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Agriculture's transformation and land-use change in a post-urban world: A case study of the Stockholm region
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Agriculture's transformation and land-use change in a post-urban world: A case study of the Stockholm region Hans Westlunda,**, Pia Nilssonb,* a
CEnSE – Centre for Entrepreneurship and Spatial Economics, Jönköping International Business School, Jönköping, Sweden and Professor in Urban and Regional Studies, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Drottning Kristinas Väg 30, SE-111 44, Stockholm, Sweden b CEnSE – Centre for Entrepreneurship and Spatial Economics, Jönköping International Business School, Gjuterigatan 5, SE-551 11, Jönköping, Sweden
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is to address the hypotheses of complete urbanization and the post urban world with an emphasis on the agricultural sector. The paper studies spatial and temporal changes in land-use and agricultural activities in one rapidly growing metropolitan region, the Stockholm region. We explore the number and size of agricultural firms, changes in their main activity and trends of diversification and land prices for various types of land and location, all in a disaggregated spatial dimension. The results contribute to a deeper understanding of agriculture's function in metropolitan regions and shed new light on the possibilities of the agricultural sector to transform in a world where the traditional urban-rural relations are ceasing to exist.
1. Introduction As early as 1970, the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre pointed out that “… agricultural production has lost all its autonomy in the major industrialized nations and as part of a global economy. It is no longer the principal sector of the economy (…) as a result, the traditional unit typical of peasant life, namely the village, has been transformed. (…) it has become an integral part of industrial production and consumption. (…) In this sense, a vacation home, a highway, a supermarket in the countryside are all part of the urban fabric. (…) the only regions untouched by it are those that are stagnant or dying, those that are given over to ‘nature’” (Lefebvre, 2003/2003, p 3). Lefebvre called the result of this process “complete urbanization” but underscored that it was an anticipatory hypothesis of a development that he, at that time, had seen tendencies of. During the 1970s Lefebvre's hypothesis seemed to be completely wrong. Scholars across the western world noticed a new trend in migration and population development. Metropolitan areas lost population at the expense of rural areas and small cities and towns. In this decade, counterurbanization seemed to be a historic trend shift (Beale, 1975; Berry, 1976). Looking at the phenomenon forty years later, we can conclude that the counterurbanization coincided with the great crisis of the manufacturing industry. The breakthrough of information technology in the 1980s marked the emergence of the knowledge economy and with that, a new wave of urbanization, not only in a pure demographic sense, but also in an economic, social and cultural sense
*
(Andersson and AuthorAnonymous, 1985). In the western world, this urbanization of the knowledge economy has meant both densification of metropolitan regions and, in combination with improved means of transportation and commuting, spatial extension of metropolitan labor market regions (Andersson and Batten, 1987). Urbanization is rapidly increasing in the developing world as well. As pointed out by Farrell (2017), current urban growth in developing countries is even faster than it was in the corresponding period of developed countries. Specifically, in China, the rapid urbanization has hollowed out the villages' population and caused uncertainties about future food supply. In China, as well as the rest of the developing world, there is a clear need for raising agriculture's productivity to levels where fewer farmers can feed the increasing urban populations, while they at the same time can raise their incomes and narrow the income gap to the urban income earners. New housing and infrastructure in the expanding city-regions have received much attention in research and policy. As mentioned above, in China and other countries, there are also concerns about agriculture's future in the vast countrysides that are “given over to nature”. However, the main bulk of studies have focused on the transformation of agricultural land to built-up areas (Harvey and Clark, 1965; Brueckner, 2000; Bae, 2017) and the impact of urbanization on the change in cultivated land (Deng et al., 2015). Much less attention has been given to agricultural transformation and use of unbuilt-up land in metropolitan regions. A pioneering work in this field was published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1989 and one conclusion is that
Corresponding author. Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (H. Westlund), [email protected] (P. Nilsson).
