Chapter 2

Re-Ruralising the Urban Edge: Lessons

from Europe, USA & the Global South

Helen Armstrong and Abby Mellick Lopes

Abstract Major cities of the world are characterised as either growing cities, such
as in Asia and Australia, or shrinking cities as in Europe and North America.
Growing cities are destroying their rural edge while shrinking cities are creating a
new rural urbanism, often in their urban centre. This chapter describes the instru-
mentality of design and its enabling function in achieving new typologies for peri-/
inter-urban rural land with key drivers being state-of-the-art technology and map-
ping techniques. Peri-urban economics require new land-tenure models and innova-
tive forms of agriculture that synthesise agriculture, nature conservation,
infrastructure and communities. The chapter also looks at small-scale community
innovations including a number of initiatives in Penrith, Western Sydney, such as
Out & About in Penrith which explored community activities in local open space,
Penrith as a Regional City Garden with diverse models of urban agriculture and the
Cooling the Commons project which explores the role that forms of urban agricul-
ture might play in adapting urban environments for liveability in a climate-changed
future. Findings from these projects reveal the potential of mobile infrastructure and
temporary urbanism for Western Sydney.

Keywords Urbanisation • Re-ruralisation • Urban edge • Urban economics • Land

tenure • Urban environment

H. Armstrong (*)
QUT, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
e-mail: [Link]@[Link]
A.M. Lopes
School of Humanities & Communication Arts, Western Sydney University,
Sydney, NSW, Australia
e-mail: [Link]@[Link]

© The Author(s) 2016 17

B. Maheshwari et al. (eds.), Balanced Urban Development:
Options and Strategies for Liveable Cities, Water Science and Technology
Library 72, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-28112-4_2
18 H. Armstrong and A.M. Lopes

2.1 Introduction

This chapter draws from a range of international projects in the peri-urban and
urban areas, both large and small, that are addressing the loss of food-producing
land such as the planning and design work occurring in the Netherlands where the
debate about urban development is focussed on how to achieve new forms of rural/
urban/natural landscapes. There are also important lessons to be learned from the
shrinking cities of Europe and North America where a new rural urbanism is emerg-
ing; either encouraged by government such as the Farmadelphia Program in
Philadelphia or informally as in Detroit and Berlin. Similarly in the German towns
of Hamburg, Frieburg and Tübingen, the rural tide is turning with new models for
collective farming in the zschischenstadt or urbanised countryside (Sieverts 2003).

2.2 Four Ways to Revive Sydney’s Peri-Urban Agriculture

What role should planners and designers in Australia play to address the loss of
food-producing lands? We suggest this problem can be addressed in four distinct
ways.
First, many peri-urban farms are market gardens developed by migrants in the
1950s–1960s. The farmers are now elderly and understandably see rezoning their
farms for residential development as a retirement income. Respect for this equity
issue requires innovative planning for land tenure, related to productive land that
allows owners to realise their land’s development value without changing the rural
use. This can be achieved through transfer of development rights (TDR) (Armstrong
2005). Parallels exist with built heritage, successfully addressed through TDR
which enable owners of heritage buildings to realise similar capital returns to those
who own non-heritage buildings by transferring their development rights to other
locations. Western Sydney’s designated Growth Centres are ideally placed for such
transfer of development rights to save productive peri-urban land.
The second issue relates to reversing ‘Rural Residential’ zoning. Many local
government areas are pressured by the electorate to rezone agricultural land to
‘Rural Residential’. This is the least supportable way to use such valuable produc-
tive land as it merely satisfies the desires of affluent exurbanites seeking so-called
‘lifestyle living’ in the rural areas outside cities. Conversion of prime farming land
in the Sydney region into rural residential lots has been at the forefront of political
and development conflict about appropriate planning for peri-urban lands (Sinclair
et al. 2003).
European designer/planners offer alternative models for ‘Rural Living’ that
allow for continued productive farming associated with new clustered residential
areas. This involves innovative land tenure and inventive forms of governance
drawn from the organizational strategies associated with cooperatives. There are
interesting examples in the Netherlands, Hamburg and Zurich, such as the
2 Re-Ruralising the Urban Edge: Lessons from Europe, USA & the Global South 19

