Eating is an intimate experience: familiar tastes feel like home to us, while a set table invites us to socialize. Culinary diversity makes us curious and adventurous to try out the unknown while eating everyday food: Food culture spans the gap between the traditional and the exotic. And while we are enjoying the bounty of the soil, we daydream of idyllic cultural landscapes of a bygone era – engraved images of a native landscape.

If we eat differently, does the landscape also change? And if landscape and agriculture changes, do we eat differently?

Our lush land of milk and honey is undergoing a transformation: pudding hills and flying fried chicken is no longer free. Climate change, energy transition, species extinctions and settlement development do not stop at agriculture. Agriculture should no longer produce cheap food in abundance, but a healthy and sustainable diet. This will help to shape diverse landscapes, create habitats and offer social meeting spaces. However the visions for an attractive food landscape are missing – imprisoned between the conservative preservation of yesterday, innovative yet dispersed small projects and the technocratic idea of food production disconnected from landscape (such as indoor farming!).

On this year's Rapperswiler Tag we question our ideas and our will to shape the landscape of agriculture – as an opportunity for an ecological transformation and more sensual aesthetics. A forested Mittelland thanks to agroforestry? Terraced landscapes with special crops from the Andes instead of dairy farming in the Alps? Crop rotation areas, integrated into parks? Functioning multicultural settlement areas with urban gardening projects? Will the last farmer disappear in the coming decades or will we all become part-time farmers?

We listen to people who get their hands dirty in order to implement their ideas for tranformational agriculture. We let ourselves be inspired in planning and designing as well when shopping and cooking.

CVs and Abstracts of the Contributors
Landscape architecture Rapperswiler Tag − YouTube
Press statement Rapperswiler Tag Hochparterre
PDF was kindly provided by Hochparterre
Press statement Rapperswiler Tag dergartenbau
PDF was kindly provided by dergartenbau

an event of
OST Ostschweizer Fachhochschule
BSLA Bund Schweizer Landschaftsarchitekten und Landschaftsarchitektinnen
SIA Schweizerischer Ingenieur- und Architektenverein

Sponsers
ACO AG, Netstal
Bärlocher Steinbruch und Steinhauerei AG, Buch-Staad
Burri public elements AG, Glattbrugg
Creabeton Baustoff AG/Creabeton Matériaux AG
Hauenstein Baumschule, Rafz
Leuthold Gärten AG, Oberrieden
Motorsänger GmbH, Männedorf
TMH Thomas Hagenbucher AG, Zumikon
Tschümperlin AG, Baar
Velopa AG, Spreitenbach