and depurated dirty waters. Agricultural heritage consists of tangible and intangible components and the historical and contemporary values that are attributed to them. The historical agricultural techniques can help to solve contemporary problems of climate change, flooding and depuration together with the recovery of landscape identity and memory values: the contemporary metropolis could be built integrating agriculture in the daily life in a mutual benefit. We will first explain the historical connection between countryside and the city that shaped agricultural landscapes; then, we will move to clarify the citizen’s relationship to the present agricultural tangible and intangible heritage; finally, we will demonstrate how agricultural heritage can provide suggestions for the contemporary city climate problems. The city of Milan will supply suitable examples.