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The project brings together a number of very different scientific
disciplines and fields of expertise, including the urban and the
rural/agricultural knowledge and practice fields, to conduct systems
research on the "rural-urban interface". The project will
combine techniques from various disciplines: geography, economics,
agronomy, marketing and management. The principal analytic framework
will be a 'problem-in-context' analysis of the environmental, economic
and social interactions between urban growth and peri-urban agriculture.
The problem-in-context framework provides a tool for analysing cause-effect
relationships in environmental problems, as well as the motivations
and behaviour of key stakeholders. The framework also allows for
the identification and design of solutions. It is thus a tool that
facilitates the integration of various disciplinary and multi-disciplinary
analyses in a problem-solving approach to environmental issues.
The analysis will be guided and considered by a stakeholder platform
to be created in each city. These will comprise a variety of stakeholders:
local policy makers, urban planners, agricultural producers, input
suppliers, consumers (of not only agricultural products, but also
of production space and room for urban function). Such platforms
for the rural-urban interface rarely exist, given the multitude
of jurisdictions and perspectives involved, and are often ad-hoc
and short-lived. They will thus be established in the two cities,
not from scratch, but on the basis of past initiatives that have
confirmed the feasibility of such an approach. The platforms, in
which stakeholders will negotiate over solutions to problems of
mutual though frequently conflicting interests, will force the researchers
to come forward with practical tools for arriving at 'win-win' situations.
But the platform will also itself be an object of monitoring and
analysis, making them a crucial element of the project.
The same research activities will be undertaken in both cities,
Hanoi and Nanjing, to the extent possible in order to be able to
compare the problems and the analysis of their causes and possible
solutions. There will of course be some variation between the two
given local circumstances and the constitution and influence of
their respective stakeholder platforms. In each city, a case study
district/location within the rural-urban interface will be selected.
These will be chosen in such a way as to be representative of the
problems generally encountered in both cities.
The work plan is subdivided into the following five work packages,
which will be implemented in parallel in each city:
WP 1: Platform building for institutional development
WP 2: Integrating urban and rural land use planning
WP 3: Peri-urban livelihood strategies
WP 4: Sustainable agriculture: constraints and opportunities
WP 5: Design of solutions and action plans
The objectives, methodologies and deliverables of the work packages
are described in more detail on separate pages this website. During
the course of the projects the realised outputs within each work
package will presented and downloadable on the project website.
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