Cities, agriculture and changing landscapes in urban milieu: the case of Rome

The paper explores the changes in agricultural landscape of Rome. In this frame the case of Rome is interesting due to several reasons. First, Rome is the largest city in Italy, 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 (Cavallo et al., 2014). The local 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. We focus on assessing the role that local flows of agri-food system can play in the frame of metropolitan food demand and consuming, try to explore how much land in Rome could be productively used for agriculture and how much could realistically be grown. These issues are important steps toward increasing knowledge and establishing a baseline for evaluating the potential role of Roman local food shed, even in terms of its impact on agro-ecosystems and landscape. Starting from the relationship between food and city, we are mapping rural urban linkages and changes in Rome’s foodscape (Morgan and Sonnino, 2010), identifying a number of representative conditions – typologies – in the area of whole province of Rome. We can identify a set of recurring elements, whether criticality rather than opportunities, that holds together the relationships between urban space and the role played by agricultural activities in rural and periurban contexts. The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 discusses the changing geographies of the relationship between city and agriculture. In section 3 and 4, we investigated the changing in urban rural linkages by examining the land use transformation, agricultural and population census data in Rome, while the following paragraph focus on taxonomy of urban agriculture morphologies. Finally, some summary considerations are provided.