award-winning proposal by the landscape designers, ceto-o/kunzt + herbert, for

‘Fischbeck Mississippi’, Hamburg (Aufmkolk 2003) and the Tübingen-Südstadt’s
community plan developed to contain the pressure for urban sprawl using orchards,
city farms and ecological infrastructure for water purification. This community plan
won a European Urban and Regional Planning Award (ECOCITY Tübingen-
Derendingen n.d.). Zurich has new consumer-led cooperatives for the production of
local, seasonal and organic food ensuring the peri-urban stays productive. The
Netherlands sees its new Agroparks as providing numerous benefits of spatial clus-
tering such as closing the cycle with community waste and reducing transport
requirements (Smeets 2011).
These cooperatives have prompted the European Commission to instigate a
research project ‘Towards sustainable modes of urban and peri-urban food provi-
sioning’ called SUPURBFOOD and financed by the European Commission’s 7th
Framework Program for Research and Technological Development as a 3 year proj-
ect from 2012 to 2015. The project is analysing agri-food dynamics, policies and
governance arrangements in different European city regions and looking at how
observations from the Global South, such as short food chain delivery, water, nutri-
ent and waste management and multifunctional agriculture in urban and peri-urban
areas, can be applied to European city regions (Supurbfood n.d.). In Asia, Beijing is
actively promoting multi-functional recreational agriculture in the peri-urban zones,
using land use planning as well as allocating parts of the municipal budget for
investments in the peri-urban region (Supurbfood n.d.).
The third issue involves making productive land attractive to new farmers. The
recent market growth of water products, ecosystem services, and niche marketing of
gourmet products are emerging opportunities for rural economics.
Finally, the fourth issue; the development of new urban agriculture associated
with hybrid urban forms which conflate architecture, landscape, infrastructure and
high tech farming in innovative ways. Thomas Sieverts (2003), the Berlin-based
planner, called the peri-urban lands the ‘Zwischenstadt’ or ‘in-between lands’, sug-
gesting that urban-rural landscapes can be a new form of city characterised by
mutual penetration of built forms and rural landscapes. For over a decade he has
been asking why not develop a new cultural landscape in which food production,
recreation, and ecological balance create new relationships with built-up areas? It
would appear that such hybrid urban forms are emerging and many of them are
exploring innovations associated with temporary urbanism.

2.3 Lessons from the Global South

Planners in Casablanca, the largest port in Africa and an emerging megacity, are
responding to Sieverts’ question. Peri-urban agriculture in Casablanca has been the
focus of a large international research team funded by the German Federal Ministry
of Education and Research (BMBF) looking at Sustainable Development for
Megacities of Tomorrow in order to develop energy and climate efficiency (Urban
20 H. Armstrong and A.M. Lopes

Agriculture, Casablanca (UAC) n.d.). They have been working together to observe
how urban agriculture can contribute to sustainable, climate-optimised, urban
development. Their focus has been on the integration of the existing agricultural use
in Grand Casablanca into urban development and on its transformation from typical
rural land use into multifunctional green infrastructure. The teams have used reflex-
ive action research to explore synergetic rural-urban linkages and new livelihoods in
peri-urban areas (Giseke 2011).
The environmental implications of these new hybrid urban agricultural forms
now include issues related to food security under climate change. Assessment of
climate change and urban/peri-urban agriculture was recently initiated in nine cities
across Africa and South Asia in order to understand the complex interplay of cli-
mate change, urban agriculture, and urban food systems. This is being funded by the
European Commission, with co-funding from UNEP and additional support from
USAID.
The extensive programs being initiated in Europe and involving Africa and Asia
are big steps. There are also small steps involving community actions in the shrink-
ing cities of North America and Europe.

