Tag Archives: Urban agriculture

Notes from the ESRS conference (2)

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At the bi-annual conference for rural sociologists in Europe  at this moment going on at Crete, we organised a working group to compare food and farming strategies in the rural and the urban. We discovered confusing (see blog 1) and potentially clarifying concepts while listening to the many interesting presentations. As an example of sustainable rural development Ignacio Lopez Moreno presented the concept of co-production as ” the ongoing interaction and mutual change of human and living nature”  (after van der Ploeg 2008) while explaining the case of quality production under the Waddengoud label in the north of the Netherlands. This definition fitted the presentation of Esther Veen and myself too who saw the urban residents in urban agriculture initiatives as co-producers in the sense of this definition.

Although co-production and co-producership also have contested meanings in the academic debate these terms are potentially bridging rural and urban studies on the way people grow food as alternative to buying in regular retail outlets of the agro-industrial complex. Both rural dweller and urban residents interact with and change nature while becoming active in growing food.  Food provisioning strategies that involve co-production open the dichotomy between producer and consumer and perspectives which start (implicitly) from one or the other side.

Notes from the ESRS conference (1)

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Today we had the last session of our working group ” Comparative perspective; governing semi-subsistance food and farming strategies in the countryside and city” . In this group we deliberately were seeking to contrast  cases of food and farming in urban and rural contexts. Can urban agriculture be compared with small-scale farming in rural areas? What has peasant farming literature to offer in how we can look at what is going on with food growing in cities?

We discovered useful and potentially bridging concepts and concepts which may confuse more than they reveal. To start with the latter, “semi-subsistance farming” may not be a useful concept. One reason is the many definitions as Imre Kovach showed us. But another is the meaning of the separate terms in the different rural and urban contexts. Is the ” semi”  in subsistance referring to selling surplus or buying the remaining part of the food supply if you only produce some of your vegetables? And is ‘ farming’  the appropriate term for growing food in allotments or community gardens?  From a rural perspective food production as a side, or part time activity is easily seen as farming and the person foremost as a producer and only in second instance as consumer. In city initiatives it is the reverse. Consumers usually do not ‘ farm’  but ‘ grow food’  or ‘ garden’  and hence are only a ‘ producer’  after their identity as a consumer. This while a rural hobby farm may be as intense in land use as an allotment at the city fringe. The focus on food provisioning strategies  seems therefore better since it refers to the activities one undertakes to eat, which may include growing activities too.

Conference Call – Agriculture in an Urbanizing Society

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A major demographic milestone occurred in May 2007. For the first time in the history of mankind the earth’s population became more urban than rural. This process of urbanization will continue in an accelerated pace in the forthcoming decades: the growth of the world population from 6 billion people in 2000 to 9 billion people in 2050 will mainly occur in urban areas. By 2050 the urban population will approximately be twice the size of the rural population.

However, this does not mean that urban areas are or will become of greater importance than rural areas. On the contrary, the urban and the rural have always heavily relied on each other and will do so even more in an era characterized by rapid urban population growth. Cities will continue to need resources such as food, fibre, clean water, nature, biodiversity, and recreational space, as well as the people and communities that produce and provide these urban necessities and desires. Hence, key questions for the next decades are how, where and by whom these urban necessities and desires will be produced and provided and if and how this can be done in manner that is considered to be socially, economically and ecologically sustainable and ethically sound.

In recent years the concept of multifunctional agriculture has emerged as an important reference in debates on the future of agriculture and the countryside and its relations with the wider and predominantly urban society. This is an expression of the fact that agriculture is not only valued for its contribution to food and fibre production and the economic development of the agro-industry, but needs to be assessed according to a much wider range of social, environmental, economic and ethical concerns. At farm level multifunctional agriculture is characterized by a variety of entrepreneurial strategies and activities, such as processing and direct marketing of food products, energy production, care for elderly and disabled people, and tourism. But multifunctional agriculture is also expressed at higher scales, such as the regional level (e.g. collective nature and landscape management schemes and regional branding) and the national level (e.g. policymaking and implementation).

Due to the multiplicity of activities, the multi-scalar character of multifunctionality and the geographical contextuality of expressions of multifunctional agriculture, research on multifunctional agriculture and changing urban-rural relations is highly fragmented, disciplinarily as well as geographically. Hence, this conference aims to advance the scientific state of the art in research on multifunctional agriculture and urban-rural relations by bringing together scholars of different disciplines (sociology, economics, spatial planning, land use planning, regional planning, urban planning, crop sciences, animal sciences, soil sciences, architecture, etc…) from all parts of the world.

Working group themes
The conference facilities allow for a maximum of 21 parallel working group sessions. The scientific committee has proposed 21 working group themes (see http://www.agricultureinanurbanizingsociety.com/UK/Working+group+themes/)   and is inviting prospective working group convenors to submit a short (max 500 words) call text for the theme they would like to convene. Proposals for a working group call text can be send to the chair of the scientific committee by email (han.wiskerke@wur.nl) before the 1st of September 2011. The deadline for submission of abstracts will be 1st of December 2011. Abstracts will have to be submitted to the convenors.

More information

Please check the conference website for more information.

Growing food in the neighbourhood

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Tilburg’s City Garden- Lise Alix

This winter I did an internship in which I set up a city garden in Tilburg. I found ten enthusiastic, mostly female neighbours, ready to cooperate in creating their neighbourhood’s kitchen’s garden. We learned about designing and preparing a garden, working together, and about physical endurance while spreading manure, transporting unwanted sand, and carrying and breaking paving stones.

I was assigned to manage this project by the Brabantse Milieufederatie (BMF), an organization that tries to protect the  environment. One of their focus points is on food, because food is a daily need that links many environmental problems like food transport, food packaging and unsustainable agriculture with use of pesticides and fertilizers.
One way of solving these problems is by growing our local vegetables, for example in neighbourhoods kitchen’s gardens. The BMF has, in cooperation with other organizations, tried to raise consciousness and support by the municipality of Tilburg on city gardens. As an example of how well it functions, BMF wanted to have one tangible kitchen’s garden in Tilburg. That’s where I came in.

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Working group at 24th ESRS congress in Chania, Greece 22-25 August 2011: Call for papers

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Imre Kovách ( Institute for Political Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest), Petra Derkzen and I are organising a working group on “the governance of semi-subsistent food and farming strategies in the countryside and city- a compartive perspective” at the 24th ESRS congress in Chania (Greece) from 22-25 of August 2011. We would like to invite all interested researchers to submit their papers dealing with empirical or theoretical reflections on the driving forces, structure and mechanisms of semisubsistence food and farming strategies in the countryside and-or cities, both within developed and developing countries. Abstracts may be submitted  to Imre Kovach (ikovach@mtapti.hu) AND chania2011@agr.unipi.it until the 30th of April 2011.  For a more detailed description of the workshop please read further…

Courtesy of European Forum on Nature Conservation and Pastoralism

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