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Urban Sprawl Towards Eden Gardens

Reference Type
Conference Proceedings (Chapter)

"Land is a valuable asset particularly in the urban realm. Farming is, under this framework, a conflicting and frequently contested urban land use. City planners and democratic governance are increasingly aware they cannot ignore the persistence of food gardens within the urban tissue and surviving peri-urban farms located around extensive agglomerations. For seven years now the Portuguese Tropical Research Institute has been collecting information about people involved in urban gardening and peri-urban farming, through extensive fieldwork conducted in Brazil, Chile and Portugal. In the last example, remote sensing techniques were also introduced in order to permit a more conclusive study over land use patterns on a metropolitan space. Geo-information systems are expensive, time-consuming and hard to learn technologies, but the continuous evolution of satellite imagery is opening new perspectives in the monitoring of geographical spaces, in all possible scales. The paper will report empirical data extracted in Belen, Brazil (1998), Santiago, Chile (2003) and Lisbon, Portugal (2002), regarding urban and peri-urban agriculture practices, bringing to light the political and economic forces that mould urbanization trends and city sprawl. It will also focus the causes and consequences of specific urban planning policies to the lives of urban gardeners and peripheral farmers, so as to discuss adequate methods and techniques to assess current evolution and ecological awareness of green belts, and debate better ways to deal with the unhealthy effects of urbanization in the urban / rural interfaces vis-a-vis increasing demands for environmental amenities and ongoing Eden gardens nostalgia." [Abstract from Conference Program and Book of Abstracts]

[Concurrent Session I-C: Peri-Urban Agriculture]

[Presented at "Emerging Issues Along Urban/Rural Interfaces: Linking Science and Society", a conference held March 13-16, 2005 in Atlanta, GA (US)]

Authors
I.M. Madaleno
Date Published
2005
Journal/Conference
Emerging Issues Along Urban/Rural Interfaces: Linking Science and Society
Editor
D. Laband, et. al.
Publisher
Auburn University Center for Forest Sustainability
Publisher Location
Auburn, AL (US)
Sub-Topics
Interface, Remote Sensing, Public Policy, GIS/Mapping
State(s)/Region(s)
Mediterranean, South America
Keywords
Urban-rural, Leaf characteristics, Peri-urban, Interface, WUI, Agriculture
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