Local Development and Sustainable Periurban Agriculture: New Models and Approaches for Agricultural Land Conservation

Periurban agricultural territories have had to confront many pressures over the last 70 years, ranging from land development pressures emanating from nearby large cities and metropolis to technological change, to the draw of the urban labour market on farmers’ families, to the consequences of climate change and variability. They are also increasingly expected to provide stable supplies of foodstuffs to the nearby urban markets as well as having the potential to respond to many other urban demands for other functions that these agricultural areas can support. Periurban agricultural areas can be considered as strategic components of urban and metropolitan regions. They have much more to offer to their regional economies and societies than simply food production because they are also support multiple functions, both market-based and non market function. Market-based functions include the production of foodstuffs for the urban market as well as functions related to both tourism and leisure activity. Non-market based functions include the conservation of landscape heritage, and water and biodiversity conservation; some of these can also be transformed into functions that generate supplementary income for the farming families. Some functions serve to strengthen the linkages between farming, farm families and nearby urban areas. For this strengthening to occur, it appears essential that: a) farmers and their families become involved in the development of their own multifunctional agriculture-based projects; and b) the significance of the non-agricultural functions must also be appropriated by non-agricultural actors, such as local government, nearby city governments, community and consumer organisations. These points are illustrated by examples drawn from several countries, including research-action projects involving the two authors neat Montréal. These latter projects, appropriated by the local farming communities, involve local development processes that can be modified to deal with periurban agricultural areas in any political and cultural context. These processes involve the development of new models of agricultural development and relatively new approaches to local and community development. These processes reinforce regional and national programs of agricultural land ‘protection’ which, it is argued, need such supportive local and community development processes in order to be effective.

Presidential Signing Statements and Congressional Oversight

In response to highly controversial statements issued by President George W. Bush upon signing various bills into law, an American Bar Association Task Force and Senator Arlen Specter both recently called for the creation of a cause of action to obtain a federal judicial declaration concerning the legal validity of future presidential signing statements. This essay argues that such legislation would be ill-advised and counterproductive. It would exacerbate existing underlying institutional infirmities. More fundamentally, the inclination to facilitate immediate resort to the judiciary for resolution of a dispute between the political branches about the President\u27s constitutional obligations is premised on an unidentified, unjustified (and in my view unjustifiable) assumption about the relative roles of Congress and the Court. Specifically, the proposed law assumes that the Court, rather than Congress, is primarily responsible for ensuring that the President remains subject to the rule of law. This premise has matters backwards. Under our constitutional text, structure, and traditions, properly understood, Congress has far greater competence and legitimacy than do the courts to undertake the awesome task of compelling presidential compliance with the Constitution and laws of the United States. It is the judicial role in so doing that can be best understood as incidental and sharply circumscribed by concerns about competence and legitimacy. Indeed, absent longstanding congressional neglect of its many, powerful tools for disciplining the executive branch, routine and open presidential assertions of the intent to disregard statutory provisions just signed into law would be all but inconceivable. Were Congress to act on Senator Specter\u27s pending bill, the resulting legislation would further entrench this congressional neglect and atrophy the congressional muscles alone capable of resisting a truly lawless President. Ironically, the bill\u27s unintended but most significant long-term consequence would be to make all the more likely the kind of presidential usurpation of the law-making function that the ABA Task Force report and Senator Specter warn against

Local Development and Sustainable Periurban Agriculture: New Models and Approaches for Agricultural Land Conservation

Periurban agricultural territories have had to confront many pressures over the last 70 years, ranging from land development pressures emanating from nearby large cities and metropolis to technological change, to the draw of the urban labour market on farmers' families, to the consequences of climate change and variability. They are also increasingly expected to provide stable supplies of foodstuffs to the nearby urban markets as well as having the potential to respond to many other urban demands for other functions that these agricultural areas can support. Periurban agricultural areas can be considered as strategic components of urban and metropolitan regions. They have much more to offer to their regional economies and societies than simply food production because they are also support multiple functions, both market-based and non market function. Market-based functions include the production of foodstuffs for the urban market as well as functions related to both tourism and leisure activity. Non-market based functions include the conservation of landscape heritage, and water and biodiversity conservation; some of these can also be transformed into functions that generate supplementary income for the farming families. Some functions serve to strengthen the linkages between farming, farm families and nearby urban areas. For this strengthening to occur, it appears essential that: a) farmers and their families become involved in the development of their own multifunctional agriculture-based projects; and b) the significance of the non-agricultural functions must also be appropriated by non-agricultural actors, such as local government, nearby city governments, community and consumer organisations. These points are illustrated by examples drawn from several countries, including research-action projects involving the two authors neat Montréal. These latter projects, appropriated by the local farming communities, involve local development processes that can be modified to deal with periurban agricultural areas in any political and cultural context. These processes involve the development of new models of agricultural development and relatively new approaches to local and community development. These processes reinforce regional and national programs of agricultural land ‘protection' which, it is argued, need such supportive local and community development processes in order to be effective