2.4 Lessons from the Shrinking Cities

Detroit, epitomising the extensive low-density suburbanised American city, is now

designated as a ‘shrinking city’. The extent of abandonment due to de-industrialisation
has resulted in sprawling anarchy. Yet out of the ashes something optimistic is hap-
pening that is far removed from the models used by planners or architects. The inner
ring of worker-housing surrounding the remnant central business district has become
a new form of rural land. The city is now a mosaic of deteriorating urban structures
and new rural spaces. The new rural areas, made up of many hundreds of urban
farms, intersect strangely with the decaying infrastructure of an abandoned big city.
These community-initiated farms, facilitated by the Detroit Agriculture Network,
are resulting in a different urban paradigm where an outer suburban ring surrounds
a re-ruralised core of new farmland and forests occupying the former inner-city.
Although most of the farms are on squatted land, the success of the community
enterprises has encouraged the city administration to develop ‘Land Banks’ where
for one dollar, residents can receive the title to land, providing they maintain the
land and pay taxes. So successful has the community enterprise been, that investors
are now seeking to be part of the new urban agriculture (Guss 2010).
Philadelphia is another shrinking city. The increasing number of derelict spaces
and vacant buildings in the urban fabric prompted the city to hold a design competi-
tion for Philadelphia’s ‘voids’ in 2005. The winning entries addressed water manage-
ment and environmental rehabilitation, but one entry, particularly empowering for
the community, was an urban farming proposal called FARMADELPHIA by the
designers, Front Studio. The FARMADELPHIA proposal involves a city-wide
conversion of vacant lots into farmlands where each block maintains responsibility
for the management and harvesting of crops. Within a far-reaching 7 year agricultural
2 Re-Ruralising the Urban Edge: Lessons from Europe, USA & the Global South 21

plan for the city, sequenced crop are proposed, starting with easy to grow perennial
crops such as corn, raspberry bushes, mustard greens, herbs and so on and progress-
ing through to well-managed permaculture (Farmadelphia 2006).
Ruralising the urban is also being explored as a hybrid between recreation and
cultivation in the form of new models for city gardens such as Gleisdreieck Park in
Berlin which involve community engagement and responsible citizenship. Harking
back to the medieval system of interlocking duties and obligations of all, from the
city institutions to the homeless, these city gardens are proposed as the locus of
local food production, new forms of bartering, innovative environmental design,
resilient and flexible examples for twenty-first century communities.
In Western Sydney, Penrith planners have been exploring the idea of a regional
city garden. As the largest of the three river cities in Sydney, Penrith is a city at the
nexus of the Cumberland Plains, the Blue Mountains and the emerging Penrith
Lakes. Penrith planners are looking at ways to contribute to responsible urban living
in the twenty-first century by forging local and regional partnerships with peri-
urban farmers and other developing industries. Drawing from city garden and peri-
urban research and consultative workshops, a proposal for a regional city garden
was developed as a major focal site in the ‘Penrith Lakes’ area with supplementary
loci throughout the region that can consolidate community partnerships and show-
case local products, including those from local farms. The educative role of Penrith
City Garden was intended to operate through smaller thematic gardens, including
innovative peri-urban agriculture enterprises as well as collaborative research proj-
ects with Hawkesbury Harvest and the University of Western Sydney.
Using the principles of eco-urbanism, particularly open-endedness, complexity
and resilience when subjected to dynamic change, these regional city gardens
develop Sieverts’ ideas where the landscape acts as multiple ‘Soft Systems’, includ-
ing urban water features that undertake water treatment, phyto-remediation on der-
elict sites, energy harvesting, green roofs and walls, and designed landscapes that
accommodate climate change by employing increasingly sophisticated use of rain
water to address unpredictability.
Another innovative example of urban agriculture was proposed for the White
Bay-Rozelle Bay precinct just west of the Sydney CBD, currently lying derelict.
The innovation lay in the concept of urban agriculture as a temporary use involving
flexible infrastructure that can exploit abandoned industrial sites. The proposal
included ‘light’ and ‘dark’ agriculture. The ‘light’ concept, proposed for the empty
hardstand previously used for container storage on Glebe Island, was an urban
orchard under a giant flexible glasshouse; while ‘dark agriculture’ was proposed for
the long nondescript maritime storage shed on the western edge of White Bay.
The proposed glasshouse was a glazed space-frame over a sub-tropical and citrus
orchard adjoining glazed vertical farms and assisted by the old silos, which were
reworked into a complex system for water purification using recycling water, as
well as sites for storage of produce. Surrounding the diamond facetted glasshouse,
a shrubby wind-blown embankment of hardy bush-food contrasted with the moist
sub-tropical environment inside. ‘Dark’ agriculture in a large abandoned shed,
consisted of enclosed layers of agriculture systems needing less and less light; on
22 H. Armstrong and A.M. Lopes

