Landscape polarisation, hobby farmers and a valuable hill in Tuscany: understanding landscape dynamics in a peri-urban context

Abstract

After the Second World War, modern agriculture and urbanisation have contributed to the vanishing of many traditional landscapes. Over the last years, agricultural restructuring, changes in farms’ structure and crisis in modern agriculture have led to an increasingly diverse set of relationships between land management and land ownership. This is especially true in peri-urban areas, where farmlands are often converted from commercially driven agriculture to various and highly dynamic land uses. This paper presents a micro-sociological study carried out in a municipality close to Pisa, where two types of landscape coexist: an urbanised lowland including areas of mechanised agriculture and a hilly area preserving traditional Mediterranean elements – such as terraces and ancient wine caves – which was abandoned during the rural outmigration and is currently being restored and managed by hobby farmers. Unlike lowland landowners, hobby farmers frame their “dwelling” on moral discourses and see the upland as a cultural heritage rather than as a personal ownership of productive units of land. Drawing on qualitative interviews and other sources of evidence, this paper analyses the landowners’ motivations and practices in the two areas and explores some of the implications of this landscape polarisation within the municipality borders for landscape management and planning.

Keywords:

• urban–rural discourse
• traditional landscape
• Tuscany
• cultural heritage
• hobby farmers
• landscape polarisation

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank my supervisor Gianluca Brunori for his support. I feel very grateful to Matthias Qviström for commenting the earlier draft of this paper, and to Jørgen Primdahl for spending his time discussing my research with me. Thanks to Carlotta Cini for her valuable linguistic assistance. Thanks to György Ängelkott Bocz for providing an insightful feedback during the seminar in SLU, Alnarp. The comments of the two anonymous referees and editors greatly improved this paper.