Agriculture is a central subject in the culture of landscape designers in France. First, because landscape schools, and in particular Ecole nationale superieure de paysage de Versailles,depend directly on the Ministry of Agriculture, but also, and especially, because France has been strongly identified with the varied expressions of its cultivated landscapes. Occurring much later than in other industrialized countries, the upheavals linked to the industrialization of agriculture (rural exodus, massive land consolidation, mechanization, simplification of farming systems, and so forth) were even brutal in France, leaving deep scars (more or less repressed) in the collective imagination.With the rise of contemporary environmental concerns, which are increasingly turning the spotlight on the primary sector of the economy, and, in particular on the operating modes and systems of agriculture, the question of agricultural landscapes,their design, and their relationship to metropolitan governance is causing (or should cause) a resurgence in current debates on the meanings and directions of landscape urbanism today.
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