High-Tech Urban Agriculture in Amsterdam : An Actor Network Analysis

The agriculture and horticulture sector in the Netherlands is one of the most productive in the world. Although the sector is one of the most advanced and intense agricultural production systems worldwide, it faces challenges, such as climate change and environmental and social unsustainability of industrial production. To overcome these challenges, alternative food production initiatives have emerged, especially in large cities such as Amsterdam. Some initiatives involve producing food in the urban environment, supported by new technologies and practices, so-called high-tech urban agriculture (HTUA). These initiatives make cultivation of plants inside and on top of buildings possible and increase green spaces in urban areas. The emerging agricultural technologies are creating new business environments that are shape d by technology developers (e.g., suppliers of horticultural light emitting diodes (LED) and control environment systems) and developers of alternative food production practices (e.g., HTUA start-ups). However, research shows that the uptake of these technological innovations in urban planning processes is problematic. Therefore, this research analyzes the barriers that local government planners and HTUA developers are facing in the embedding of HTUA in urban planning processes, using the city of Amsterdam as a case study. This study draws on actor-network theory (ANT) to analyze the interactions between planners, technologies, technology developers and developers of alternative food production practices. Several concepts of ANT are integrated into a multi-level perspective on sustainability transitions (MLP) to create a new theoretical framework that can explain how interactions between technologies and planning actors transform the incumbent social\u2013technical regime. The configuration of interactions between social and material entities in technology development and adoption processes in Amsterdam is analyzed through the lens of this theoretical framework. The data in this study were gathered by tracing actors and their connections by using ethnographic research methods. In the course of the integration of new technologies into urban planning practices, gaps between technologies, technology developers, and planning actors have been identified. The results of this study show a lacking connection between planning actors and technology developers, although planning actors do interact with developers of alternative food production practices. These interactions are influenced by agency of artefacts such as visualizations of the future projects. The paper concludes that for the utilization of emerging technologies for sustainability transition of cities, the existing gap between technology developers and planning actors needs to be bridged through the integration of technology development visions in urban agendas and planning processe

Technology-Driven Transition in Urban Food Production Practices : A Case Study of Shanghai

The continuing decline of arable land per person and global human population growth are raising concerns about food security. Recent advances in horticultural technology (i.e., growing using light-emitting diode (LED) lighting, hydroponics, vertical farming, and controlled environments) have changed the ways in which vegetables can be produced and supplied. The emerging technology makes it possible to produce more food using fewer resources, independent of the weather and the need for land. They allow bringing agricultural practices inside urban built up spaces and making horticultural production an integrated part of the daily life of urban residents. However, the process and consequences of this technology-driven transition on urban planning and development are hardly understood. This paper uses the theory of multi-level perspective (MLP) on sustainability transitions and actor\u2013network theory (ANT) to explore this technology-driven transition and its adoption in urban planning and development. The high-tech horticulture zone development in Shanghai was used as a case study. The results show the importance of both social (i.e., policymakers and planners) and material (i.e., technologies and policy documents) actants in the transition of the sociotechnical regime. Furthermore, the transition toward sustainable urban horticulture practices requires the simultaneous preparation of supportive and compatible spatial development, agricultural and sustainable development policies, and adequate policy implementation and evaluation tools to increase the competitive strength of innovative practices

Markets in municipal code : The case of Michigan cities

Food’s place on the urban, municipal agenda has become an increasing focus in the emergent fields of food policy and food planning, whose leaders argue that food needs to be more explicitly added to the urban agenda. Yet, public food markets are a food system activity that municipal governments have been long engaged in. Reports from leading health, planning, and food organizations assert that farmers markets—the dominant form of public retail food markets in the US today—should be explicitly included in zoning and other municipal codes to ensure that they can be created and sustained. Despite their popularity as a local sustainable food system and healthy food access strategy, it is unclear whether markets have been codified through municipalities’ planning and policy instruments, and research has largely not addressed this topic. This study aims to elicit whether markets have been codified into law, focusing on US municipal charters, codes and zoning ordinances, using Michigan, an upper Midwest state, as a case. After analyzing municipal documents to determine whether and where markets have been codified into law in ninety Michigan cities, this study concludes that markets are highly underrepresented in municipal policy, rarely defined in code, and mostly absent from zoning ordinances, even among those cities with currently operating markets. Market presence in code is, however, associated with the presence of historically operated markets. These findings raise questions about why markets are missing from codified food policy and what risks this poses to the future of markets. They also highlight the need to better document the market sector and underline the importance of including historic perspectives when examining the efficacy of current food policy efforts

