Community sustainability and agricultural landscape change: insights into the durability and vulnerability of the productivist regime

Abstract

Food is produced in material places: distinct combinations of landform, soil, climate, hydrology and biota. However, agricultural landscapes are more than material, they are also social. Biophysical materials interact with phenomena including communities of place, and the wider economic, political and social context, to produce particular practices and arrangements of food production. The sociologically informed concept of place-making has recently been introduced to sustainability science, with the suggestion that it can assist in identifying practical pathways towards more sustainable landscapes, through offering insight into this variety of relations between the physical and the social. Here, we apply this perspective to a case study of an Australian rural community of place that is grappling with questions surrounding the future of its farm land. We have used “community sustainability” as a conceptual entry point for exploring how landscape development trajectories result from discursive place-frames that draw on different sets of place-making relations. In this case, the relations that reproduce a broadly “productivist” trajectory in landscape change are strong, but under some pressure, most evident in community perceptions of the relative unattractiveness of traditional farming livelihoods to a younger generation. However, place-making relations that might lead in alternative directions are weak. Incremental change towards a more diverse agricultural landscape appears possible if different economic and discursive relations can be drawn on to create a different place-frame that offers an equivalent promise for maintaining community in place.