Project Summary 

 

 

AgriMet-MOD: Metropolitan Agriculture spatial MODeling: contribution to the construction of an analysis model to support spatial planning and land use decision-making is a research project funded by Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

 

Metropolitan regions are characterized by complex spatial forms. In these regions occur substantial levels of soil consumption, putting enormous pressure on agricultural land. In Portugal, these pressures are occurring in the coastal areas, especially in the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto. However, changes from agriculture to urban land use have consequences on food production, cities’ security, landscapes’ multifunctionality, and soil protection. The role of agriculture in urban regions becomes a compelling discourse of the "green" European policy, as well as national strategies for sustainable urban development. However, these global, European and national strategies fade at the operational level due to a number of factors: a) conceptual: e.g difficulty of understanding the concept of agriculture in the city, b) political and juridical: e.g length in the Masters plans revision and the zoning rigidity, difficulty of articulating actors at different scales; c) socio-economic: e.g real estate interests and land speculation; d) technical: e.g. difficulty of applying geocomputation methodologies and tools in spatial planning.

 

The project AgriMet-MOD is developed in the context of an important issue nowadays: agriculture and agricultural land use/cover (LUC) as a contribution to the spatial planning of areas under important urban pressure. The pertinence of this study relays on the importance that agriculture takes concerning the strategies for urban sustainable development, and on the need that urban and regional policies come to respond effectively to those questions. To this end, it has as main objective to analyze and measure the agriculture and agricultural LUC in region of Lisbon for its effective incorporation in the instruments of land management. This analysis relies on testing advanced computer-based spatial modeling (e.g. ABM-LUCC).

 

The project AgriMet-MOD seeks to answer a set of complementary objectives:

1) Discuss the concept of metropolitan agriculture (e.g. urban and peri-urban), its different scales and dimensions of analysis, and its implementation in the instruments of territorial management in Portugal.

2) Understanding the spatial relationships between agriculture and urban development and the spatial typologies arising from them.

3) To model the agents-environment interaction generating conflicts in agricultural LUC and predict LUCC departing from those conflicts.

4) Propose tool to support decision-making and a set of technical and political recommendations to integrate agriculture in the spatial planning instruments.

 

Project reference: PTDC/ATP-EUR/4910/2012

Funding: 85.992,00€