The Urban Farm Expansion: Design by the community for the community
Honor Award
Student Collaboration
Eugene, Oregon, United States
Clark Frauenglass, Student ASLA;
Aidan Teppema, Student ASLA;
Michael Mitchell, Student ASLA;
Rachel Benbrook, Student ASLA;
Tayler Uesato, Student ASLA;
Hattie Sterns;
Ben Michel;
Anika Hall;
Ashley Carr;
Comet Rajvanshi;
Faculty Advisors:
Ignacio López Buson, ASLA;
Mary Polites;
University of Oregon
Wonderful project that worked through tense community issues to find a solution. Amazing summary of collaboration process, community vision, and synthesis of the main design elements. Excellent example of cross disciplinary and multi-leveled (undergraduate and graduate) student work for a very significant project. Great community focus here and collaboration between design disciplines. The jury appreciate how there is positive impact though the visioning process as well as through the completed design.
- 2025 Awards Jury
Project Credits
Harper Keeler
Director of the UO Urban Farm, Senior Instructor in Landscape Architecture
Ellee Stapleton
Visiting Professor in Landscape Architecture
Blake Schouten
Studio Assistant for the Urban Farm Riverside studio, BLA, ASLA
Katherine Harrison
Studio Assistant for the Urban Farm Riverside studio, MLA, ASLA
Project Statement
The Urban Farm is a place and a program. It began in 1976 as a student-led initiative to grow food on unused campus land, evolving into a beloved model for alternative urban land use where people grow food, take care of the land, and build community. In 2023, affected by the construction of a new research facility, the UF lost 40% of its productive land, leading to a community uproar, uniting students, faculty, and allies beyond the university boundary, and resulting in the acquisition of a new site for its expansion. This project describes the innovative co-design process between students and local stakeholders to envision a master plan for the new site and its success in rekindling a necessary dialogue for the future of the UF program.
Project Narrative
The University of Oregon Urban Farm (UF) represents a local response to contemporary global challenges. As cities expand and the climate changes, the need for innovative and sustainable food production in urban areas is critical. In 2020, the UO Food Security Task Force reported "that 36% of UO students experience food insecurity at some point during their time on campus." To meet this and other critical needs, the Urban Farm provides "a model for alternative urban land use where people grow food, take care of the land, and build community." This approach has engaged students for five decades, and "it is estimated that the program produces and distributes approximately 20,000 pounds of food to UO students per year" (University of Oregon, 2022). As part of the Department of Landscape Architecture, the UF offers hands-on courses to more than 300 students annually from 95 different disciplines across the University. The UF project began in 1975 as a student-led initiative to grow food on unused campus land. Spearheaded by landscape architecture professor Richard Britz, who outlined his theories in the publication "The Edible City Resource Manual" (Britz, 1981), the initiative continued to this day thanks to the efforts of Ann Bettman and Harper Keeler, current Urban Farm director since 2007. Since 2022, affected by the construction of the Knight Campus Phase 2, the UF has lost 40% of its productive land. This impact can be considered a social milestone in the recent campus history. The organized student response was an inspiration for the entire community, uniting and reconnecting staff, faculty, and students across departments and drawing attention beyond the University boundary. Although these actions did not change the course of the building construction, they effectively led to the acquisition of a new 1.9-acre site along the Willamette River and funds to expand the program. Unfortunately, it also generated a climate of distrust between the academic body and the administration that wasn't ideal for the development of the future location. The complexity of the project and its contentious nature, with the UO community still mourning the recent loss, put the initiative on hold until two architecture and landscape professors led a collaborative studio to create a visioning master plan for the new site in the summer of 2024. The Urban Farm Riverside studio was designed as a platform for students, faculty, local stakeholders, and administration to co-design the future of the UF while honoring the efforts of all those who made the program grow and last for five decades. Through lectures, immersive workshops, field trips, research methods, student-led engagement sessions, and multimedia presentations, the studio cohort developed a proposal that successfully brought everybody together. This project is a reminder of the principles Christopher Alexander brought to the UO Campus Plan with 'The Oregon Experiment' in 1975. It is also proof that the UO community can still revive those principles despite the increasing centralized administrative control that seems to drive campus planning nowadays, and that Alexander tried to revert through his theories. In the case of the Urban Farm expansion, students demonstrated that users can still be responsible for the future of the physical environment where they live and work, and that transparent and ambitious co-design methodologies such as the one presented here are essential to achieve such goals.