Urban Agriculture Magazine no. 29 – special issue on City region food systems

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Today the 29th issue of the Urban Agriculture Magazine has been published online, featuring a special issue on city region food systems.

UAM29 coverThis issue addresses the growing attention for policy and practice approaches that focus on food issues in urban areas from a city-regional perspective, taking into account possible contributions from urban and periurban agriculture and a strengthening of urban-rural relations. It is largely based on our EC funded research programme SUPURBFOOD but also features articles from other projects and initiatives.

The Magazine will be officially launched in hardcopy at the ICLEI Resilient Cities Congress on 10 June 2015 in Bonn, Germany, during which event three Urban Food Forum sessions are held in collaboration with the SUPURBFOOD consortium together with policymakers and SMEs from the SUPURBFOOD city regions.

European farmers and agricultural practices

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Barley field Critical Discourse Analysis of the Common Agricultural Policy on the ‘Payment for agricultural practices beneficial for the environment and the climate’

Thesis for the International Development programme – Rural Sociology – Wageningen UR

By Alberto Serra

The world population increases, the world food production increases but the number of farmers declines. Although agricultural production increased (United Nation 2014) in the last decade three million farms disappeared in Europe (La Via Campesina 2013). Farmers are facing many challenges and threats. Nowadays they have to deal with market price fluctuations, market competition, access to capital and technology and high difficulties in the intergenerational succession of farming activities (Davidova and Thomson 2014).

In contrast, large scale farmers are able to cope better with such stresses, nevertheless contributing to reduce the competiveness among farmers, due to their production capacity and better access to capital (Evans 2014). Technological and policy choices by large producers and landholders fuelled the growth of inequality in rural areas contributing to squeezing out small farms (van der Ploeg 2006; De Schutter 2014). According to the 2014 State of Agriculture 1% of farmers control 65% of all agricultural land (FAO 2014). Although many small farmers keep on struggling to survive, Europe became in last decades one of the leading power in agricultural trade (Fritz 2011).

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Breakfast presentation about Local food initiatives and sustainable diets

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Everyone is invited to learn more about a local food initiative in Tilburg. The presentation is based on the MSc research of Nicole van Riel.

Date:     Wednesday May 27

Time:     9:00-9:30

Where: Room 3011

What:  For the last six months I have been working on my master thesis, where I studied if participation in a local food initiative contributes to more sustainable diets. To answer my research question, I have done participant observations and semi-structured interviews at one particular initiative: ‘Goei Eete’ in Tilburg. To put the results in perspective, I have made use of transition theory. If you are interested in the findings, you welcome to join the final presentation next Wednesday.

If you are planning to attend in advance, please let me know via Nicole.vanriel@wur.nl so there will be enough croissants (and little food waste!).

BSc/MSc thesis topics: Where is the rural?

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The classic nineteenth century thinkers devoted comparatively little attention to the rural, concentrating their work on the coincidence of urban-industrial as the modern spatial and socio-economic ‘setting’ of modern life. While the urban-industrial was considered contemporary and developed, dynamic and  active, modern and progressive, the rural was looked upon as archaic and backward, static and passive, traditional and conservative. The rural emerged as a residual category of our thinking of modern society.

Over time rural sociology has been plagued by the question what the rural is? Some have argued that the rural (and for that matter the urban) is a socio-spatial category: the space of agriculture. However such definitions are intrinsically instable, since the occupational basis of rural populations has become loosely connected with agriculture. Attempts to differentiate the rural and the urban on basis of other social characteristics as population size and density also proofed to be untenable. Others have argued that the urban ‘exploded’  into the countryside and the world we live in has become one of planetary urbanization, leaving us behind with the question where the rural has gone to?

We are looking for students who are interested in doing a BSc/MSc thesis study into the question of the what and where the rural is. Questions that can be explored are: How has the rural been defined in sociological theory; what socio-spatial constructions of the rural have been made? Is there still place for an idea of the ‘rural’ in ‘planetary urbanization’? To what extend is our thinking ensnared by the words ‘rural’ and ‘urban’, forcing us to think in highly problematic analytical and empirical categories?

Students interested have the choice to deal with these questions in different ways and from various perspectives. Depending on your interest you can do a literature research into past and present of defining the rural, empirical research into constructions of the rural, or delve into theory, for example by exploring the thinking of Deleuze or Lefebvre for developing new ‘vocabularies’ or notions of socio-spatiality.

Interested or looking for more information? Please contact Joost Jongerden at joost.jongerden@wur.nl or Leeuwenborch room 3027

 

Localizing Urban Food Strategies – Farming cities and performing rurality: call for abstracts for the 7th AESOP Sustainable Food Planning Conference

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The 7th Aesop Sustainable Food Planning (SFP) Conference entitled “Localizing Urban Food Strategies: Farming cities and performing rurality” will take place in Torino (Italiy) from 7 to 9 October 2015.

Localizing urban food strategies refers to embedding sustainable food planning issues in place and in time within each specific local context. Moreover, by targeting planners, agronomists, designers, geographers, administrators, activists etc. engaged in the urban food debate, Farming cities and performing rurality aims at representing a platform for the development of fruitful perspectives for sustainable food planning policies and practices.

On the one hand, Farming cities refers to the development of innovative roles for agricultural production in and around the city, approaching in a structural manner the way agricultural issues are dealt (or should be dealt) with in contemporary urban policies. On the other hand, Performing rurality considers urban food strategies as a tool to define a cooperating relationship between the urban and the rural, reversing in terms of equality the traditional ideological subordination of the countryside to the city.

The activities of the Conference will be articulated around the following tracks: (i) Spatial planning and urban design, (ii) Governance and private entrepreneurship, (iii) Relevant experiences and practices, (iv) Training and jobs, (v) Flows and networks. There will be a specific activity for PhD students and young scholars.

Abstracts for one of the aforementioned tracks can be submitted until the 31st of May via the submission form on the conference website.