About this pattern
Innovative cropping and consolidating measures to mitigate the impacts of loss of agricultural land and its associated natural systems on account of sprawling urbanisation, that results in the heating of urban space. This is exacerbated by the growing impact of motor transportation and related infrastructure on global warming. The appropriate pattern relates to topography, soils and hydrology where urban development is located on higher land and where agricultural land is located on the lower slopes and floodplains beside creeks and rivers.
To achieve urban & rural fingers, there are several issues to address.
Equity Issues necessitate innovative planning that allows owners to realise their land’s development value without changing the rural use. This can be achieved through transfer of development rights (TDR).
New Farming Practice: Maintaining rural and peri-urban fingers requires making productive land attractive to new farmers. The market growth of water products, ecosystem services, and niche marketing of gourmet products are emerging opportunities for rural economics inspired by new poly-cropping techniques.
New Forms of Rural Living: European planners offer alternative models for ‘Rural Living’ that allow for continued productive farming to be associated with new clustered residential areas. This involves innovative land tenure and inventive forms of governance that are drawn from organizational strategies associated with cooperatives.
New Urban Agriculture: New urban agriculture associated with hybrid urban formulas that conflate architecture, landscape, infrastructure and high-tech farming, can instigate innovative forms of agriculture at the urban rural nexus.
Pattern Conditions
Enablers:
- Urban & Rural Fingers instigated and sustained as a private/public-owned commons;
- To maintain existing rural land, establish the means for transfer of development rights;
- Develop the urban/rural interface as new housing clusters.
Constraints:
- Current NSW Government planning;
- Extent of alienated land that instigates a need for resumption/buyback policy.
Commoning Concerns
Access: restricted by private ownership.
Use: residential, farming, environmental services.
Benefit: community life, maintain peri-urban productive land.
Care: owners & community.
Responsibility: owners, State government.
Ownership: farmers, homeowners.
References
Armstrong, H. (2004). New Forms of Green for Mega-Cities: Peri- and Inter-urban Agricultural Space. Proceedings of the Australian Insurance Law Association (AILA) Conference 2004, Brisbane.
Armstrong, H., & Mellick Lopes, A. (2016). Re-Ruralising the Urban Edge: Lessons from Europe, USA and the Global South, in Maheshwari, B., Singh, V.P., Thoradeniya, B. (Eds), Balanced Urban Development: Options and Strategies for Liveable Cities. Switzerland: Springer Open, pp. 17-28.
Cumberland Plain vegetation mapping project (no date). NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment. https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/surveys/CumberlandPlainVegetationMappingProject.htm
Layton, H., Stephens, R. & Walshe, K. (2003). Vorpeise Gardens, unpublished studio submission. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology.
NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment. (2013). Cumberland Plain vegetation mapping project, https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/surveys/CumberlandPlainVegetationMappingProject.htm