Feeding Rome: Exploring the role of urban agriculture in the urban phenomenon

The lack of productive urban land, the food insecurity, the uncontrolled urban growth, the lack of stable local food markets, the land use conflicts in the urban areas, and a general lack of knowledge about the food production, fuel the debate about city and food in time of changes (Morgan & Sonnino, 2010). This paper aims to explore the agricultural phenomenon in Rome, focusing on its relationship with the development of the metropolitan area in the framework of a food sustainable planning. At the same time ensure the productive urban landscape as a part of the urban phenomenon require an assessments of its roles, which are not limited to the provision of food. Starting from the relationship between food and city, we are mapping the landscape identifying a number of representative condition - typologies - in the metropolitan area of Rome. Through a complex system of criteria - density, relationship with the urban fabric, production patterns, flows, services, distribution infrastructure, environmental characters, social behaviors linked with the production - the study try to summarize the Roman agriculture phenomenon. We can identify a set of recurring elements, whether criticality rather than opportunities, that holds together the city and the food production and distribution. All those relations represent a fundamental step to move from an agricultural land use close to the “city”, into a multifunctional green infrastructure that can directs the metropolitan development. In this frame the case of Rome is interesting due to several reasons. First, Rome is the largest city in Italy (Camagni, 2001), in terms of surface area and population, and was the largest agricultural municipality in Europe until 1992, when the municipality of Fiumicino separated itself from Rome. The special features of the case of Rome also concern the extent and size of the settlement developments characterizing the area: two thirds of the urbanized surface areas have been built up in the last fifty years, occupying mostly agricultural land (Bianchi & Zanchini 2011). Despite, last Census data show us an increase of urban farms of 44% and of agricultural surfaces of 16% in the last decade (ISTAT, 2011). The food network behind agriculture in the city, within a number of integrated social agrarian cooperative, who represented an alternative food production system and landmark for many initiatives carried out by the civil society, associations, cooperatives, volunteer and school sectors. Moreover most of them are within the perimeter of the protected areas of the city. Despite are not available official data, also due to the fact that all of this phenomena area characterized by informal dynamics - the community gardens in Rome are estimated in more than 2500 sites on a surface of 90 hectares (Dell’Orco, 2010). The urban-planning instruments over the years, and the regulation plan, in force since 2008, have not expressed a territorial set-up strategy linked to the environmental, productive and landscape factors of the Rome area agricultural ecosystem for the environmental and agricultural system (Palazzo, 2005, De Lucia, 2010, Magnaghi 2011).

Scopo di questa nota è di esaminare i caratteri e le dinamiche che connotano l’agricoltura urbana nel caso di Roma. Il contributo sintetizza in chiave evolutiva i fatti stilizzati del rapporto tra città e campagna, successivamente si indaga il contesto produttivo agricolo al fine di proporre una tassonomia dei tipi di agricoltura urbana. Il tentativo che qui si propone è una preliminare lettura dell’agricoltura urbana attraverso un sistema di criteri per la classificazione della distribuzione funzionale e relazionale del primario in aree metropolitane. Tali categorie interpretative tentano di ricostruire le relazioni causali che traducono i modelli produttivi agricoli (caratteristiche strutturali, ordinamenti, forme giuridiche, forme d’uso delle risorse naturali, collocazione), in specifiche forme spaziali e funzionali nella dimensione urbana – fisica e sociale -. Sul piano teorico tale lettura s’inserisce nel paradigma coevolutivo e guarda al paesaggio come il risultato delle interazioni tra il sistema ambientale e l’agire dell’uomo che abita e utilizza il territorio (Marino e Cavallo, 2009). Una sintesi tipologica definitiva sembra ancora un obiettivo da raggiungere, sicuramente questo è il primo passo verso la costruzione di una griglia interpretativa e di un vocabolario tipologico da mettere poi a sistema con i dati morfologici e quelli di uso del suolo.