Farming the City

The Resilience and Decline of Urban Agriculture in European History. Resilienz und Niedergang der städtischen Landwirtschaft in der europäischen Geschichte

Erich Landsteiner, Tim Soens, Erich Landsteiner, Tim Soens

• Verlag: StudienVerlag
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783706560573
• Thema: Histoire
• Thema: Histoire sociale

THE RESILIENCE AND DECLINE OF URBAN AGRICULTURE IN EUROPEAN HISTORYUrban agriculture is a highly diversified and multi-layered phenomenon, and its roots are both very old and very recent. Throughout European history, it has appeared in different forms and guises. In some periods and regions, urban agriculture seemes to have declined at an early stage, whereas in others urban economies and societies remained firmly based on more or less specialized and commercialized agrarian production until the recent past. At the beginning of the 21st century, in an urban world characterized by globalizing food markets, social polarization, but also increasing food insecurity, it is again rapidly gaining importance. Citizens practice urban agriculture in a combined effort to diversify their food supplies, shorten the food chain and strengthen community life. In order to understand the organization, the resilience and failure of urban agriculture in different contexts, this volume aims to develop a comparative and long-term approach, with a particular focus on the actors involved in urban agriculture, their income strategies, and the social and economic configurations in which they operate.RESILIENZ UND NIEDERGANG DER STÄDTISCHEN LANDWIRTSCHAFT IN DER EUROPÄISCHEN GESCHICHTEDie urbane Landwirtschaft ist ein vielschichtiges Phänomen, dessen Wurzeln unterschiedlich weit in der europäischen Geschichte zurückreichen. In einigen Regionen schien die städtische Landwirtschaft in einem frühen Stadium nachzulassen, in anderen beruhte die städtische Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft bis in die jüngste Vergangenheit fest auf einer mehr oder weniger spezialisierten und kommerzialisierten Agrarproduktion. Zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts gewinnt sie in einer von globalisierten Lebensmittelmärkten, sozialer Polarisierung, aber auch zunehmender Ernährungsunsicherheit geprägten urbanen Welt wieder rasant an Bedeutung: StädterInnen betreiben Landwirtschaft in einem gemeinsamen Bemühen, ihre Lebensmittelversorgung zu diversifizieren, die Produktionsketten zu verkürzen und das Gemeinschaftsleben zu stärken. Um die Organisation, die Resilienz und das Scheitern der städtischen Landwirtschaft in verschiedenen Kontexten zu verstehen, zielt dieser Band darauf ab, einen vergleichenden und langfristigen Ansatz zu entwickeln. Dabei stehen die Akteure der städtischen Landwirtschaft, ihre Einkommensstrategien und die sozialen und ökonomischen Bedingungen, in denen sie arbeiten, im Mittelpunkt.

Erich Landsteiner / Tim Soens

Editorial: Farming the City

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, urban agriculture is rapidly gaining importance.¹ All over the world, urban dwellers gather to cultivate crops and vegetables or to raise some poultry or pigs, often on a cooperative basis and on small plots of ‘marginal’ land. In an urban world characterised by globalising food markets and social polarisation – but also by increasing food insecurity –, citizens practice urban agriculture in a combined effort to diversify their food supplies, shorten the food chain and strengthen community life. Urban agriculture today is a highly diversified and multi-layered phenomenon, and its roots are both very old and very recent. Throughout European history it has appeared in different forms and guises. In some parts of Europe, urban agriculture seems to have declined at an early stage, whereas in others food production remained part and parcel of the urban economy until very recently, both as a component of a diversified household economy and in a highly specialised and professionalised form (for instance as horticulture or viticulture). Today, this urban agricultural heritage might offer inspiration to those who are looking for low-tech alternatives to high-precision and energy-intensive variants of urban agriculture like so-called vertical farms.²

It has already been noted that in most current discussions urban agriculture is treated as a new phenomenon and that this might have to do with its neglect in the prevailing historiography on towns and urbanisation.³ Due to a long tradition, going back to the nineteenth century, of defining towns as “big non-agrarian settlements”,⁴ historians are indeed ill equipped to tackle the new challenge of providing a historical background to this societal demand and the initiatives connected with it. Whatever else is marshalled in the numerous attempts to define a town and urbanity in European (or Western) historiography, especially when they are concerned with medieval origins, the functional difference between town and country is generally stressed.⁵ The other criterion, intimately connected with the functional definition, is demographic and relies on a – unavoidably arbitrary – threshold of the number of inhabitants, usually set at 5,000 or 10,000 people.⁶

This functional cum demographic separation of town and country is, in both respects, a “deceptively simple dichotomy”.⁷ From the functional perspective, it necessarily neglects the involvement of towns, both large and small, in agriculture as well as the production and processing of agricultural goods and commodities by their inhabitants in the European past; from the demographic perspective it neglects the fact that a significant proportion of premodern European towns fell below the applied thresholds, relegating large parts of Europe to the status of non-urbanisation until the nineteenth century. This has not gone unnoticed. In his introduction to a volume on Small Towns in Early Modern Europe, Peter Clark stated:

“Throughout the medieval and early modern period the small town, with a few hundred or thousand people, often clustered behind stone or earthen ramparts, with farms and orchards in its midst, and a handful of public buildings around the marketplace, was a constant and quintessential feature of the European landscape. […] Across Europe, there were five or more times as many small towns as all other kinds of urban community put together.”⁸

Nevertheless, the functional and/or demographic definition of towns and urbanity continues to dominate the more synthetic accounts of the past constitutions of European towns and of economic development in general. It is, for example, widely used to estimate changes in agricultural productivity by breaking down populations into urban, rural agricultural and rural non-agricultural, and then applying the urban ratios thus established to measure agricultural labour productivity over space and time.⁹ It is highly significant that research on proto-industrial production has led to the differentiation of the rural population into agricultural and non-agricultural sections, whereas the urban population (identified by applying the usual size thresholds) is always – with some caveats of low significance – considered to be non-agricultural.¹⁰ For the moment, it can only be surmised how the results of this kind of measurement would change if we lowered the demographic threshold to include the other four fifths of (small) towns into the urban ratio and split the urban population into agricultural and non-agricultural. Needless to say, this would be as arbitrary as splitting the rural population into these categories, considering the frequent combination of agrarian and non-agrarian occupations in town and countryside. It would certainly raise – perhaps even double – absolute urban ratios, especially for those regions where most towns were below the size threshold usually applied, but would it also change their relative standing with respect to more urbanised regions? Conversely, we could also ask to what extent the consideration of the weight of agricultural activities in the now more numerous towns would change the gaps in the estimates of regional agricultural productivity. It is far from clear that these sample changes would counterbalance and leave the results unchanged.¹¹

Was the presence of agrarian occupations in towns simply a matter of size? Given the fact that a town of 10,000 inhabitants required about 9,000 hectares to secure its supply of bread grains in a preindustrial environment, there must have been limits of size to the self-sufficiency of towns in terms of food provisioning. Climbing up the size scale of towns, the interplay between urban food production and food markets tipped clearly in favour of the market.¹² However, we should, on the one hand, not underestimate the capacity of towns to cater for themselves given they had sufficient access to arable land. For a sample of twelve Swedish towns in the size bracket between 500 and 5,000 inhabitants, it has recently been calculated that their majority would, in theory, have been able to produce between 50 per cent and 100 per cent of the grain consumed in the respective town, up to and into the nineteenth century.¹³ On the other hand, urban agriculture was – in many instances, also including small towns – not limited to food production by and for the townspeople, but rather dedicated to highly commercialised branches of agriculture.

Was the presence and extent of urban agriculture a matter of location? In the context of the overarching and evolving division of labour within Europe, the size, growth potential and functional specialisation of towns in manufacture and trade clearly declined from the centre to the periphery. The economic constitution of the many Mediterranean, east-central European and Scandinavian agro-towns would then reflect the higher concentration and higher development of industry and merchant capital in the centre(s), and urban development and underdevelopment (if one associates the weight of agrarian production in towns with the latter) would constitute the opposite sides of the same coin. This conclusion has been stressed for some time in research on centre-periphery relations and certainly has merit, as long as one does not conflate urban agriculture with self-sufficient subsistence production and takes into consideration its often high degree of specialisation and commercialisation.¹⁴ But even before the core of European urbanisation moved from southern to north-western Europe during the seventeenth century, in most Mediterranean towns, both large and small, the landownership of citizens and agricultural production for the household and the market constituted an important sector of the urban economy.¹⁵

Finally, we could ask if the relationship of towns and agricultural production is a matter of the type of farming and land use. Although the involvement of towns in agrarian production spanned a wide spectrum from small-scale food production for subsistence over market gardening to fully developed commercial farming, there seems to have existed an urban preference for market-oriented branches of agrarian production such as viticulture, hops and tobacco growing, cattle-raising, and the processing of agrarian raw materials oriented towards regional and supra-regional markets (wine making and beer brewing, the processing of dye-plants), often in close interaction with and based on the institutionalised coercive power of towns over the surrounding countryside.

In order to understand the organisation, resilience and failure of urban agriculture – broadly defined as all forms of food production in an urban context involving urban citizens as producers – this issue of the Rural History Yearbook aims to develop a comparative and long-term approach, with a particular focus on the actors involved in urban agriculture, their income strategies, and the social and economic configurations in which they operate. Most contributions to this special issue resulted from a double session at the 2017 Rural History Conference in Leuven (Belgium), organised by the Comparative Rural History Network (CORN). In this session and the special issue, the contributors were asked to reflect upon the drivers and actors explaining the long-term continuity of urban agriculture in some contexts and its rapid demise in others.

In his introductory article, Tim Soens elaborates a conceptual and methodological framework for the study of urban agriculture in the past, emphasising the role of demography, property rights, the organisation of the household ec...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title
• Table of Contents
• Special Issue: Farming the City
• Articles
• Impressum