ABSTRACT
Peri-urban agriculture, in a strict etymological sense, is agriculture that is practised on the periphery of cities, regardless of the type of production system concerned. 1 Depending on the particular case, the relationship of this agriculture to the city can take the form of either shared ownership or a reciprocal exchange of functions. In the latter case, agriculture becomes part of the urban equation, with the result that farmland and built-up land then jointly take part in the urbanization process as parts of the urban space. Urban agriculture (UA) thus becomes the agricultural activity whose resources, products and services have, or can have, a direct urban use. This is the definition that is currently provided by the UA team at the research laboratory of the École nationale supérieure du paysage de Versailles and that the author adopted in this research when speaking more specifically about UA's transforming processes.
