Re-Ruralising the Urban Edge: Lessons from Europe, USA & the Global South
Major cities of the world are characterised as either growing cities, such as in Asia and Australia, or shrinking cities as in Europe and North America. Growing cities are destroying their rural edge while shrinking cities are creating a new rural urbanis
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Re-Ruralising the Urban Edge: Lessons from Europe, USA & the Global South Helen Armstrong and Abby Mellick Lopes
Abstract Major cities of the world are characterised as either growing cities, such as in Asia and Australia, or shrinking cities as in Europe and North America. Growing cities are destroying their rural edge while shrinking cities are creating a new rural urbanism, often in their urban centre. This chapter describes the instrumentality of design and its enabling function in achieving new typologies for peri-/ inter-urban rural land with key drivers being state-of-the-art technology and mapping techniques. Peri-urban economics require new land-tenure models and innovative forms of agriculture that synthesise agriculture, nature conservation, infrastructure and communities. The chapter also looks at small-scale community innovations including a number of initiatives in Penrith, Western Sydney, such as Out & About in Penrith which explored community activities in local open space, Penrith as a Regional City Garden with diverse models of urban agriculture and the Cooling the Commons project which explores the role that forms of urban agriculture might play in adapting urban environments for liveability in a climate-changed future. Findings from these projects reveal the potential of mobile infrastructure and temporary urbanism for Western Sydney. Keywords Urbanisation • Re-ruralisation • Urban edge • Urban economics • Land tenure • Urban environment
H. Armstrong (*) QUT, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] A.M. Lopes School of Humanities & Communication Arts, Western Sydney University, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2016 B. Maheshwari et al. (eds.), Balanced Urban Development: Options and Strategies for Liveable Cities, Water Science and Technology Library 72, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-28112-4_2
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H. Armstrong and A.M. Lopes
Introduction
This chapter draws from a range of international projects in the peri-urban and urban areas, both large and small, that are addressing the loss of food-producing land such as the planning and design work occurring in the Netherlands where the debate about urban development is focussed on how to achieve new forms of rural/ urban/natural landscapes. There are also important lessons to be learned from the shrinking cities of Europe and North America where a new rural urbanism is emerging; either encouraged by government such as the Farmadelphia Program in Philadelphia or informally as in Detroit and Berlin. Similarly in the German towns of Hamburg, Frieburg and Tübingen, the rural tide is turning with new models for collective farming in the zschischenstadt or urbanised countryside (Sieverts 2003).
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Four Ways to Revive Sydney’s Peri-Urban Agriculture
What role should planners and designers in Australia play to address the loss of food-producing lands? We suggest this problem can be addressed in four distinct ways. First, many peri-urban farms are market gardens developed by migrants in the 1950
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