Roots in the City: The Rise of Brazil’s Regenerative Agrihoods

As world leaders gathered at COP 30 in Belém to tackle climate change, one critical terrain remains overlooked: cities. More than 86 percent of Brazilians now live in urban areas. Cities are major drivers of climate change and they are also where climate impacts are most acutely felt.  As Brazilian metropolises expand, they increasingly push into degraded peri-urban zones, the transitional zones between city and rural areas that once buffered ecosystems, supported agriculture, and made city life more sustainable.  

The São Paolo Metropolitan area, home to 22 million people, expands into surrounding farmland and forests in search for more space to grow. Photo: NASA

Amid this expansion, a revolution in urban design is taking root. Regenerative agrihoods are reimagining how cities grow, turning expansion into regeneration, and bringing food production closer to metropolises. Urban planner Marcia Mikai is showing that through innovative design, the same forces driving unsustainable sprawl can power ecosystem restoration, climate resilience, and community well-being.

From Real Estate to Regeneration

Agrihoods are residential communities designed around food production and ecological restoration. Rather than separating residential areas from forests and farmland, they weave communities, ecosystems, and sustainable food production together.

With her colleagues at Pentagrama Projetos em Sustentabilidade e Regeneração, Marcia Mikai has spent over a decade developing this model, bridging agroforestry science and urban development to make ecological restoration central to city growth.

Her model targets medium-sized pastures and farmland on the outskirts of sprawling cities like São Paulo, Brasília, and Curitiba. Often abandoned or degraded by unsustainable practices, these areas become ideal spots agrihoods that combine agroforestry and biodiversity corridors with mixed-use neighborhoods, multigenerational housing, and space for environmental education and hospitality.  

The Atlantic Rainforest, which surrounds Brazil’s major metropolitan areas, is one of the world’s most threatened biodiversity hotspots, with less than 10% of the original forest extent standing today. Photo: Rainforest Trust

A Cerrado landscape on the outskirts of Brasilia, and an ideal spot for a regenerative agrihood. Photo: Marcia Mikai 

Within these agrihoods, regenerative food forests are woven into the urban fabric, from edible landscaping in parks to large-scale agroforestry plots. Pentagrama’s designs employ syntropic agroforestry, a technique that imitates natural forest succession by layering crops and trees, so each species supports the others. Rather than monocultures, these multi-strata forests blend fruit trees, vegetables, timber species, and native plants into productive mosaics that regenerate soil, restore microclimates, and bring ecosystems back into neighborhoods, while providing nutritional and economic benefits to residents.  

Symbiosis between ecosystems and cities

Marcia sees agrihoods as a response to two crises: monocultural farming, and monotonous urban design. Brazil’s peri-urban belt around major cities faces erosion, deforestation, and water stress. This is especially true for small-medium size farms, where 25% of Brazil’s degradation takes place, as farms are abandoned and pastures overgrazed.

Conventional urban expansion replaces forests and wetlands with concrete, worsening, flooding, heat islands, and water scarcity, especially in Cerrado (savanna) regions that once recharged aquifers. Fragmented and degraded ecosystems lose their ability to regulate temperature, store carbon, and support biodiversity, while sprawling infrastructure drives emissions and costs. At the same time, cities have become detached from food and nature. The growing distance between urban life and farmland fuels deforestation, emissions, and a loss of ecological awareness.

By embedding agroforestry into city design, regenerative agrihoods restore this balance. Degraded semi-urban spaces are replanted with native and edible species that provide ecosystem services, specifically cooling cities, reducing flood risk by slowing surface runoff, and enhancing groundwater recharge to replenish aquifers. Restored ecosystems act as refuges and buffer zones for endangered species that are being pushed out of the cities. Shared green spaces reconnect residents with their food and community. Beyond reducing emissions, these biodiverse systems actively sequester carbon, turning urban growth into climate action.  

Left: one agrihood design, integrating restoration into the landscape (Image: Andrew Georgiadis, Steven Fett, Jose Venegas and Marcia Mikai)

Right: A young syntropic agroforestry system in a residential area implemented by Marcia’s partners (Image: AgroSintropia) 

Leading a New Urban Restoration Movement

For Marcia, restoration also means rebuilding the bond between people and nature. Inspired by regenerative communities in Brazil, India, Mexico, and the U.S., she began shaping the concept of regenerative agrihoods two decades ago to achieve her mission. Her work focuses on shifting mindsets across a broad network of partners: municipalities, farmers, ecologists, landowners, planners, developers, and impact investors.

This shift is not easy. Marcia work involves risk-averse institutions and landowners.  Convincing them to invest in restoration requires fluency in local ecology, economics, and urban planning. Over the past decade, she has worked on a broad range of projects, from agrarian condominiums and retirement homes to agroforestry systems and real estate developments. Her work and advocacy aim to prove that regeneration can be both ecologically beneficial, and profitable for communities.

Marcia’s next step is large-scale implementation. Having refined the business case and forged strong partnerships, she is moving beyond influencing other projects to designing   agrihoods where restoration is at the center of her project.  Through UNEP’s BioCidades Empreendedoras program, which supported urban restoration ventures in Brazil, she has strengthened her financial model and expanded collaboration opportunities with entrepreneurs working in urban restoration. 

Marcia presenting Regenerative Agrihoods at the BioCidades Empreendedoras project

“The program was extremely helpful in deepening our value proposition and helping us understand the scale of our challenge. BioCidades helped us communicate the innovation behind our approach to our partners.”

Marcia’s vision is to transform the expanding edges of Brazil’s cities into systems where people and nature thrive together.  She envisions a future where cities are surrounded by productive and regenerative green belts that feed their residents and restore ecosystems. As she moves from plans to pilots, her goal is not just to build neighborhoods but to seed a movement, one that makes restoration part of urban development all over the world.