A Spatial Optimization Model for Sustainable Land Use at Regional Level in China: A Case Study for Poyang Lake Region

Economic growth in China is accompanied by many problems, such as rapid deterioration of the environment and a sharp decline in the area of arable land. China’s current land-use planning system fails to deal with these problems, especially at the regional level. The lack of sustainable spatial allocation at regional level has become a pressing problem. This article aims to: (1) analyze the reason why sustainable land use at the regional level is difficult to achieve under the current Chinese land-use planning system; (2) put forward a regional optimization model for sustainable land use; and (3) explore the usefulness and possibility of the future application of the model in supporting land-use planning. The model has been applied in a case study for the Poyang Lake Region, Jiangxi Province in China. Based on predictions of the demand of land in 2015, three single-objective scenarios were constructed: food production oriented, nature conservation oriented and economic growth oriented. An optimized, multi-objective pattern of sustainable land use was achieved by integrating the three single-objective scenarios. The relevance and applicability of the model were discussed with planning experts and practitioners. The results indicate that the model can contribute to a more sustainable regional land-use planning in China. However, the results also show a need for further research on how to embed wider social and economic aspects in the model

The Role of Urban Agriculture Technologies in Transformation toward Participatory Local Urban Planning in Rafsanjan

The agricultural sector in developing countries is one of the most vulnerable sectors to climate change and water scarcity. Iran is one Middle Eastern country facing a growing water crisis. Rafsanjan county, located in the province of Kerman, is losing its pistachio orchards to water shortages and climate change. The modernisation of irrigation methods and transfer of water from other regions have been the main strategies taken by the governmental authorities. The lack of success of these strategies has led to the emergence of more participatory approaches in the transformation of the agricultural sector and local urban planning in Rafsanjan. This study analyses the actor network of transformation in the agricultural sector and the rise of high-tech urban agriculture, and aims to understand the role of technologies in supporting citizen participation in local urban planning. The research draws on the concept of Technology-Driven Transitions (TDT). The interactions among social and materials entities and the impact of technological novelties on the re-configuration of their relationships in the transition process were studied. The research comprised an exploratory case study, and data were gathered through observations, document study and in-depth interviews with farmers, planners, researchers, and policy makers in Rafsanjan. The results of the study show that governmental planning organizations and their implementation bodies, such as the Agricultural Research, Education and Extension Organization (AREEO) and the 10-year plan for the development of greenhouses, were the most influential actants in the transition process. Their relationships with the other actants involved, such as the private sector, knowledge institutes and farmers, were re-configured by technological novelties. This re-configuration of relationships has led to strengthened participatory decision making in local urban planning in Rafsanjan

Modelling multi-regional urban growth with multilevel logistic cellular automata

Simulation models based on cellular automata (CA) are useful for revealing the complex mechanisms and processes involved in urban growth and have become supplementary tools for urban land use planning and management. Although the urban growth mechanism is characterized by multilevel and spatiotemporal heterogeneity, most existing studies focus only on simulating the urban growth of singular regions without considering the heterogeneity of the urban growth process and the multilevel factors driving urban growth within regions that consist of multiple subregions. Thus, urban growth models have limited performance when simulating the urban growth of multi-regional areas. To address this issue, we propose a multilevel logistic CA model (MLCA) by incorporating a multilevel logistic regression model into the traditional logistic CA model (LCA). In the MLCA, multilevel driving factors are considered, and the multilevel logistic model allows the transition rules to not only vary in space, but also change when the subregional level factors change. To verify the MLCA's validity, it was applied to simulate the urban growth of Tongshan County, located in China's Xuzhou Prefecture. The results were compared with three comparative models, LCA1, which only considered grid cell-level factors; LCA2, which considered both grid cell- and subregional-level factors; and artificial neural network CA. Urban growth data for the periods 2000–2009 and 2009–2017 were used. The results show that the MLCA performs better on both visual comparison and indicators for accuracy verification. The Kappa of the results increased by <5%, but the improvement was significant, while increases for the accuracy of urban land and figure of merit were much higher than 5%. In addition, the results of MLCA had the smallest mean absolute percentage error when allocating new urban land areas to the various subregions. The results reveal that higher-level (e.g., town level) factors either strengthened or weakened the effects of grid cell-level factors on urban growth, which indirectly affected the spatial allocation of new urban land. The MLCA model is an effective step towards simulating nonstationary urban growth of multi-regional areas, using the comprehensive effects of multilevel driving factors.</p

