Healing and Growing Birmingham city

2020

My project aims to mitigate climate change and the urban life impact on peoples’ lives and on the environment by proposing an urban agriculture design strategy to Birmingham in order to create a more sustainable city. By using Birmingham’s rivers and canals’ potential and proximity to post-industrial built-up areas, hospitals, schools and existing green open spaces in the city I proposed a strategy to connect them together and create a continuous productive urban landscape, integrating communities together and let nature grow its own food. The Birmingham city hospital site acts as the city’s urban farming centre to produce fresh organic food, train new urban farmers, reduce isolation. It includes therapeutic gardens and organised and managed urban farming in the city, introducing food growing for all generations, encouraging physical activity, increasing biodiversity, and bringing communities together to produce and enjoy food.

My name is Zagros Nouri and I have always had a passion for art, design, and mountaineering. My love for outdoor spaces took root while I was growing up in a mountainous rural area in Urmia, Iran, and was involved in working in my family farms (a traditional national business). I graduated from the Urmia University with a master’s degree in Horticultural Science in 2012.
I worked as a horticulturist in a number of landscape design companies in Iran and owned my own landscape design company in late 2013. I have brought my knowledge of horticulture, design, and art to deliver elegantly styled landscapes in the UK. I am interested in such topics as Sustainability, Biophilic Design, and Urban agriculture.

The Parkside Building
5 Cardigan Street
Birmingham B4 7BD UK
+44 (0)121 331 5000