Operational modelling of peri-urban farmland for food planning in Mediterranean region

S5: Post Sprawl policies for the horizontal metropolisIn the current context of awareness of Mediterranean agricultural multifunctionality and social concerns about food security and quality, the role of urban-rural linkages for the management of landscapes across multiple geographical contexts (local, regional) need to be specified. Actually, agriculture and food production should play a key role in urban and regional planning. There has been a growing literature on peri-urban farming to characterise its dynamics and to quantify urban pressure and farmland consumption by urban sprawl. However, these works require expensive surveys and comprehensive databases that are usually inaccessible to planners and public-policy analysts. Furthermore, there exist no integrated tools usable at the public policy scale that account for these interactions of the agricultural models at the farm/local (e.g. yields, agricultural plot patterns, stakeholders’ activities...) and regional level (e.g. food security, energy flows...). In a planning perspective, the issue at stake is the integration of two approaches aiming to provide significant levels of precision in a tool usable at the policy level. This communication presents an analytic framework of peri-urban farmland that is operational for public action in the Mediterranean region. Based on a comprehensive analysis of a local case study, including in-depth survey, on-site landscape reading, remote sensing analysis and interviews, we have classed peri-urban farming by means of spatial units of peri-urban agriculture (USAPU). Then, we have extracted all useful information from the classification on the seven municipalities of the study area and related it with available data at the municipal and provincial level (similar to NUTS-3), in order to train a fractional regression model. The model is then tested on the rest of the province in order to predict the presence and actual proportion of each USAPU out of the total agricultural lands of each municipality. This work is the starting point for the development of a methodology characterizing complex Mediterranean peri-urban areas, simple to handle and hence operational for policy-makers and planners. This methodology might be an instrument for decision support concerning food planning. This finding is a real novelty in regional science and it is relevant beyond the scope of the case study presented