top, a system known as valcent vertical hydroponics took advantage of roof lighting,
below this were omega carousel gardens with internal lighting, and below this com-
mercial mushroom farms in the dark. These were all modular enabling rapid assem-
bly and disassembly. A key to the feasibility of these proposals lay in the economics
of temporary use (Armstrong 2011).

2.5 The Value of Temporary Uses

Temporary use of urban space has progressively become the focus of innovative
planning (La Varra 2005). A European urban forum, Urban Catalyst, has developed
a unique archive for planners, municipalities, developers and others from their
investigations into temporary uses in residual urban areas. They note that conven-
tional architecture and urban planning are increasingly unable to find answers to the
radical transformation occurring in cities. To address this, Urban Catalyst’s interdis-
ciplinary network has developed strategic planning tools which integrate temporary
uses into long lasting urban developments. These are now available in the publica-
tion, URBAN CATALYST- THE POWER OF TEMPORARY USE (Oswalt et al.
2013); a compilation of more than 10 years of research and practice in the field of
temporary use as a catalyst of urban development in Europe. Urban agriculture with
its annual crop cycle is well suited to temporary and flexible infrastructure.
The British-based urban theorists, Bishop and Williams (2012) have provided an
overview of numerous temporary urban projects in Britain and North America in
their book The Temporary City. Of the 68 projects they describe, most are related to
creative interventions or community agriculture and gardening initiatives.
Community horticulture projects also feature in the four case studies described in
Urban Tactics, Temporary Interventions + Long Term Planning (Killing Architects
2012).
In Australia, the concept of temporary use has been well-developed by the Pacific
Islander community in Brisbane who manage a mobile yam plantation. They
approach various authorities with vacant land and request the right to use it for a
community plantation for 3 years. They carry insurances and use their own water
truck so that they do not require assistance from the authorities who own the land
and the owners are not liable for accidents etc. Usually a number of families plant
and cultivate the plantation, often sharing banana or guava trees with other families.
The yams are harvested and shared while some are kept for next year’s planting.
When the land is required, the trees are transplanted to the next site, leaving the
temporary site as it was (Armstrong pending publication).
Another successful model of temporary use, this time in local parks, has been
explored by Penrith City Council: the Mobile Play-van (Sofoulis et al. 2008). The
Council’s mobile Play-van is stocked with a changing array of children’s play
equipment, furniture, toys and art materials. Experienced Council community
workers take the Play-van on scheduled visits to local and pocket parks and
2 Re-Ruralising the Urban Edge: Lessons from Europe, USA & the Global South 23

