Reflective Summary: My Exploration of Integrating Agriculture into Urban Design

As a student from a horticulture and agriculture engineering background, this semester’s blog writing experience gave me a very new understanding of urban design. Before, I mostly worked with plants, greenhouses, and production systems. But through the blog tasks and design tasks such as the Newburn Area project, the Sensory Garden, and the topic of Urban Agriculture, I gradually realized that urban design is not only about physical space, but also about how people live, feel, and connect with each other in the city.

At first, I was not very confident because I didn’t have much professional knowledge about urban planning. Writing blogs required me to read academic articles, look at global examples, and think critically about different urban issues. Sometimes I felt confused, especially when I couldn’t find the right way to organize my ideas or when I had too much information to deal with. But slowly, I learned how to choose useful sources, and how to break big problems into smaller points to think more clearly.

One important learning moment was during the Newburn Area project. It helped me understand how planning is about more than just building things—it’s also about movement, public space, and social needs. Our site was a former industrial area, and we had to imagine how to bring life back to it. This made me start thinking about how space can connect different groups of people, not just physically but also socially.

Later, when I worked on the Urban Agriculture blog, I felt more connected to the topic because it related to my past studies. I was happy to find that my knowledge of farming and plants could still be useful in the urban context. The case studies like Brooklyn Grange showed me how cities can also grow food, and how these spaces can become green, productive, and social at the same time. It made me think more about how future cities in China could also include food-growing areas, especially in new housing communities.

The Sensory Garden blog gave me a new experience. It made me think not just about space as a physical thing, but also as something people experience with their senses. I learned how design can help people feel calm, safe, or connected, especially for children, older people, or people with special needs. It made me reflect on the emotional part of design, and how details like smell, sound, and texture can make a place more inclusive and friendly.

Even though I faced some challenges, I feel that I have grown a lot in this process. I improved my ability to write, to think in a logical way, and to explain complex ideas more clearly. I also started to see how my background in horticulture can be useful in urban design, especially in topics like sustainability, green infrastructure, and community wellbeing.

In the future, I hope I can improve my academic reading and writing skills more, so I can express my ideas better. I also want to keep learning how to combine my plant knowledge with spatial thinking, and maybe one day, I can design green and caring urban environments that connect nature and people.

To sum up, this semester’s blog projects were challenging but very meaningful to me. They helped me open my eyes to the world of urban design and gave me new ideas for my future career. I am thankful for this opportunity and excited to continue exploring this path.