Laplacian Solitons and Symmetry in G_2-geometry

In this paper, it is shown that (with no additional assumptions) on a compact 7-dimensional manifold which admits a $G_2$-structure soliton solutions to the Laplacian flow of R. Bryant can only be shrinking or steady. We also show that the space of symmetries (vector fields that annihilate via the Lie derivative) of a torsion-free $G_2$-structure on a compact 7-manifold is canonically isomorphic to $H^1(M,\mathbb{R})$. Some comparisons with Ricci solitons are also discussed, along with some future directions of exploration

Agricultural Change and Farmland Rental in an Urbanising Environment : Waterloo Region, Southern Ontario

Dans l'analyse des rapports entre l'urbanisation et l'agriculture, la recherche géographique s'est surtout intéressée, jusqu'à maintenant, aux effets néfastes de la croissance urbaine sur l'agriculture. Nous émettons l'idée que cette interaction, lorsque prévalent des conditions régionales bien précises, peut jouer un rôle positif dans le progrès agricole. C'est à titre d'exemple d'effets potentiellement bénéfiques que nous étudions ici le phénomène de la location des terres agricoles appartenant à des propriétaires non-exploitants. Pour une région donnée du sud de l'Ontario, des corrélations statistiques entre certaines variables agricoles et démographiques justifient une enquête approfondie auprès des agriculteurs. Les résultats de cette enquête montrent, qu'autour des villes de taille moyenne à haut niveau de croissance de cette région, la location des terres appartenant à des non-exploitants joue un rôle important dans le développement agricole. Cette recherche contribue donc à alimenter une littérature récente qui tend à démontrer la complexité de l'agriculture en milieu péri-urbain.In geographic research into urbanisation-agriculture interactions, a strong emphasis has been given to the negative effects of urbanisation on agriculture. Here, it is argued that the urbanisation-agriculture interaction process may provide certain opportunities for agricultural progress and development, depending upon the specific regional circumstances; the phenomenon of farmland renting from nonfarm landowners is thus studied as an example of such a potentially beneficial interaction. Statistical associations between agricultural and population variables for an area in southern Ontario provide the context for a detailed farmer survey. The results show farmland rental from nonfarm owners to be a significant factor in agricultural development in the urban fringe environment of the medium-sized, yet fast-growing cities in the study area, and add to recent literature which has stressed the complexities of urban fringe agriculture

Harnessing the power of the 'Massive': an innovative approach to participation, digital citizenship and open learning on-line.

In January 2015, the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK) launched an innovative civic engagement project, which aimed to crowd source the United Kingdom Constitution. One of the key intentions of the project was to leverage and magnify the power of the community and the ‘massive’ in order to empower participants to engage in debate, identify solutions and come to a common agreement about the need for and the content of a UK Constitution. Involving over 1500 participants and generating tens of thousands of on-line interactions that increased as opposed to decreased over the 14 week duration of the ‘course’, Crowd Sourcing the UK Constitution challenged some of the dominant paradigms of Massive Open On-line Learning. We will present the findings arising from a critical evaluation of the project and pose a number of questions that emerged from both our engagement with the project and from the participants themselves centred on enhancing the effectiveness of a pedagogical design to harness the power of the massive, a large community of engaged participants working together in order to solve a problem, effect change or develop capacity

Évaluation des impacts sociaux de projets majeurs dans l’étalement périurbain, le cas de Stablex à Balinville, région de Montréal

Depuis les années 1970, la grande banlieue montréalaise, dont Blainville fait partie, a vu ses limites s'élargir, ses activités se diversifier et sa gestion se complexifier. Dans ce complexe environnement, comment évaluer l'impact social de l'implantation d'une industrie d'envergure? L'étude rétrospective de Blainville (1977-1993), une période qui inclut l'arrivée de STABLEX (gestion des déchets dangereux), permet de cerner les agents et les processus de changement impliqués dans le développement du territoire. Les données proviennent des archives et des journaux locaux, des recensements, de même que d'entrevues structurées auprès de divers acteurs locaux. Après avoir identifié les différents événements concomitants ou consécutifs à l'implantation de STABLEX, nous en analysons les répercussions directes et indirectes sur la gestion du territoire et l'environnement social. Nous discutons notamment de la diversité croissante des intérêts et des conflits dans la gestion de ce territoire, et du rôle de STABLEX dans cette dynamique.Since the 1970s, the outer suburban areas of Montréal, including Blainville, experienced substantial expansion, diversification of activities and increased management complexity. How can the social impacts arising from the development of major industrial projects be evaluated in such a complex environment? A temporal analysis of Blainville for the period 1977 to 1993, which includes the arrival of STABLEX (hazardous waste management), reveals the actors and development processes involved in the area's transformation. Information was taken from archives, local newspapers and census sources as well as a set of structured interviews with several local actors. After identifying the different events associated with or consequent upon the development of STABLEX, the direct and indirect impacts for land use planning and for managing the social environment are analyzed. In the discussion, the increased diversity of interests and of conflicts involved in the management of this area and of the role of STABLEX in this dynamic are highlighted