ABSTRACT
Agriculture is currently playing a role in Western European public policy and planning by means of land-use and land-cover local regulations (Galli et al., 2010; Groot et al., 2009). City sprawl is encroaching onto farmland and the urban fringe of intensive agriculture that used to be an important land use is diminishing fast (EEA, 2006). Other related functions are also taking over (Delattre and Napoléone, 2011). A new set of concerns is arising, such as landscape preservation, ground-water quality, health and food security or sovereignty (Griffon, 2006). These are some of the reasons that legitimate the protection of agricultural zones in urban planning (Hervieu, 2002; Vidal and Fleury, 2009; Waldhardt et al., 2010). Nowadays, agriculture’s multi-functionality is credited with providing tangible benefits on ecological and economical territorial dynamics, at both local and regional levels (Groot et al., 2007; Guillaumin et al., 2008). This chapter seeks to examine how local policy can include agricultural and
urban planning into a singular territorial project that would be no longer urban or rural but a resilient model integrating both realms. We seek a framework to define changing agriculture practices and landscapes on urban fringes, especially those that have been gobbled up by city sprawl. By extension, we question those tools and instruments that could be developed to take into account agricultural issues in planning. Our aim is to draw up an empirical and theoretical framework, looking for a methodology to integrate peri-urban agriculture management in urban planning as a tool for policy makers and stakeholders. Our thesis is that farming under urban influence is responding to the pressures
and opportunities that arise from its geographical adjacency to cities. Five trends can be identified, based on a literature review and fieldwork:
1 An intensive and specialised high-value production farming selling both in short or long supply chains (Aubry and Kebir, 2013; Nahmias and Le Caro, 2012). These are stable farms with a long-term oriented strategy, and aware of marketing techniques.