**
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.07.002 Received 29 March 2018; Received in revised form 16 April 2019; Accepted 7 July 2019 0743-0167/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article as: Hans Westlund and Pia Nilsson, Journal of Rural Studies, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.07.002
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metro farms are generally smaller, have a higher land intensity in their production, are more diverse and focused on high-value production compared to farms elsewhere (Heimlich and Brooks, 1989, p. iii). This study contributes to the literature by putting current spatial and temporal development trends in agriculture and land-use into the context of a new paradigm: the post-urban world. This is being done by exploring spatial and temporal changes in agriculture and land-use in the Stockholm region, which belong to one of the fastest growing urban regions in Europe in terms of population and income per capita, and by comparing Stockholm with the rest of Sweden. The Stockholm region shows signs of many of the development trends that are central behind the idea of the post-urban world (Westlund, 2018). This includes changing land use and density patterns, the rapidly increasing urban character of agricultural activities and a disappearing dichotomy between the urban and the rural. As Westlund (2018) notes, during the agricultural period, cities were strongly dependent on foodstuff and raw material from the hinterlands and increasingly also on markets and inputs from other cities. In the current knowledge economy, the dependency on hinterlands foodstuff and raw material is small while the dependency of exchange with other city regions has increased rapidly. Hence, under the knowledge economy, rural areas are in a transition and their development is strongly influenced by the global networks. Rural areas are also transformed from spaces of production and consumption to spaces where tourism and land-based leisure activities play an increasingly important role. Rurality in the city-region has become a lifestyle for the urban inhabitants to pursue, to escape from the urban daily life. Correspondingly, several scholars use the term “post-rural” to re-understand the changing role of rural areas (Murdoch and Pratt, 1993; Hopkins, 1998; Halfacree, 2009). This paper examines different dimensions of agricultural transformation and land use change using disaggregated spatial data that cover long time-periods and the whole Swedish geography. The analysis is descriptive and focuses on spatial autocorrelations using cluster analysis and other spatial statistical methods. The descriptive analysis reveals that small and diversified farms have increased in areas nearby and surrounding the big cities in Sweden and that agricultural activities and the use of arable land has changed markedly over the last two decades. Although we do not study the causes of these observed changes, we argue that they may be linked to changing urban demand and increases in land prices within and surrounding rapidly growing urban areas. Comparing agricultural development trends across Sweden shows that the capital region Stockholm seems to be leading the transformation, followed by the second and third largest cities and their surrounding hinterlands (Gothenburg and Malmö). Given the rapidly increasing diversification of city-close agriculture, emerging from the analyses, particularly among the smaller farms, calls for further analyses in this direction. The remainder of the paper is organized in the following. Section 2 reviews the post-urban world hypothesis and the subsequent section outlines the case-study region and the data used in the descriptive analyses. Section 4 describes prices of agricultural land in Sweden and in the Stockholm region and land-use changes in the Stockholm region. Section 5 investigates the spatial extensions of the Stockholm region and changes in the number and size of farms, changes in their main activity, trends of diversification over time, and compares the development of the Stockholm region with the rest of Sweden. The last section summarizes the contribution of this paper, discusses the transferability of the research findings to other regional contexts and the limitations of the study, and proposes further studies of agriculture's role in the metropolitan regions of the post-urban world.
counterpart to the ‘complete’ urban. Westlund (2014, 2018) and Westlund and Haas (2018) take this circumstance as the foundation for their hypothesis on a post-urban world. According to the hypothesis, former rural areas are being dissolved in two categories. The first category, the city-close countryside, becomes integrated with the growing urban regions, or with Lefebvre's words more or less “totally urbanized”. The second category, the vast rural areas (but also peripheral cities and towns) outside the positive influence of the growing cityregions, are shrinking and “given over to nature”, apart from a few areas that can respond to certain niches of urban demand. Westlund and Haas (2018) highlight four aspects of the post-urban world that have been central behind the densification of metropolitan regions and the spatial extension of their labor market regions. The first is the re-urbanization of the western world, which deviates somewhat from the traditional understanding of urbanization that consists of migration from countryside to cities (and often within the same region). The re-urbanization of the western world include migration from declining manufacturing cities and regions to expanding knowledge- and service sector, cities and regions, or from the centers of declining manufacturing cities to suburbs. It also included upward migration within the national urban hierarchies from smaller urban settlements to bigger ones, partly affected by increasing immigration from low-income, or war affected countries. The second is densification of city regions, and particularly densification of suburbs. Soja (2011) emphasize the transformation of big cities from dense centers with lowdensity suburbs, to polycentric city regions with relatively high density all over. In areas where this process is most pronounced, the longstanding urban-suburban dualism of metropolitan urbanization has almost disappeared. In his view, the age of mass suburbanization has shifted to regional urbanization, a filling in of the entire metropolitan area (Soja 2011, p 684). The