Displaying Urban Agriculture: From Garden City to Carrot City Joe Nasr and June Komisar This chapter reflects on the process of the re-emergence of food and agriculture as an area of urban concern and intervention by planners, designers and others. It seeks to articulate the nature of and approaches to food issues in planning through an examination of public discourse, focusing on exhibitions as a public manifestation of this discourse and as a communication medium with a long tradition in planning history. It starts with a brief consideration of the roots of planning pioneers’ interest in urban food production and of the context for the emergence, disappearance, and resurgence of this interest. This leads to an analysis of recent exhibits and related public events which have explicitly sought to highlight the relationships between food and cities, past and present. We use the lessons from our involvement as co-curators with Mark Gorgolewski in a recent exhibition called Carrot City: Designing for Urban Agriculture as a case study. Launched initially in Toronto, Canada, this exhibit has travelled to numerous cities on three continents, generating a website and a book, among other media. At the heart of this chapter, we will recount and reflect on the immediate and larger lessons learnt from the experience of staging the exhibition in terms of content and communication, the evolution of the exhibit itself, and its impacts. Urban food production in planning discourse and practice Food and agriculture have emerged in recent years as major concerns globally, becoming areas of intervention for urban and regional planners as well as other professionals working with the built environment. This phenomenon appears to be new, but the food system has had a long history in planning, including its communication, representation and promotion. Those who put forth early idealised visions of societies and human settlements (from American religious communitarianism to planned industrial settlements to tracts like Peter Kropotkin’s call for local self-reliance) generally held a special place for the provisioning of food by inhabitants. Food systems (and especially food production activities) were a major component of planning discourse in the early years of the profession and were included in the writings of pioneer