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Humans have always been dependent on the built environment for survival. Since the beginning of times, human settlements have been mainly consumers: of raw materials, food, livestock…that came from the surrounding natural areas. Therefore, a settlement was not solely the urban settlement itself but the surrounding fields that supported it, existing in a symbiotic relationship where one could not survive without the other. Without this supply, a fortified city could not endure more than a few months. At the same time, urban settlements were also producers: of processed goods and materials as well as places for the safe development of human life and, most might say, of civic laws and democracy. This represented a healthy ecosystem where all parts are interrelated within a whole: landscape, urban settlements, life, art and all other things needed to work in harmony.

The Industrial Revolution introduced a shift in this dynamic where due to the technological developments of the machine age, the demands for natural resources increased drastically alongside the pollution hazards of the growing number of industries, businesses, and people. In the early twentieth century, the Modernist Functionalist City aimed at solving these problems by proposing the separation of functions, division (of labour) and over-exploitation (of resources). In this scenario, cities and ecosystems cease to exist (Rebois, D; Yoorés, C.; 2018).

With this separation, cities have become mainly consumers of goods, while production and extraction of resources are spread out through the world in increasingly distant locations. Cities have become mainly extractive, destructive and alienating. People living in cities mainly dwell and access services and entertainment facilities that, due to recent technological developments, are high consumers of energy and producers of waste. Except for those who work in services and tech businesses and industries, most will have to travel long distances to go to work on production plants, increasing traffic and the dependency on cars, oil and increasing air pollution. Demand for resources keeps increasing, contributing to the destruction of entire ecosystems and extending further and further away from the urban centers.

In this scenario, the last forty years have seen a crescent awareness of the importance of promoting sustainable urban development and the overall need to promote the healthy balance of our ecosystems, but humans' dependency on fossil fuels, the overall exploitation of resources and disposal of waste practices have been difficult to overcome.

In recent years part of the discourse has focused on the idea that we need to reinvent our cities and their relations to people and nature by re-localizing production within or in the surrounding areas of cities to ensure energy saving, alternative clean energy sources, lower CO2 emissions and waste and overall better life quality for inhabitants promoting shorter home-work distances and access to locally grown healthy products. In other terms, cities need to become more self-sufficient. This is called urban production (Schaaj, Jan; 2021).