Urban Agriculture for Growing City Regions

Connecting Urban-Rural Spheres in Casablanca

Undine Giseke, Maria Gerster-Bentaya, Frank Helten, Matthias Kraume, Dieter Scherer, Guido Spars, Fouad Amraoui, Abdelaziz Adidi, Said Berdouz, Mohemed Chlaida, Majid Mansour, Mohamed Mdafai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317910121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This book demonstrates how agriculture can play a determining role in integrated, climate-optimised urban development. Agriculture within urban growth centres today is more than an economic or social left-over or a niche practice. It is instead a complex system that offers multiple potentials for interaction with the urban system. Urban open space and agriculture can be linked to a productive green infrastructure – this forms new urban-rural linkages in the urbanizing region and helps shape the city. But in order to do this, agriculture has to be seen as an integral part of the urban fabric and it has to be put on the local agenda.

Urban Agriculture for Growing City Regions takes the example of Casablanca, one of the fastest growing cities in North Africa, to investigate this approach. The creation of synergies between the urban and rural in an emerging megacity is demonstrated through pilot projects, design solutions, and multifunctional modules. These synergies assure greater resource efficiency; particularly regarding the use and reuse of water, and they strengthen regional food security and the social integration of multiple spheres. A transdisciplinary research approach brings together different scientific disciplines and local actors into a process of integrated knowledge production. The book will have a long lasting legacy and is essential reading for researchers, planners, practitioners and policy makers who are working on urban development and urban agricultural strategies.

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ENDNOTES

REFERENCES

LIST OF FIGURES

LIST OF TABLES

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

INDEX

Endnotes

Preface

¹ The concept of the ‘life-world’ refers to pre-scientific times, a term introduced by Husserl at the beginning of the 20^th century in philosophy, and later used in the humanities and social sciences. Therefore, it has undergone multiple re-definitions, which has made the concept rather vague (Preyer et al., 1996). The concept is currently used in transdisciplinary research (Mittelstrass, 2005; Hirsch Hadorn et al., 2008). Inclusion of the life-world concept expands the spectrum of perspectives, questions and working methodologies beyond those common to disciplinary specializations (http://blog.zhdk.ch/trans/lebenswelt). According to Mittelstraß, the concept has to do with a particular form of scientific knowledge, i.e. with a methodologically re-constructible synthesis of theoretical, practical and life-world orientation (Mittelstraß, 1996, p106). The life-world concept was defined in more detail from a systemic-constructivist perspective by Kraus (2006).

A

A1

¹ In the 1990s the first international initiatives on informal settlements (mainly from UN Habitat) were developed, and applied in two major campaigns: on good governance and on security of land tenure. However, it was in 1999 with the new ‘Cities without Slums’ Initiative of the World Bank and UN Habitat, that the term ‘slum’ drew international attention (Huchzermeyer, 2006, p2). The extent of informal settling was now on the global agenda, promoted by the UN Habitat study ‘The Challenge of Slums’ (2003). With the United Nations Millennium Development Declaration (2000), informality was made even clearer in the context of the processes and consequences of rapid urbanization. In the UN Habitat study ‘Cities with slums’ (2008) there was a shift in definition and attitude towards informality from the household level to geographical categories. In 2010, it was even estimated by the UN Habitat (2010) that between the year 2000 and 2010 over 200 million people will not be living under slum conditions anymore.

² ‘Veränderte Akteurskonstellationen wie die Bedeutungszunahme transnationaler Unternehmen, neue politische Rahmenbedingungen (z.B. Neoliberalismus) sowie die Auseinanderentwicklung von Wertmaßstäben und Lebensstilen im Zuge von Globalisierungsprozessen erzeugen in den Megastädten neue Formen von Polarisierung und Fragmentierung sowie durch Destabilisierung und Disparitäten den Verlust sozialer Kohärenz’ (Kraas and Nitschke, 2006, p21).

A2

¹ A similar boundary is drawn in the construction of the city as a place of culture (and later society) opposed to nature (Descola, 2011, p 118, p125).

² The FAO and the IDRC give the most common definitions of Urban Agriculture, but it must be remarked that they result from the perspective of development policy. Therefore, the definitions mostly orient themselves around the practices of agriculture, and the urban dimension is often just related to the distance to the city centre (e.g. ‘on the fringe, periphery’).

Definition by the FAO (1997/ 2001): “Urban” agriculture, as used here, refers to small areas (e.g. vacant plots, gardens, verges, balconies, containers) within the city for growing crops and raising small livestock or milk cows for own-consumption or sale in neighbourhood markets. “Peri-urban” agriculture, as used here, refers to farm units close to town which operate intensive semi- or fully commercial farms to grow vegetables and other horticulture, raise chickens and other livestock, and produce milk and eggs. The FAO definition follows a binary understanding of the urban and peri-urban, according to opposite characteristics such as the size of the production unit and the surface size. Thus, it was assumed that the practice of Urban Agriculture occurs in coherent city centres on small surfaces for subsistence, and in the periphery on greater surfaces for commercial sale.

Another current definition has been provided so far by Mougeot, IDRC (2000). He regards Ur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Contents
• A Why are we Talking About Agriculture as Part of the City? - Framing a Problem from Life-World to Research
• B The Context: Grand Casablanca
• C Understanding the Problems of Grand Casablanca
• D On the Way to Target Knowledge: Scenarios and Action Research
• E Deepening Target Knowledge Towards Problem Solving
• F Changing Practices: Generating Transformation Knowledge
• G Research as a Process
• Notes
• References
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Index
• Backmatter Page