Peri-urban Farmland Research Articles

Reading Ecosystem Services at the Local Scale through a Territorial Approach: the Case of Peri-Urban Agriculture in the Thau Lagoon, Southern France

In recent years, the ecosystem services (ES) concept has become a major paradigm for natural resource management. While policy-makers demand hard monetary evidence that nature conservation would be worth investing in, ongoing attempts are being made to formalize the concept as a scientifically robust one size fits all analytical framework. These attempts have highlighted several major limitations of the ES concept. First, to date, the concept has paid little attention to the role of humans in the production of ES. Second, the ongoing formalization of the ES concept is turning it into a technology of globalization, thereby increasingly ignoring the socio-cultural context and history within which ecosystems emerge. Third, economic valuation has been shown to limit local stakeholders in expressing their daily and immediate ways of interacting with their environment over and beyond extrinsic motivation provided by financial gains. We address these three limitations by analyzing a social evaluation of the roles of peri-urban farmland from a territorial perspective. Our case study is the Thau lagoon in southern France. We conducted in-depth interviews with a broad range of stakeholders and ran two participatory workshops. Using a territorial meta-model that distinguishes three levels-physical, logical, and existential-stakeholder data were analyzed to unravel the interplay of territorial elements at these three levels that gives rise to ES in two broad categories: food production and aesthetic landscape. The coupling of ES and territory concepts opens up several novel analytical perspectives. It allows partitioning of ES in a manner that re-contextualizes them and gives insight about both their physical constituents and their meaning at the territorial level. Additional research should incorporate the dynamics of service demand and supply, and further investigate options for implementation.

Agriculture in urban and peri-urban areas in the United States: Highlights from the Census of Agriculture

AbstractUrban agriculture, a current trend in many US cities, is purported to bring enhanced food security, reduction of food waste, community building, open green space in cities and higher property values. However, the literature lacks an understanding of whether urban farming has extended beyond a compelling concept into the practice of farming in the city and peri-urban areas. The exact definition of an urban farm is challenging, since many urban farms have a primary mission of supporting social goals rather than providing food. Use of the USDA definition of farm omits many self-identified urban farms, but the most consistent measure of agriculture is the Census of Agriculture. Using census data, this paper finds that urban farms are smaller than the typical farm, and while the amount of urban and peri-urban farmland declined between 2002 and 2007, the total number of farms increased. Growth in farmland is positively related to land values, suggesting that increases in urban farmland are more likely to take place in population dense, land scarce areas. Spatial analysis of urban and peri-urban farms in the Northeast finds fewer clusters of farms in areas with high land costs. In the most populous Northeastern cities, the farms are more likely to be located in the peri-urban area than in the urban core. Urban farms in the Northeast were more likely to produce vegetables, eggs and goats. Significant levels of vegetable farm clusters were detected surrounding Providence, Boston and Hartford Metropolitan Statistical Areas, which are regions that had no significant level of clustering of total farms. Future analysis, incorporating data from the 2012 census, should provide insight into whether local policy changes have resulted in growth in urban farms and farmland.

Peri-urban farmland conservation and development of alternative food networks: Insights from a case-study area in metropolitan Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain)

There has been a growing literature on alternative food networks (AFNs); structures that reconfigure the systems of production, distribution and consumption of food. Part of this literature emphasises the local scale and the idea of proximity. In a world that is increasingly urban, AFNs at a local scale can be more easily developed by linking peri-urban farmlands and cities. However, agriculture in the rural–urban fringe struggles to survive in the face of urban pressures and sprawl; a process which undermines viable agricultural production in the city's countryside. A widely used strategy to address these pressures has been farmland protection, undertaken in different ways depending on the legal framework of particular countries. This paper considers farmland conservation and AFNs development issues through a case-study of the Baix Llobregat Agricultural Park (BLAP) in metropolitan Barcelona. It concludes that AFNs in peri-urban areas are only possible if farmland preservation is guaranteed, and that the former does not come as a direct consequence of the latter. The specific conditions in which both can occur will be of interest for scholars as well as policy-makers and planners.

How Urban Agriculture is Reshaping Peri-Urban Beijing?

In Beijing, urban agriculture (UA) experienced a corkscrew development with its role changing in decades: It has evolved from the purely production mode to multi-functional urban agriculture, fulfilling both social and ecological demands. At present, the practice of UA as well as the number of rural to urban migrants is growing rapidly in peri-urban Beijing. Through Multi-stakeholder Process for Action planning and Policy Design (MPAP) methodology and four in-depth case studies, we can see that UA activities are playing very important roles in reshaping peri-urban Beijing. Socially, UA induces the emergence of new migrant communities. While migrants rebuild their social network, they are changed by the city as well, which has also changed the local community. The new comers are on their way to creating a new balance. Physically, urban and peri-urban farmland limits urban sprawl, supplies agricultural products for everyday life, and reserves urban green spaces for recreation and leisure for citizens in Beijing, which has changed the landscape and land use and land cover (LUCC) pattern greatly. Under Beijing's land policy, the concentric configuration spatial allocation through multi-functional UA is formed, which at the same time due to migrants' UA activities are creating harmful and low efficient land use pattern which should be of concern.

Economic appraisal of profitability and sustainability of peri-urban agriculture in Bangkok

Promoters of urban and peri-urban agriculture generally stress its positive role in terms of food security, income, employment and improvement of the urban environment. Unfortunately, competition with agricultural and non-agricultural uses of peri-urban farm land often translates into intensive farming systems that are detrimental to the environment. Based on two original surveys of peri-urban farms in the area of Bangkok, this paper ranks four cropping systems (fish, shrimp, rice, and fruits) according to their economic profitability. A second step of the analysis aims at taking into account the cost of water into the analysis, so as to assess whether the hierarchy formerly established is modified. Although all environmental costs are not introduced and environmental benefits are ignored, this work paves the way for further research in the area of taking into account the environmental impact of farming activities.

Urban influences on periurban farmland prices

In periurban belts, landowners expect agricultural parcels to be converted to urban use and so farmland prices fall with distance from cities, owing to premiums reflecting potential capital gains from such future development. This is shown, first, by analysing residential and agricultural land prices via a theoretical microeconomic residential location model and, second, by an econometric model based on individual transactions with random spatial effects. Results show that farmland prices fall sharply close to the city and then gently further aways premiums for development are decomposed and allocated to several factors and the expected time of urban conversion are evaluated. Copyright 2003, Oxford University Press.

SQUATTING, APARTHEID AND URBANISATION ON THE SOUTHERN WITWATERSRAND1

IN THE 1 970s, homelessness amongst Africans on the Witwatersrand took the form of illegal shacks built in the backyards of formal houses within existing African townships. This pattern began to change in the 1980s as freestanding squatter settlements sprung up throughout the Witwatersrand.2 One area on the Witwatersrand which played host to free-standing squatter settlements was the peri-urban farmland south of Johannesburg (Fig.1). Although there is evidence of illegal African tenure on farms south of Johannesburg from as early as the 1960s, the numbers of families involved was small. By the early 1980s, however, the numbers of squatters had increased to the point where the Orange Vaal Development Board (OVDB) took steps to evict illegal tenants.3 Squatters on a farm later to become popularly known as 'Weiler's Farm', after the name of its owner, and others on small plots near Grasmere were the first to suffer harassment and trespass charges in the early 1980s.4 In 1986, the growth of yet another squatter