Farming the urban fringes of Barcelona: Competing visions of nature and the contestation of a partial sustainability fix |
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| Institution: | 1. Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, Spain;2. Institut Catala de Recerca i Estudis Avancats (ICREA) Research Professor, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) and Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM), Spain;1. School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, College of Engineering, Nanyang Technological Univeristy, Singapore 639798, Republic of Singapore;2. School of Energy and Power Engineering, Jiangsu Univeristy of Science and Technology, Zhejiang City, Mengxi Road 2, Jiangsu Province 212003, China;3. School of Mechanical and Automotive Engineering, Zhejiang University of Science and Technology, Hangzhou City, Liuhe Road, Zhejiang, 310023, China;1. Centre for Environmental Research and Impact Studies, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania;2. Department of Biological Sciences, Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA;3. Department of Biology and Ecology in Hungarian, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania |
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| Abstract: | While the concept of urban agriculture investigates the way in which disused land within the consolidated city is returned to its citizens through a variety of farming practices, many pockets of rural land in peri-urban areas continue to be contested by institutions and communities – including informal farmers, formal farmers, municipal planners, metropolitan agencies, and investors – with contrasting interests. To date however, little scholarly attention has been paid to informal practices within the degraded areas of urban fringes and, more specifically, to the link between the expansion of peri-urban agriculture and the civic appropriation and negotiation of space in neglected peripheral areas. In this paper, we ask how a metropolitan sustainability fix is produced and contested both materially and discursively. We also explore how local residents involved in peri-urban agriculture claim the use of land for agricultural practices and in turn attempt to influence the urban agenda of the neoliberal city. Inquiring how competing visions of nature act as obstacles in this negotiation process, our analysis of the peri-urban Baix Llobregat Agricultural Park in Barcelona reveals that the imposition of official visions about how needs for food and agriculture should be fulfilled, which landscapes are esthetically acceptable, what nature is, and how land should be controlled and developed indicate why apparently “marginal” and informal urban agriculture in the periphery has come to be subordinated to the planning of the neoliberal city and of a metropolitan sustainability fix – a partial sustainability fix that is however progressively being questioned and renegotiated. |
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| Keywords: | Urban fringe Sustainability fix Urban agriculture Informal garden Land negotiation Barcelona |
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