Understanding the complexity of city-agriculture interactions. The "agri-urban system" of Bobo-Dioulasso, West Africa

Urban agriculture is a phenomenon worldwide and invites us to overcome the frontiers that traditionally separate urban and agricultural studies. This paper seeks to emphasize the importance of the agri-urban system concept to analyze the complexity of city-agriculture interactions. From the study of a West African city, its objective is to develop an interpretative framework of these interactions at the city region level. We propose a systemic approach based on the intersection of three groups of interactions: i) spatial and historical interactions between nature, agriculture and the city, ii) the interactions between the urban system and agriculture, and iii) the interactions within the urban agricultural system. This is to identify how a variety of relationships between city and agriculture are developed and what is at stake in the persistence of urban agriculture. Our study reveals firstly the place agriculture has occupied in the city's development and how farmers have mobilized local resources to develop a diversity of urban or peri-urban farming activities. Secondly, analyzing the agricultural urban system reveals specific forms of urban governance and the weight of informality in the development of urban agriculture. Finally, our analysis highlights the weight of crop-livestock and rural-urban interactions in the functioning of the agricultural urban system. To conclude, the concept of agri-urban system allows us to better understand what covers a city region in its spatial, socio-political and functional relationship to agriculture. It also helps to measure the importance of adaptive governance in the construction of sustainable relationships between city and agriculture