Student information
Urban, peri-urban and regional planning
Multi-functional agriculture and food systems is an novel issue in spatial planning in developed countries. Over the last decade ‘local food systems planning’ and ‘mixed land use’ have developed into mature research fields in the academic domain of planning and in practice.
A recent scan of prominent international planning journals by Broekhof and Van der Valk (2010) shows a rapidly growing body of literature and a proliferation of research in Europe and North America. Lately an academic community of practice focusing on regional food systems and multi-functional agriculture in the metropolitan landscape has emerged in Europe and North America.
During the twentieth century planning and agriculture have been strangers to each-other in the developed countries. In developing countries sustainable urban agriculture is a well publicized phenomenon, which has been largely ignored so far in mainstream planning journals. Planning has been equated to planning urban land use for decades. Agricultural land use was reserved for sectoral organizations and regimes. New policy and planning concepts promoting policy integration between landscape planning and agriculture have been around since the nineteen eighties and are recently entrenched in the CAP and the American Farm Bill.
This track aims at an update of the state of the art focusing in on recent in-depth studies in local and regional spatial planning. Although the number of papers in the field has grown substantially, the bulk of the publications is descriptive-analytical and devoid of theory. Planning as an academic discipline suffers from the consequences of undecided battles between a handful of competing paradigms. So discussions in this track will explicitly address promising theoretical perspectives in planning research, thus contributing to progress in planning.
Specific questions to be addressed in this track are:
- To what extent is multi-functional agriculture included in urban, peri-urban and regional planning processes?
- How do planners deal with and attempt to overcome competition between different land-use claims?
- Which decision-making approaches (e.g. government command and control, collaborative planning, stakeholder consultation) are applied in the resolution of competing land use claims?
Contact: arnold.vandervalk@wur.nl
Duim, Rene van der (2010), Safari. A journey through tourism, conservation and development. Wageningen University: Wageningen. Inaugural lecture upon taking the post of Special Professor of Tourism and Sustainable Development at Wageningen University on 9 December 2010.
Webb, David (2011), The limits of associative democracy: a comment on an actor-relational approach in planning. In: Planning Theory, vol. 10, nr 3,pp. 273-287.