Peri-urban areas as contested territory and space of opportunity to urban sustainability: Córdoba´s peri-urban fringe as case study.

BEATRIZ GIOBELLINA; SARA BOCCOLINI

Beyond metropolis: new dynamics of peripheral urbanization in Latin America

University of Toronto Press

Lugar: Toronto; Año: 2018; p. 1 - 20

EN PREPARACIÓN (FECHA ESTIMADA DE PUBLICACIÓN 2019)SE INCLUYE SÓLO EL RESUMEN EXTENDIDO Urban and rural land management is directly related to the ability to provide local food, and the regulation of several processes such as climate, water cycle, as well as and diseases and plagues regulation. This means regulating territorial ecosystem services, whose availability (or lack of it) has direct impact on prosperity and health of urban populations settled there.This article is based on studies that are being developed in the O-AUPA located at AER INTA Córdoba . Research points as an opportunity the redefinition of the city´s peri-urban fringe and its redesign as agro-ecological landscape as possible limit to urban sprawl, and to preserve and recover some of the critical ecosystem services that territories provide, which will be needed for future development, as they were in the past.Since the ´70s the idea that there is a limit to growth (Meadows et al., 1972, 1992, 2004) set a warning about the finite nature of the earth´s resources and, at the same time generated additional theoretical frameworks to rethink development strategies from a socio-ecological and sustainable paradigm, or, in planning, from landscape ecology. Agricultural soil, availability of sufficient water of quality, as well as biodiversity of the areas where cities are settled also have limits which, when exceeded, damage mean very difficult to reverse.Land use regulations and policies in Argentina do not yet sufficiently integrate these concepts, nor the idea that cities need to identify what are the limits of fair and sustainable growth. In the case of the green belt of the city of Cordoba (its peri-urban fringe), there was a loss of 46% of area under irrigated horticultural production between 1974 and 2014. (Mari, et al., 2016) due to changing land use from rural to urban. This loss is produced simultaneously by different actors: on the one hand, the urban land (and housing) market, where investors capitalize extraordinary profits by changing land use from rural to urban; on the other hand, local land use policies, and the provincial and national policies of urban habitat and infrastructure production, who primarily base their strategies on creating new urban land on a massive scale.Today, in the peri-urban fringe, multiple activities and exchanges coexist that are an important part of urban metabolism: food production and extensive agriculture; landfills and waste dumps; sand and stone quarries and brick kilns; spontaneous and illegal settlements -villas miseria- alongside country clubs, gated communities, and social housing; industries and road infrastructure, etc.However, family farmers continue to resist the pressure of the housing market, the competition for land and water and the absence of state support. Although demographic dynamic shows the decreased number of producers, due to relocation to other cities and lack of generational change, it also shows that the migration of Bolivian farmers since the 80s is guaranteeing the continuity of the system and guarantees between 60% and 90% of the fruits and vegetables production in urban regions of Argentina.Cordoba is a representative case of the main cities of Argentina; there, the dynamics of restructuring urban horticultural production systems has a knowledge gap, low social value and poor attention from academia and government. This raises two key questions: What is the possible role of peri-urban fringe of the city today? Who, how and where will produce healthy food that need cities will in the coming decades?This research is based on two sets of arguments with prospective vision for cities:a) setting a limit to the horizontal expansion promotes urban compactness, and streamlining flows and exchanges helps prevent internal social debt to get deeper: the current model of urban sprawl increases social inequality due not only to fragmentation, segregation and socioeconomic ghettification in the territory, but also due to inequality in access to basic thresholds of the right to a dignified city (public services, infrastructure, transport, security, adequate location, opportunities for human development, jobs, etc.).b) advance of the urban frontier destroys rural areas without assessing the damage in terms of landscape and cultural heritage, identity, production processes, nor loss of the ability to sustain a healthy rural-urban environment.Both arguments bring together criteria to think sustainability of cities: reducing their urban metabolism and ecological footprint, and promoting and enhancing synergy and innovation processes in territorial systems. Both concepts are at the core of the debate between compaction or intensification of cities, versus the spread or extent of urban sprawl over rural and natural space.