“Quiet sustainability”: Peri-urban spaces important for social cohesion and resilience

A new study reveals the importance of peri-urban agriculture for local communities’ sense of purpose, social fabric, and resilience.

Peri-urban agriculture is found between the outer limits of urban centres and the rural environment. Although dominant urban development discourses portray this urban fringe as underdeveloped, backward and ‘empty’ space waiting for more productive urban use, new research suggests otherwise.

A study on the Colombian city of Sogamoso contradicts these discourses and reveals the importance of peri-urban agriculture to local communities’ sense of purpose, social fabric, and resilience, and provides novel arguments for the protection and promotion of peri-urban agriculture in Colombia and across Latin America.

Peri-urban agriculture framed as a barrier to economic progress

With development defined in terms of technological and infrastructural ‘progress’, productivity, economic growth, and ‘modern’ and global cultural connections, peri-urban agriculture in Sogamoso is framed by planners, developers, and local authorities as a barrier to economic development. 

It is represented as a backwards, localized, low-tech and economically poorly performing activity—a legacy of past underdevelopment that should be abandoned in order to make space for the expansion of a more ‘productive’ economy.

Less tangible effects

“It is especially difficult to measure peri-urban agriculture’s less tangible effects on local communities and cultural identities,” says lead author Dr Giuseppe Feola, associate professor at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development. This means that both those who oppose and defend urban agriculture often measure its impacts solely in terms of material or economic productivity.

A lively social network of food exchange

“This leaves out less easily quantifiable contributions such as the symbolic importance of food self-provisioning and its connection to heritage and identity,” he adds. This has in turn contributed to its invisibility in planning documents and in the policy-making arena, particularly from a social and cultural perspective.

Strong support for peri-urban agriculture 

The study on Sogamoso’s peri-urban space revealed a lively social network of food exchange and an even stronger practice of growing at least part of one own’s food supply. Peri-urban farmers had a positive perception of the role of peri-urban agriculture and noted its positive contribution as a source of income as well as a source of healthy, clean food, which contributed to their food security.

Appreciation of existing modes of living

“The stakes of urban development are high: urban expansion into the peri-urban space is not trading empty and unproductive land for modern housing and development,” explains Feola.

Instead it’s driving the loss of peri-urban agriculture and food self-provisioning and exchange as socially and culturally meaningful sources of social cohesion, alternative income, food security, and social resilience.

“Revealing such practices of quiet sustainability highlights the importance of existing modes of living. It also discredits discourses of underdevelopment employed by those pushing for land appropriation for exclusionary and ‘modern’ Western development models,” he adds.

Further reading

Feola, G., Suzunaga, J., Soler, J., & Wilson, A. (2020). Peri-urban agriculture as quiet sustainability: Challenging the urban development discourse in Sogamoso, Colombia. Journal of Rural Studies.