Category Archives: General
Re-localising Food Projects in Zurich
I’ve spent the last few days in Zurich for a meeting of the SupurbFood project. Amongst the range of privileges this brings is that we get to visit different projects that are in some way shortening food chains, closing the cycles of nutrients and using land innovative ways.
Ortoloco, Zurich – peri-urban CSA with a view of an Ikea
We visited a range of projects in Zurich but I thought at this point I would highlight three that are relevant to discussions the CCRI is involved with at the moment.
As I left the UK there was much discussion of the plummeting price of milk and the future of the dairy industry. One answer to this is to change the distrubition of milk so the farmer captures more of the value and consumers get a fresher offer. At the Markthalle Vidautk (Markethall Viaduct) Conradin Flurin (@FlurinConradin) had set up a…
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RSO Organized PhD Course: Spatial thinking in the social sciences
RSO is organizing a course for PhD students. This course “new perspectives on the urban and the rural: spatial thinking in the social sciences ” is meant for PhD students in the social, environmental and political sciences. In the course we will switch between close reading of texts, workshops, and discussion. Students following this course will not only learn to think about place as an analytical category, but also learn to ‘work with place’ by applying various perspectives to concrete cases. The course will also give ample attention to the question how to develop research methodology.
Social sciences have gained a renewed interest in space and place. Acknowledging that through activities and practices people are linked into broad geographical fields, the times are gone that we could assume a city, a village, a park or the nation-state as discrete entities. The emergence of the concept of the city-region, focusing on relations stretching out, connectivity and fuzzy borders, is just one illustration of the way spatial thinking entered the social sciences. Disciplinary vocabularies too get blurred: the concept of gentrification travelled from urban to rural and nature studies (today we can find contributions on rural gentrification and the gentrification of nature), and agriculture, once banned from the city, has become a welcome partner of the urban again (exemplified in the studies on urban agriculture).
Central to the course is a relational analysis, in which we look at the production of place and space in and through social practices. This includes the lived experience, the many ways in which people, consciously or not, are engaged in place making activities through the things they do as consumer, farmer or citizen. Another angle is to look at place/space making from the perspective of what we may call‘processes of abstraction’. This refers to the ‘logics’ imposed by markets and bureaucracies and may include processes of commodification and identity-politics. This course will also deal with questions of methodology: how to apply the spatial turn in social sciences in research?
Resource Revolution – Sustainable Entrepreneurship
What: lecture and debate
When: 21 January, 19.15
Where: Public Library // Stationsstraat 2
Entrance: Free
A new wind is blowing in entrepreneurial land and it is called sustainable entrepreneurship. Erik van Slobbe (WUR) will lead the evening and look into the question what sustainable entrepreneurship is and whether it is more than nowadays’ catchphrase. Who better to answer this question than those who are entrepreneurs?
An introduction of the speakers:
Dr. ir. Erik van Slobbe – WUR
Erik van Slobbe completed his PhD at Wageningen University and is currently a senior researcher for the chair group Earth System Science as well as teaching integrated water management and adaptive water management. Before returning to Wageningen University he worked for Arcadis as a senior consultant and has thus acquired experience in moderating meetings with different stakeholders. He was the coordinator of the Climate KIC funded ‘Working with Nature’…
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M.Sc. thesis: New opportunities and new constraints for Maasai livelihoods
Part 3: Dispatch on M.Sc. thesis results
Florian Neubauer has been working on a M.Sc. thesis with RSO titled `New opportunities and new constraints – Understanding changes in land tenure and livelihoods among the pastoral Maasai in southern Kenya´. In his third and last post, he shares some of the thesis` main findings. Florian’s second post can be found here.
Localized coping strategies increasingly gain in importance: Here, cattle which has accessed a fenced area where grass is preserved for stressful times.
Background
Pastoral livelihoods in Africa are characterized by a high reliance on strategic migration and livestock keeping as a source of social and economic wellbeing. However, over the past decades pastoral livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa were increasingly exposed to various pressures like a progressing privatization of land. The experiences of the Maasai in southern Kenya provide an illustrative example for livelihood changes due to land privatization. During the 1970s, a transformation from land held in trust to individual ‘group ranches’, as land communally owned and managed, took place in the Maasailand. During the 1980s, title deeds were privatized and group ranches subdivided into smaller, individually owned ranches. Focusing on Maasai households, this research analysed – with specific regards to impacts and implications on food (in)security – how these changes in land tenure shape the livelihoods of Maasai pastoralists in southern Kenya.
Main results – Summary
The research suggests that changes in land tenure – notably, the privatization of title deeds and the commodification of land – shape Maasai livelihoods and can contribute to increase a household`s food security. It suggests furthermore that Maasai actively adapt their livelihood strategies as a result of these changes and use(d) the new land tenure system to develop new livelihood strategies. However, these new or changed livelihood strategies impact Maasai pastoralism both as a production system and as a socio-cultural way of life.
Rural Sociology Wageningen University 