This article has been published as the editorial of the electronic newsletter
"Peri Urban Development in South East Asia", and has been re-published with the
consent of the author. More information on this newsletter can be found under http://www.uni-giessen.de/fbr09/pudsea/
A major theme in the creation of viable urban-rural interfaces is the
creation of natural resource scarcities by urbanisation. Urbanisation is driven
by the desire for short-run economic growth and wealth in ever growing cities.
Therefore, periurban agriculture should provide a bypass for this ecologically
unhealthy development of large urban agglomerations. Sustainable, or at least
less ecologically harmful, development of mega-cities can only be reached if it
is grounded in a better development of periurban agriculture, biotic resource
recycling and waste management.
In other words, a more pronounced
sustainable development of periurban agriculture requires a strong biotic
natural resource component. It further means creating closer ties between
ecological habitat functions on one hand and urban or industrial habitat
functions of larger metropolitan agglomeration on the other. However, linking
and integrating functions must be grounded in profound land-use planning, which,
in our opinion, can only be indicative planning or the provision of orientation.
This includes land zoning and taxation or subsidisation of negative or positive
externalities, respectively, as policy instruments.
Creating viable
urban-rural interfaces should not only be market driven. In the current
deliberate and somewhat unplanned and unsustainable development of mega-cities
in South-East Asia, periurban land-use planning in conjunction with building
rural-urban interfaces is an important new policy tool. To achieve a critical
threshold of ecological sustainability, local administrators of cities need
guidance on how to balance the resource cycle and cope with organic wastes on a
larger regional scale. In situations where different cycles should be closed,
government interventions are needed to correct market failures. An ecologically
more balanced growth of cities can only be reached if the potential interactions
between market driven growth and spatially driven planning initiatives are
explored.
However, agroecological land-use orientation in city
planning does not intend to give state planning the upper hand, thereby
hampering industrial expansion. In fact, catering for the ecological basis of
city growth means to create platforms from which to initiate market development.
For instance, the potential of private waste management and sewage recycling on
the basis of government directives could be explored. Directives may enforce
consumers to seek private companies for their sewage treatment, enforce sewage
treatment companies to look for farmers that offer acceptance of organic
material and sludge at lowest prices, and farmers to buy clean technologies.
However, especially the urban farmers need planning and land security to start
such an operation.
To achieve these objectives for sustainable
development of cities, a broader investigation of the specific functions and
system components of periurban agriculture is needed. Special design and
treatment of functions of land-use types is urgently needed to provide local
decision-makers with options for adequate land-use planning. However, the
analysis cannot solely focus on periurban regions as the only, or main, support
system of cities. Alternatives for purchases of functions of metropolitan areas
have to be included. It is always the purchase of these functions from a global
market that serves as a reference point. In particular, with respect to food
imports, trade-offs appear. But local waste treatment also must be challenged on
economic grounds. For instance, we all know that waste can very easily be dumped
into the sea. In economic terms, the waste treatment service in this case is
purchased from the sea for a zero-price. However, the property of a global
community that shares the world seas is violated; not to mention, the tourism or
fishing industry.
This aspect brings about a double-sided discourse into
the debate on policy options for land use. On the one hand, we have to look at
opportunity costs for local provision of live support of mega-cities by
periurban land use. This means that we have to consider economic, ecological and
social prices for dumping or offering payment to the countries willing to
provide the envisaged services. On the other hand, we have to look at the earth
from the perspective of a spaceship. This implies that policy-makers in these
mega-cities may have a duty not to dump waste outside their borders, for
instance, but should rather look at periurban land use as the dumping ground. If
you look at a city like a world on its own, it becomes a micro-cosmos that has
to look for its own solutions for recycling organic matter using agriculture. To
seek for waste dumping as possible local alternatives might become an obligation
in global debates. Hence, we have to specify limits for transactions within live
support systems of mega-cities, or look for real costs.
For
practical reasons, periurban land-use planning should focus on periurban
agriculture providing a core local service function instead of relying on
resources elsewhere. However, this requires clean technologies including in
agriculture.
The challenges today are to extend this thinking to
much larger regional scales, to consider modern clean technologies, and to
develop or streamline modern policy instruments in such a way that we can reach
a threshold of sustainability.