third is the region enlargement of labor markets due to improved transportation infrastructure and public transportation. This means that the city regions have not only been densified within a given area, as noted above but also become sparser when more distant centers (and their suburbs and adjacent rural areas) have become integrated in the metropolitan transportation networks. Lastly, the fourth is the downgrading of the relations between cities and their outer hinterlands and upgrading of the networks between cityregions that has emerged with the expansion of the knowledge economy. When human capital replaces raw materials and physical capital as the main production and location factor, the large, diversified labor markets of city-regions have become a key location factor for both businesses and labor. With the decreased relative importance of raw materials, the importance of peripheral areas' exchange with the city regions decreases. Instead, the city regions’ exchange increasingly takes place with other city regions, as their import- and export markets are much larger than those of their peripheral hinterlands. For rural areas, this means a division in two parts: one city-close part that becomes integrated in the growing city regions, and one peripheral part that is less and less needed in the knowledge economy. Different parts of the world are in various phases of the post-urban transition. All the abovementioned four aspects of the post-urban world hold in principle for the developed, western world, in which the traditional urbanization through migration from rural areas to urban ones largely has ceased. In the developing world, the traditional urbanization is still the dominating trend and re-urbanization is mainly insignificant. However, densification of city-regions and region enlargement are frequently occurring as a consequence of urbanization, although not exactly in the same way as in the developed countries. The fourth aspect, downgrading of relations with outer hinterlands and upscaling of relations with other city-regions, probably varies between developing countries depending on their development level; in China, for example, it is already a reality. This means that even if we cannot expect that the developing world will follow exactly the same development pattern as the western world, we should be able to assume that the post-urban pattern is already, or will be, reflected in similar trends there.
2. Background The development after 1970 has in many ways confirmed Lefebvre's hypothesis on complete urbanization. However, given complete urbanization there can, by definition, not be anything ‘rural’ as a 2
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Fig. 1. Population per square kilometer in the municipalities of the Stockholm region.
Swedish capital city Stockholm with almost 1 million inhabitants. The region is the largest in Sweden, in terms of population and it has undergone a transformation to a global polycentric city region in that many of its surrounding rural hinterland municipalities have been integrated and become a part of the metropolitan region. The Stockholm labor market region consist of 37 municipalities and has a population of over 2.2 million, illustrated in Fig. 1. The region makes up around 30% of Sweden's GNP (Gross National Product) and more than every third company in Sweden is located here, hosting around 240 thousand companies (Statistics Sweden). Although the largest proportion of economic activity takes place in the service sector, about one percent of the firms have agriculture as their main economic activity. In terms of economic performance and new firm formation (around 25 thousand new firms started in the region in 2017), the region places itself among the ten strongest regions in the EU. The rationale for focusing on this particular region is that it shows signs of many of the development trends that are central in the concept of post-urban transition, including changing land-use and density patterns, the rapidly increasing urban character of agricultural activities and the signs of a disappearing dichotomy between the urban and the rural. Table A1 in Appendix 1 summarizes and defines the variables used in the analysis of spatial and temporal urban development trends, with the overall goal to shed new light on central aspects on the future of urban-rural relations and integrated city regions with a focus on the agricultural sector. For analytical purposes, the municipality, which is the main political and administrative unit in Sweden, is used as the unit of observation in the empirical analyses.
This paper takes the post-urban dissolution of rural areas into two categories as the starting point for its case study. When rural areas up to a certain distance from the city (that varies with the size of the urban core and other characteristics of the region) become integrated in the city-regions, their land-use undergoes significant changes. The posturban transition means that the land-use within the city-regions adapts to the changing demands of the urban populations. “Post-rural” land, including arable land is transformed to land for housing, industry, transportation infrastructure and recreation. The use of remaining arable land is most often expressed in terms of that agriculture becomes “urban”, meaning a movement of the growing of plants and the raising of animals to within and around cities: “The most striking feature of urban agriculture, which distinguishes it from rural agriculture, is that it is integrated into the urban economic and ecological system: urban agriculture is embedded in -and interacting with-the urban ecosystem. Such linkages include the use of urban residents as laborer's, use of typical urban resources (like organic waste as compost and urban wastewater for irrigation), direct links with urban consumers, direct impacts on urban ecology (positive and negative), being part of the urban food system, competing for land with other urban functions, being influenced by urban policies and plans, etc. Urban agriculture is not a relic of the past that will fade away (urban agriculture increases when the city grows) nor brought to the city by rural immigrants that will lose their rural habits over time. It is an integral part of the urban system” (http://www.ruaf.org/urbanagriculture-what-and-why). In line with the post-urban hypothesis that we base this paper on, we here use the term “post-urban agriculture” for this phenomenon.
