A city is not an island – rethinking rural-urban connections
Our previous blog in this series questioned the idea of the ‘global food system’ and suggested that we might more productively secure our future food supplies by focussing on the relationships between particular urban and particular rural areas: the city/region food system. This time we delve into the links between cities and their surrounding rural areas and ask whether strengthening these city region connections might bring benefits for both.
Cities have always been completely dependent on rural areas for their existence. In times past this interdependence would have been more obvious. In the London of several hundred years ago, the streets filled every morning before sunrise with carts and traders bringing their crops from surrounding areas. Richard Rowe in 1881 in Life in the London Streets, reported: “In fine weather, in spite of the general squalor of the street-retailers, it is rather a pretty sight to see them flocking out of the great watercress market with their verdant basketfuls and armfuls”. That watercress came from places near to the city, like Mitcham and Beddington in Surrey and at Warnford, Overton and Hurstbourne Priors in Hampshire, and the linkages between London and these places were strong and obvious.
And when there was a problem with the harvest, everyone knew about it. As Carolyn Steel remarks in her excellent book ‘Hungry City’, whether or not Marie-Antoinette ever actually said “Let them eat cake”, failed wheat harvests and subsequent shortage of bread in French cities were a major catalyst of the French Revolution.
Urban areas in many parts of the world are still provisioned in ways not dissimilar to the London of the 1880s, sourcing much of their food from a dense network of small-scale farmers and traders in their nearby hinterland. But in the West, where our food supply chains are more international, and operate through a well-oiled logistical machine invisible to most consumers, it can seem as if cities exist in isolation from their hinterlands.
In fact though, irrespective of where cities get their food from, there are many threads linking urban areas to surrounding rural areas. The least visible but perhaps one of the most directly important of these linkages is an ecological one. What happens outside the city impacts inside, and vice versa. Flooding is a classic example – if land outside the city is poorly managed, the risk of flooding for the urban denizens is raised. Clean water too: if the city’s watershed is protected from pollution then less money need be spent treating its water supply. In cities where sewage treatment and discharge regulations are inadequate, it may be the city itself that is the source of water pollution.
Water is an obvious flow connecting rural and urban. People too make regular movements between urban and rural areas. Just watch the flow of people on cars, trains and buses making their way into a city in the morning, and out again at night. In the developing world these flows can be even more pronounced, with urban areas representing the only chance of work for many people, who may move semi-permanently to cities, even though families remain at home in the countryside. Here it is flows of money in the form of remittances that constitute the main linkage. So, rural areas provide labour and urban areas provide income – but there’s also a flow of social connections and cultures that unite these areas.
Finally, in addition to these ecological and socio-economic ties, there are the governance links to consider – the structures of government and politics that help define the shape and character of the other linkages. In many places, local government structures have separated cities from their rural hinterlands. City councils or mayors have a remit to only think about what lies within the city boundaries. But if the two are so intimately connected, maybe it is short-sighted to govern them entirely separately? There is an increasing movement now to think about governance in terms of joined up city regions combining urban and rural under their purview.
By putting in place joined up governance structures, linkages such as flow of water, people and money can be better managed in order to maximise mutual benefits for both urban and rural areas. But joined up governance also raises the possibility of resurrecting linkages that have now almost disappeared in industrialised economies, such as the food link that used to unite London and its surroundings. Although it goes against the global value chains that now dominate western food systems, might fostering more explicit food linkages between urban and rural areas carry benefits for both? 3Keel’s recent research for the Prince of Wales’ International Sustainability Unit explored this question in detail – and our conclusions will be the subject of the next blog in this series!
Urban areas in many parts of the world are still provisioned in ways not dissimilar to the London of the 1880s, sourcing much of their food from a dense network of small-scale farmers and traders in their nearby hinterland. But in the West, where our food supply chains are more international, and operate through a well-oiled logistical machine invisible to most consumers, it can seem as if cities exist in isolation from their hinterlands.
