Meet the Architect
Read about the food activist and planning Architect who designed the buildings at Swedish Country Living.
Meet Jonathan Naraine!
The Architect
Jonathan Naraine is an architect and food system designer who now works as a planning architect at Skara Municipality. He has designed everything from urban farms in Gothenburg to unique close to nature experiences and circular solutions at Swedish Country Living in the rural Dalsland region, which have won awards and accolades for sustainability. He is the architect behind the three unique hermitage cabins in the middle of beautiful the natural grazing landscape by the canal, the greenhouse and circular water treatment system, and a gathering space with an outdoor kitchen - all designed using reused windows, doors, bricks and ecological building materials from the region.
Regenerative design
From pop-up parks to regenerative agriculture and designing the sustainable Hermitage cabins.
Here seen on the roof of the Slate house Hermitage.
Background
Jonathan Naraine co-founded The Foodprint Lab architects - where they designed pop-up parks, rooftop gardens, urban farming, and other edible landscapes on behalf of, among others, Gothenburg city and major real estate companies such as NCC, Wallenstam and others. He is a co-founder of the matchmaking platform for farming and land sharing Grow-Here.com. He also co-organized Sweden's first hackathon for food and rural development, Vischan 2017.
He has been active as a food activist for 15 years, organizing urban farming safaris, food rescue parties, and re-connecting people with food and its origins. In recent years, he has specialized in spacial planning at the municipal and regional levels to co-create more local regenerative and resilient communities and food systems. In his master’s thesis in the spring of 2022 at Chalmers University of Technology, he wrote about ”Carbon positive food regions" with practical planning strategies for how a municipality or region can become self-sufficient in food and sequester more carbon than it emits through regenerative agriculture.