Agriculture is an essential part of Ethiopia’s economy and culture. A transition from rural to urban must therefore incorporate food production in order to ensure social acceptance and economic viability. In a master thesis, you can study the effect of different urban planning measures on the productivity/feasibility of urban agriculture in Ethiopians future cities. Therefore you will have to take a system-theoretical approach, identifying the food-relevant urban components (such as soil, water, land, mobility, food processing) and create a model that allows to investigate the effect of different parameters on food production. A master thesis in this field could go in different directions, e.g.:

• based on a case study, different scenarios of urban agriculture are generated and tested (using computational analysis)
• a simulation model is developed which allows to better anticipate/integrate food production in the urban planning process
• a comparative study of different urban agriculture projects is done in order to reveal advantages and disadvantages of different approaches

Required Skills: Computational Analysis, System Thinking

Supervisors: Sven Schneider, Philippe Schmidt, Katharina Prost (Research Center Jülich)

Get inspired by related Master Theses:

Luisa Correa de Oliveira (2020) Edible Modernism - Algorithm-based spatial exploration of Urban Agriculture in Brasília

Bastiaan Woudenberg (2019) Ethiopian Open Rural Markets.