Somewhere in between towns, markets, and neighbors Agricultural transition in the rural-urban interface of Bangalore, India

This paper presents a flexible conceptual and methodological framework to model the dynamics of agricultural transition in the increasingly complex rural-urban interfaces of large cities. Our empirical analysis is based on data of a household survey conducted in the rural-urban interface of Bangalore, India. In our analysis we follow a polycentric perspective of urbanization introducing a two-dimensional variable measuring the effect of urbanization. Furthermore, we accommodate high input and crop diversity by applying a Structured Additive Regression (STAR) model. Our results show that satellite towns and road infrastructure are the main channels of urbanization to accelerate agricultural transition. The access to satellite towns seems to be even more important for smallholders to modernize their management systems than the access to the actual main city of Bangalore. Finally, our study implies that more flexible models are necessary to understand the dynamics of agricultural transition in the surroundings of fast-growing large towns, the kind of town expected to be dominating the urbanization trend in the coming decades. Acknowledgement