3.1. Indicators of a post-urban world
3. Study region and description of data
The empirical approach to analyze key characteristics of a posturban transition with a focus on the agricultural sector is to use data that describe changes in the composition of agricultural activity, land
The Stockholm region belongs to one of the fastest growing regions in Europe in terms of population and GDP per capita and hosts the 3
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Fig. 2. a. Average per hectare price in SEK of arable land, Sweden 2007–2008, 2b. Average per hectare price in SEK of arable land in the Stockholm region, 2007–2008.
use and the price of various types of land at different locations in the study region (see table A1 in Appendix A). In Sweden, prices of arable and pasture land have been increasing over time and explanations can be found in both agricultural and non-agricultural factors e.g., related to urbanization and growth in agricultural related markets (Oltmer and Florax 2001; Nilsson and Johansson, 2013). Another issue is the accession to the EU and the European Common Agricultural Policy, which has brought changes in institutional factors, agricultural land prices and the structure of the agricultural sector (Latruffe et al., 2010). The key feature of the data used for the present paper is that they provide consistent information across time and space, which offer a comprehensive picture of the scale and transition of agricultural activities. The main source of data used for the analyses is Statistics Sweden, although several other sources are used as well, and the analytical frame covers the whole Swedish geography.
and Rendle 2000; Sharpley and Vass 2006). In Sweden, agricultural related tourism in combination with farming is indicated to turn over about 1 billion SEK each year (Nilsson and Johansson, 2013). These activities tend to locate in rural areas that are relatively close to the largest cities, Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö, which influences the prices of market sold agricultural land, including both pasture and arable land. It is a well-known fact that prices of agricultural land are determined simultaneously by agricultural and non-agricultural factors and that the later can be most profoundly linked to urbanization which tends to increase the conversion of land from agricultural to non-agricultural uses (Capozza and Helsley, 1989, 1990; Shi et al., 1997; Cavailhès and Wavresky, 2003). Nilsson and Johansson (2013) show that urbanizing influences are the main factors lifting the price of agricultural land in Sweden.1 To examine spatial patterns in the price of agricultural land in the study region, and compared with Sweden as a whole, this paper applies a cross-regional approach where the unit of observation is the market
4. The price of land for different types of land and location One trend, which can be witnessed throughout Europe, is the diversification of agricultural activities and the growth of agricultural related markets, such as tourism, culinary markets, experiences and horse breeding, in rural areas surrounding many city regions (Busby
1 This study follows the approach that agricultural land prices can be decomposed into expected returns from land in its current agricultural use and expected returns from its potential use (e.g., Capozza and Sick, 1994; Plantinga et al., 2002).
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Fig. 3. a. Average per hectare price in SEK, pasture, Sweden, 3b. Average per hectare price in SEK, pasture, Stockholm region.
transacted per hectare price of agricultural land (arable and pasture).2 The possibility to observe Swedish agricultural land prices in a consistent way over time is limited because Statistics Sweden do only report yearly agricultural land prices at the aggregated county or NUTS3 level, which prevent spatial analyses at a disaggregated level. There are also relatively few sales of exclusively agricultural land each year as most of the transactions comprise a residential unit in combination with other types of farm buildings and agricultural land. To obtain the per hectare price of agricultural land at the municipality level, which is a
more disaggregated unit of observation than both the county- and NUTS3 level, we use a sample of 11 thousand market transacted farms across the Swedish geography. Fig. B1 and B2 in Appendix B illustrate the spatial distribution of these land transactions and the estimated per hectare price of arable- and pastureland across Sweden. Fig. 2a and b shows the average price of land at the municipality level (aggregated from the sales data). From the figures, it is evident that agricultural land prices in Sweden are under strong influence of urbanizing factors as prices in city regions and in areas with good accessibility conditions, surrounding the three metropolitan areas in Sweden (Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö), are generally much higher than elsewhere. High prices in these areas reflect a higher demand for land in city close regions, which is tied to possibilities for future gains after land has been converted to urban uses, and to its current agricultural use or value (Capozza and Sick, 1994; Plantinga et al., 2002). Fig. 3a and b shows the average price of pasture at the municipality level (aggregated from the sales data) indicating that the price of pasture is also under the influence of urbanizing factors in that prices are high in the urbanized regions and in areas surrounding the city regions. High prices of pasture land in these municipalities reflect that the land
2 These data are obtained from the Swedish Mapping, Cadastral and Land Registration Authority, and include transactions from the period January 2007 to December 2008. To obtain the municipal per hectare price of agricultural land from this sample we follow the approach taken by Statistics Sweden and Nilsson and Johansson (2013). This implies that the price of land is calculated by deducting the value of the housing units, in cases the transaction includes both housing and land. Tax assessment values are available in the data which allows us to calculate the value of land based on the assumption that the price of agricultural land in relation to the purchase price is the same as the tax assessment value of agricultural land in relation to the total tax assessment value.
