Beneath the messy agri-scapes: spaces

in between

Angela Castles Institute of Regional Development University of Tasmania akc@utas.edu.au

Complex messy landscapes

• planning has a very narrow interpretation of the peri-urban’s use

• prevailing view: a space with no firm identity and an inevitable transition to residential land use

• planning is allowing these spaces to be lost, and this seemed to be at odds with what can be seen

• an identity crisis taking place – messy and confused spaces

Research imperatives

• does the peri-urban have an identity, and if so, what does it look like?

• if it does, then how can it subsequently be expressed in planning terms?

Making sense of messiness • contextual forces: population

growth, agriculture and food security and sustainable landscapes (amenity, ecosystem services and open space)

• the multidisciplinary nature of the challenges - different types of knowledge required to respond to the research questions

• led to a view of the peri-urban as wicked and much of its wickedness lies in its complexity

Unpacking complexity using landscape

• ten versions of the same scene (Meinig 1979)

• planners view the landscape too superficially (Armstrong 2006)

• rural landscapes are complex and we must accept this complexity rather than seeking to cure it – place it in its context and find an accommodation of the forces at play (Barr 2003)

• the peri-urban landscape as a distinct landscape

Unpacking complexity using voice

• voice as a tool to unpack the complexity, to tear apart the peri-urban and find new accommodations

• allows us to capture meaning and values

• creates a space for people to talk about the landscape and the place and their relationship to it

• allowed a search for deeper meaning underneath the messiness to understand what causes and creates it

• a cacophony of voices emerged

Voices in the peri-urban

• four main voices • the developer (loud) • the dense voice (loud when

challenged) • the media voice (persistent

background) • the producer voice (quieter

than expected) • different voices of different

strengths • expected dominant productive

voice was not as evident

Voice highlighted...

• the failings of policy makers

• the state of life on the fringe is not as some would have us believe

• many people do not feel they get what they pay for when they relocate

• the very thing that attract people into the space is often temporary

• the same voice that seeks to escape the suburbs often seeks to recreate it

Hints of emergent positivity

• a drive for change and disconnection from status quo

• some pursuing an alternate identity for the space

• a challenge to the relevance of the urban rural dichotomy

• hints of identity – a third space where producer voice reinvigorated

Reconfiguring assets and resources

• its usefulness has been badly misinterpreted

• it is a useful space, especially when contextualised with challenges of food security, sustainability and growth

• multiple expressions of value and an ongoing challenge to value its inherent assets

An alternate identity: the peri-urban as

the new useful

The new useful • a novel value chain

• an opportunity space to reconfigure resources into new enterprises

• a site of emerging collaboration

• a place where relationships are critical

• old has conflated with new to create an alternate identity – a new market

• the peri-urban does have an identity • it can hold competing realities steady, in a way

that other pieces of land have not been able to do • the emerging peri-urban activity brings its assets

together to create new value and use • captured in the idea of a new market space where

individuals entwine its multifunctional assets together into a new business model

• this land can contain and hold what looks like a messy agriscape, but when centred around usefulness is much more

• quite possible that over time other platforms will also emerge

Conclusion

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