New urbanized agricultural lanscapes around Ghent: exploring a public investment strategy

Abstract

Actually, we are losing the soil…

Unfortunately, our precious topsoil that is to be considered alive is deteriorating rapidly. Indeed, mostly as a response to feed the hungry city (getting increasingly bigger due to immense population growth during the past century), the agricultural landscape from the past had to be quickly transformed into the industrial one as we know it today. The modern and capitalist urbanism thereby externalised the soil issue. However, this kind of development is now in large part at the root of global problems as the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, chemical pollution, etc. Agriculture needs to change if it doesn’t want to hit the planet’s structural borders (read: planetary boundaries). As a matter of fact, it could be at the forefront of the ecological transition.

… and with it, the soil carer too.

So, due to agricultural intensification, the quality of the soil is being neglected. But, just as important, the role of the soil carer (read: the farmer) is being neglected as well. Even though, in the past, the vision on the development of agriculture was very clear, namely the immense upscaling that was needed to meet the needs of an increasingly urban society, there has never been a real spatial policy regarding agriculture. Instead, the open spaces that are still left in the peri-urban area are being sold and urbanized at high rate. Farmers, then, are being left behind with a landscape that doesn’t match their needs. Peri-urban agriculture, thus, needs to be reconsidered to provide farmers with landscapes that could eventually contribute to their liveability. As a matter of fact, these landscapes could be at the forefront of the social transition.

Let’s care for our soil and soil carers.

Hence, in a mainly urban society where there is no space left for landscapes with a living soil that benefits ecologically, and with soil carers who. cannot live economically and socially well any longer, this master’s dissertation aims to explore some other kind of development in the urban fringe, more particularly around the City of Ghent. Put differently, this dissertation aims to explore a public investment strategy that is focused on new urbanized agricultural landscapes in which the farmer can play a key role, and in which agriculture is, in part, at the root of both the ecological and the social transition. As a matter of fact, I’ll argue that the future agricultural heritage could be at the forefront of the socioecological transition.

— Abstract, taken from the master dissertation