Food production on the urban-rural fringe is under pressure due to competing land uses. We discuss the potential to improve resilience for urban-rural regions by enhancing food production as part of multifunctional land use. Through studies of peri-urban land in the regions of Gothenburg (Sweden), Copenhagen (Denmark) and Gent (Belgium), recent developments are analysed. Arable farming has been declining since 2000 in all three areas due to urban expansion and recreational land use changes. In city plans, networks of protected areas and green spaces and their importance for human wellbeing have been acknowledged. Policies for farmland preservation in peri-urban settings exist, but strategies for local food production are not expressed in present planning documents. Among the diversity of peri-urban agricultural activities, peri-urban food production is a developing issue. However, the competing forms of land use and the continuing high dependence of urban food on global food systems and related resource flows reduces peri-urban food production and improvements in urban food security. The positive effects of local food production need to be supported by governance aiming to improve the urban-rural relationship. The paper discusses the resilience potential of connecting urban-rural regions and re-coupling agriculture to regional food production.
Although the importance of hedgerows for sustainable agriculture and conservation of rural biodiversity is increasingly being recognized, obtaining insight into the spatial and temporal dynamics of hedgerow networks remains an important challenge for landscape ecologists, with the key factors driving changes in rural landscape structure especially deserving further attention. The present study analyses the long-term history of a hedgerow network landscape in Flanders, Belgium. A detailed reconstruction of the hedgerow network is made at five points in time, starting at the end of the 18th century until present, for 367 distinct 400 m×400 m samples. Whilst hedgerows were mainly concentrated around historical village centres and within valleys at the end of 18th century, the network expanded progressively during the 19th century. In the 20th century, the hedgerow network degraded strongly, with hedgerow density and connectivity declining and mesh-size heterogeneity and network fragmentation increasing, although the network recovered slightly during the 1990s. Different trajectories of change in hedgerow network structure were observed depending on landscape position, with both topography and village proximity significantly affecting hedgerow network dynamics. The present network structure was mainly governed by land use, with highly developed networks being predominantly associated with pasture. Three main conclusions arise from the results of this study. First, the role of land use and landscape position as basic factors steering hedgerow network dynamics at the landscape scale is demonstrated. Second, the long-term perspective of the study enabled insight into the poorly known expansion phase of hedgerow networks, linked mainly with the development of small-scale labour-intensive agriculture. Finally, the findings confirm the large-scale degradation of linear semi-natural habitats in European agricultural landscapes during most of the 20th century, and indicate that a pro-active rural policy can halt and even reverse this process.
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