Evolving local agrifood initiatives within a territorial agrifood system: the case of Prato Province, Italy

ABSTRACT

Complexities and case-specific nature of territorial agrifood systems require urgent attention of researchers. The objective of this study is to provide advanced understanding and analysis of the perspective of urban and peri-urban farming through the lens of embeddedness in the life of the urban community. The study adopted Prato Province (Tuscany Region, Italy) as a case study area. Spatial analysis, in-depth semi-structured interviews with local stakeholders (N = 9), field observations and discussions with local farmers (N = 17) were deployed in the research. Drawing upon our research, we identified a wide diversity of unique, locally focused and rooted agrifood initiatives and innovative food networks connecting individual (or groups of) farmers with local people. Our findings suggest that observed farms tend to be highly differentially re-embedded to the urban space of Prato Province and its inhabitants. Mutual interconnectedness through jointly cooperating local agrifood initiatives truly contributes to a more sustainable shape of territorial agrifood system. Furthermore, our observations showed a clear tendency toward more sustainable land management in the region. We claim that well thought out and smart local food governance and systemic involvement of innovative territorial planning instruments, have potential to beneficially contribute to the formation of inspirational and transferrable sustainable agrifood systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPUA)
• local agrifood initiatives
• sustainable farming
• embeddedness
• territorial agrifood system
• Prato Province

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to the people who helped during the research, including respondents of our survey for supporting data and materials collection necessary for this research.

We thank Marco Mancino for elaboration of figure 2, 4, 5.

We thank Gabriele Mori for elaboration of figure 1b, 3

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

CRediT author statement

Barbora Duží: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing- Original draft preparation, Reviewing and Editing

David Fanfani: Conceptualization, Investigation, Writing- Original draft preparation, Reviewing and Editing

Stanislav Martinát: Supervision, Reviewing and Editing

Data availability statement

Data available upon reasonable request from the authors

Notes

1. For a first visual map of such initiatives see at: https://www.politichelocalicibo.it/mappe/

2. Data issued by ISTAT adopting an estimative procedure. See at: http://dati.istat.it/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=DCSP_COLTIVAZIONI

3. Particularly at Regional level farms number in the period 2011–2021 decreased by 28,5% whereas cultivated surfaces (SAU) of 15,1%. (see ISTAT at: https://www.istat.it/it/archivio/273753)

4. Data from 2021 Census data at provincial level are not still available for the Tuscany region.

5. ^{For more information about Gran Prato, including map of producers and purchasers, see:}https://granprato.wordpress.com/

Additional information

Funding

Barbora Duží´s work was supported by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic “Strengthening rural resilience via empowerment of local stakeholders and land owners“ (TL03000007), and the Research Program Foods for Future, Strategy AV 21 of the Czech Academy of Sciences (AV ČR(CZ) StrategieAV21/19). David Fanfani´s work was supported by the Florence University Research Funds 2020 “Peri Urban agricultural areas and settlements resilience. Methodologies and tools for integrated planning and Assessment” (DavidFanfaniRicAten20). Stanislav Martinát´s work was funded by the Scottish Government RESAS Strategic Research Programme 2022-2027.