neighbourhood centres, bringing opportunities for adult and child social engage-
ment. Play-van visits transform even the bleakest looking environments into hives
of positive social activity. The service has a community facilitation role, providing
educational and community service information as well as a role in alleviating
social isolation. Aside from mothers, many grandparents, single dads and involved
neighbours accompany the young children. The Play-van has a role in getting peo-
ple into the habit of going to parks; some stay on after the van has gone. Many
councils offer a Mobile Play-van service; however the transformative value of the
service is magnified in a low-density city like Penrith, which is not served particu-
larly well by public transport infrastructure.
The Play-van service demonstrates that open spaces do not have to offer the same
facilities to the same groups of ‘average’ users every hour of the day; nor do differ-
ent groups of users necessarily need different open spaces. Instead, park uses and
facilities can be temporary, allowing the park to become an attractor for different
social and cultural activities at different times. Thought of in this way, the park is
not a static space but a dynamic event (Sofoulis et. al. 2008).
In this context, parks and open space in Western Sydney can include community
agriculture in interesting ways, such as the National Gallery of Victoria’s successful
Urban Commons (Urban Commons n.d.) and the Nomadic Green in Berlin which is
a mobile garden in the Kreuzberg district set up as a not-for-profit open organic
garden dedicated to exchanging knowledge and work through growing vegetables.
By growing vegetables in rice bags, plastic crates and milk containers they have
created a dynamic system where they can bring the plants with them if a change of
location is needed. The garden was started as a pilot project in the summer of 2009
by Nomadic Green (International Network for Urban Agriculture 2009).
The concept of mobile urban agriculture has also been explored by Atelier
d’architecture autogérée (aaa) described as a studio for self-managed architecture.
Based in Paris and co-founded by architects, Constantin Petcou and Doina Petrescu
(2012), aaa’s projects are experiments in the temporary reuse of leftover urban
space using catalysts in the form of enabling infrastructure that local residents grad-
ually transform into self-managed spaces (International Network for Urban
Agriculture 2009). The success of their ‘Ecoboxes’, a series of vegetable gardens
made from recycled materials, has prompted urban horticulture ideas to be extended
further in the project called ‘Passage 56’. This involved the transformation of a
disused passageway into a productive farm/garden whose ecological footprint
through recycling, composting and use of solar panels was minimal. Tactically, aaa
learned from these projects that it is easier to use space with easy access, such as
disused laneways or vacant land, to avoid being blocked by various authorities.
Rather than buying land, aaa negotiate for short and long term use, focussing on
interstices and urban spaces which are not currently subject to financial speculation.
They also realise that mobility of the structures is a key to allaying municipal con-
cerns about permanent appropriation of land. Their urban agriculture project called
‘Agrocité’ began in 2012 in Colombes, a suburban town near Paris. As an agro-
cultural unit, Agrocité comprises an experimental micro-farm, community gardens,
24 H. Armstrong and A.M. Lopes

educational and cultural spaces and a series of experimental devices for compost
heating, rain water collection, solar energy production, aquaponic gardening, phyto-
remediation. ‘Agrocité’ can be thought of as a ‘Civic Agriculture Unit, which con-
sists of a micro-farm aimed at collective and familial use’(Urban Tactics n.d.).
The project at Colombes is divided into three areas; one for activities related to
nature and agriculture, one for community gardening and one for an ‘AgroLab’
experimenting with intensive organic agricultural production. It also has a shared
greenhouse for plants and seedlings, equipment for collecting rainwater, phyto-
purification, solar energy and biogas, aquaponics crops, and agricultural short cir-
cuits. Despite being such an elaborate project, the components can be disassembled
and moved to other locations if required.

2.5.1 Temporary Use as a Strategy for Urban-Rural

Reimagining

These examples provide valuable lessons for how new ways of imagining the
dynamic relationship between rural and urban spaces might be enabled. Temporary
uses can initiate, introduce and elicit social creativity, as well as provide an environ-
ment for ‘social dreaming’ (Dunne and Raby 2013) while garnering support for
interventions prior to more fixed and permanent ‘solutions’ taking place. In the fol-
lowing we elaborate on some design considerations based on the projects we have
explored in this chapter that may productively inform strategies for temporary agri-
cultural and horticultural use in cities and suburbs on the urban edge.

[Link] Cultural Sensitivity and Shared Vision

Communities are complex and dynamic and already involved in using peri-urban
landscapes in ways that need to be acknowledged and understood prior to urban
agriculture initiatives taking place. Collaborative and reflexive forms of community
engagement and co-design, including creative mapping strategies, elicit the creativ-
ity of non-designers, generate shared future visions and promote ongoing commu-
nity involvement.
As the previously discussed examples of mobile and temporary urban agriculture
show, successful initiatives are often community-led and operated enterprises.
Co-design processes might facilitate engagement with peri-urban communities to
respond creatively to emerging opportunities for rural economics that may not have
been previously considered.