Technology-driven transition in urban food production practices: A case study of Shanghai

The continuing decline of arable land per person and global human population growth are raising concerns about food security. Recent advances in horticultural technology (i.e., growing using light-emitting diode (LED) lighting, hydroponics, vertical farming, and controlled environments) have changed the ways in which vegetables can be produced and supplied. The emerging technology makes it possible to produce more food using fewer resources, independent of the weather and the need for land. They allow bringing agricultural practices inside urban built up spaces and making horticultural production an integrated part of the daily life of urban residents. However, the process and consequences of this technology-driven transition on urban planning and development are hardly understood. This paper uses the theory of multi-level perspective (MLP) on sustainability transitions and actor-network theory (ANT) to explore this technology-driven transition and its adoption in urban planning and development. The high-tech horticulture zone development in Shanghai was used as a case study. The results show the importance of both social (i.e., policymakers and planners) and material (i.e., technologies and policy documents) actants in the transition of the sociotechnical regime. Furthermore, the transition toward sustainable urban horticulture practices requires the simultaneous preparation of supportive and compatible spatial development, agricultural and sustainable development policies, and adequate policy implementation and evaluation tools to increase the competitive strength of innovative practices.</p

Modeling urban expansion by using variable weights logistic cellular automata : a case study of Nanjing, China

Simulation models based on cellular automata (CA) are widely used for understanding and simulating complex urban expansion process. Among these models, logistic CA (LCA) is commonly adopted. However, the performance of LCA models is often limited because the fixed coefficients obtained from binary logistic regression do not reflect the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of transition rules. Therefore, we propose a variable weights LCA (VW-LCA) model with dynamic transition rules. The regression coefficients in this VW-LCA model are based on VW by incorporating a genetic algorithm in a conventional LCA. The VW-LCA model and the conventional LCA model were both used to simulate urban expansion in Nanjing, China. The models were calibrated with data for the period 2000–2007 and validated for the period 2007–2013. The results showed that the VW-LCA model performed better than the LCA model in terms of both visual inspection and key indicators. For example, kappa, accuracy of urban land and figure of merit for the simulation results of 2013 increased by 3.26%, 2.96% and 4.44%, respectively. The VW-LCA model performs relatively better compared with other improved LCA models that are suggested in literature

Analysis of the relationship between cross-cultural perceptions of landscapes and cultural ecosystem services in Genheyuan region, Northeast China

A major challenge today and in the future is to maintain or enhance the beneficial contributions of landscapes to the quality of life of people. Neglecting cultural ecosystem services (CES) in landscape planning can lead to loss of unique cultural landscapes and undermine the well-being of local communities. Despite a rapidly increasing body of literature on CES, little is known about the relationship between socio-cultural values and the non-material benefits of landscapes. To help fill this gap, we assessed the perceptions of people from different ethnic groups about the cultural ecosystem services of local landscapes. We took the Genheyuan National Wetland Park and the adjacent forest areas, a typical mountain forest-wetland ecosystem, as our case area. By combining surveys (250 semi-structured interviews and 26 local stakeholders in Focus Group Discussion) with structural equation modelling (SEM), we gained insights into the importance of landscapes to CES provision from the perspective of stakeholder diversity. Surprisingly, wetlands are perceived as playing more important roles than other landscape types in providing diverse CES, with a 1.25 times higher CES Diversity Index (CDI) than that of forests. Among all demographic factors, ethnicity is most significant in determining people's perceptions, reflecting the spiritual cognition, manners, and customs of the ethnic groups. The perceptions of CES provided by landscapes are likely to increase if landscape characteristics are attached more to functions in order to meet fundamental human needs.</p