Sustainability as a topic in landscape architecture addresses a cross section of environmental and social needs. While transportation alternatives, water quality and air quality are common considerations in sustainable urban development metrics, food provisioning seldom is. This research examines one potential variable determined by environmental designers that can play a critical role in supporting a sustainable food system: residential urban agriculture or the potential to produce food within a residential lot considering existing lot size and configuration. This study evaluates the potential for existing residential lots to provide for the caloric needs of residents in four case study communities within the San Francisco Bay Area and defines a new metric for evaluating a community’s relative productive potential.

The popularity of urban agriculture in numerous California cities has begun to escalate; however, Sacramento has been slower to address this growing interest. Sacramento serves as a significant case study in examining the relationship between community and municipal efforts to promote urban agriculture, given its role as an agricultural and political centre for the state. Three veins of inquiry investigate the landscape of urban agricultural practice in Sacramento: first, past and present urban agricultural projects and advocacy within the city are detailed, offering a narrative of urban agriculture’s role within Sacramento’s development. Second, city and state policies that have both promoted and prevented the practice within the city are examined. Finally, the authors investigate the potential for strategies and plans for the future of urban agriculture in Sacramento. The authors conclude that community interest is out-pacing local policies, and city-wide initiatives might improve efforts at increasing opportunities for new projects.

Climate change has the potential to disrupt ecosystem services and further exacerbate the effects of human activities on natural resources. This has significant implications for educational institutions and the populations they serve. As the current crop of landscape architecture students struggles to define its role within the climate crisis and its related social and political underpinnings, a core mission of colleges and universities moving forward should be to provide students with applied knowledge about how climate change affects the landscape. This goes beyond coursework in climate science or policy; for landscape architecture students to be leaders in the response to climate change, they need applied, practical skills. An ever-growing body of the literature focuses on landscape design strategies for climate change adaptation; however, few frameworks integrate these strategies with the hands-on experience students will need to face real-world challenges after graduation. Educational institutions have the potential to utilize their campuses as demonstration sites for applied ecosystem research programs and actively engage students with the design, implementation, politics, and ongoing stewardship of these landscapes. This paper uses a case study methodology to understand how experiential and public-engaged learning pedagogies contribute to student preparedness to address climate change. It examines three cases of engaged learning at the University of California, Davis campus and attributes their impact to intentional connections with research, to the delegation of responsibility; to the openness of spaces for experimentation, and to self-reflection that connects climate with everyday behavior. By promoting experiential learning programs that require students to actively use their heads and their hands to construct and sustainably manage their own campus landscapes, service-learning studios and internships can provide opportunities for students to address the real scenarios of climate crisis and resilience.

#OurChangingClimate incorporates social media tools into a public practice design project that examines climate change as a place-based and everyday experience. Based on the pilot stage of the project, an initial series of workshops with youth in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, we found that we were able to sow seeds for strengthened community resilience by creating a hybrid online–in real life (IRL) space where participants could gain new understandings about the causes and impacts of climate change and network within and outside of their community. Together we begin to envision new opportunities to mitigate against the adverse impacts of climate change and contemporary climate disruptions. Incorporating social media offered opportunities for a focus on open and accessible exchange, the unique perspectives of specific communities, and public circulation of ideas between community members and designers.

Participatory urbanism is on the rise in communities struggling to develop quality public spaces in constrained environments. In light of the growing practice of community-based strategies to shape urban place-making, this paper argues for an increased role of community engagement in urban place-understanding. It presents the work of feminist environmental artists of the 1970s as a precedent for participatory approaches towards infrastructure awareness and environmental stewardship, and discusses opportunities for expanding the impact of their approach through digital media integration. Lastly, the paper concludes with a contemporary case-study as an engaged model for improving urban systems function. The case study presented represents a collaboration between the authors and the City of San Jose to engage pilot communities with a greater understanding of the connections between household practices of waste water management and urban sustainability. Keywords: participatory urbanism, community engagement, environmental art, urban infrastructure, social media, urban sustainability.