[Link] Identifying Shared Values and Needs

Culturally specific designs can exacerbate territoriality, while designs for shared
age, life stages and interests can foster social cohesion. There is an opportunity for
2 Re-Ruralising the Urban Edge: Lessons from Europe, USA & the Global South 25

urban agriculture to contribute to the development of social and practical skills, and
foster intergenerational communication. Knowledge exchange, experimentation
and social learning as exemplified by the R-Urban project, need to be seen as a criti-
cal part of re-ruralising the urban edge.

[Link] Identifying Enabling Infrastructure

As shrinking cities such as Detroit and Philadelphia show, derelict and abandoned
sites, vacant lots and voids are being reimagined for their regenerative possibilities.
Such ‘in between’ spaces, as well as existing roof and wall surfaces, become
enabling infrastructure as ‘platforms’ for creative communities (Manzini 2005).
Mobile infrastructure like the Play-van facilitate temporary use, and enterprises
such as the Nomadic Green and aaa projects reveal the potential for the sustainable
reuse of discarded materials and products in flexible applications.

2.5.2 Temporary Urbanism in the Peri-urban Riverlands

of Western Sydney

Drawing on the model provided by aaa (Paris), the R-Urban project, and learning
from the previous Penrith projects, the MURRS group (Mapping Urban Resilience
in Riverland Sydney) seeks to explore a local dialogue with the concept of urban
‘resilience’ through a hybrid collective approach using Action Research to explore
both human and non-human factors.
Initially the team are establishing local government partners in order to under-
take a series of mapping processes that explore human and non-human aspects of
the agreed local context. Blacktown City Council, a local government area east of
Penrith City and including large areas of peri-urban land, has expressed interest in
mapping their numerous pockets of left-over spaces that are too small for develop-
ment with a view to community urban agriculture projects. Blacktown City also has
large areas of land already subdivided and partially developed. The MURRS team
are exploring partnerships with developers where temporary community projects,
including vegetable gardens and workshops for temporary shade houses, could ani-
mate the currently vacant land awaiting development.
In recent times Urban Heat Islanding (UHI) has emerged as a significant concern
for Western Sydney’s future (Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Council
2008). UHI results from the replacement of vegetation with heat-absorbent sur-
faces, increasing ambient temperatures and extreme heat days. This unanticipated
consequence of hard urban development provides further impetus for the explora-
tion of new forms of urban agriculture. In addition to providing substantial cooling
benefits (Susca et al. 2011), urban vegetation provides protection from heat stress
(Loughnan et al. 2012), potentially alleviating reliance on energy-intensive air con-
ditioning; as well farming and gardening supporting social participation in open
spaces, which has substantial wellbeing benefits. In ‘Out & About in Penrith’, the
26 H. Armstrong and A.M. Lopes

lack of shade was revealed as a strong inhibitor of the use of open public space
(Sofoulis et al. 2008). The creation of ‘cool commons’ is a creative challenge for the
growing city.

2.6 Conclusion

The peri-urban productive lands in coastal areas of Eastern and South-Western

Australia, including the rich volcanic land of Northern New South Wales and South
East Queensland and the alluvial soils of Western Sydney, are continuing to be
appropriated by urban sprawl. To address this loss, lessons can be learned through
the current planning and design work occurring in the shrinking cities of Europe and
North America where a new rural urbanism is growing. In this chapter we have
outlined four ways in which this rural urbanism is retrieving lands for urban agricul-
ture. Findings from these projects reveal the potential of mobile infrastructure and
temporary urbanism for adapting urban environments to enhance liveability in a
climate-changed future. The MURRS group is exploring partnerships that could
exploit the potential of these lessons in creating opportunities for ‘re-ruralising’ the
urban edge in Western Sydney.

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