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Fig. 4. a. Cluster analysis of land prices, arable, 4b. Cluster analysis of land prices, pasture.
offers possibilities for alternative use, or agricultural-related tourism activities, e.g., activities related to tourism and/or horse breeding. To explore the pattern of land prices in more detail, we employ cluster analysis to identify statistically significant patterns with land that sell for prices above the average. The Hot Spot Analysis tool is used to calculate the Gi* statistic for each of the transacted land lots included in the dataset (Getis and Ord, 1992). The resultant z-scores and p-values reflect where land with either high or low values cluster spatially by comparing each transaction within the context of neighboring transactions. A transaction with a high value is interesting but may not be a statistically significant high price cluster. To be a statistically significant cluster, a transaction must have a high price and be surrounded by other high-priced land lots. Hence, the local sum for a land transaction and its neighbors is compared proportionally to the sum of all transactions; when the local sum is very different from the expected local sum, and when that difference is too large to be the result of random chance, a statistically significant z-score results. The Gi* statistic is calculated in the following:
Fig. 5. Percentage change 1990–2012 in built-up land Stockholm region.
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parts of the country with conducive climate and accessibility conditions and surrounding the most urbanized areas (Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö). Prices significantly below the average are found in the northern parts of the country, where coniferous forests dominate the landscape and where natural prerequisites for agriculture and accessibility conditions are generally poorer. The price of pasture (Fig. 4b) show a similar pattern in that prices are high surrounding the metropolitan areas (Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö) and that prices significantly below the average in the northern parts of the country. The Figures also indicate differences in the spatial patterns of the prices of pasture and arable land. One observation is that the price of arable land seems to be more linked to agricultural factors (e.g., the quality of the soil), as prices are high in areas with better agricultural preconditions. Pasture, on the other hand, seems to be more heavily under the influence of urbanizing factors, which can be seen from the clusters of high prices of pasture surrounding the largest metropolitan areas (Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö). This also reflects a demand for land from urban residents for uses other than agriculture, including various types of land based leisure activities (golf) and horse breeding. 4.1. Land use and spatial extension of the city region - Although agriculture comprise a small share of income and employment in Sweden, as in most developed countries, it plays an important role in land use. Urbanization is often considered as having negative impacts on agriculture, for instance, from the loss of agricultural land to urban expansion or resulting from an urban bias in public funding for infrastructure and services (Deng et al., 2015; Jedwab et al., 2017). One connected feature, highlighted in the concept of the emerging post-urban world, is the ‘region enlargement’ in the form of spatial extensions of the city region and the resulting changing density patterns and land uses within the city region. As discussed, urban regions tend to become denser within a given area, but also more dispersed as distant centers (and their suburbs and adjacent rural areas) become integrated in the metropolitan networks (Westlund, 2018). These development trends are reflected in changing density patterns and in land use change within the city region with more land being converted into urban use e.g., to built-up areas and transportation networks. Figs. 5 and 6a-6c illustrates development trends connected to land use change and regional enlargement in the municipalities included in the Stockholm metropolitan region for the period 1990–2012. Fig. 5 display the percentage change in built up land in the Stockholm metropolitan area during 1990–2012. The Figure show a striking increase in the share of built up land in the central municipalities of the city region (up to 50 percent in the most central parts), followed by increases in all the surrounding municipalities. Certainly, these developments are reflections of urban sprawl in that the Stockholm metropolitan region has enlarged, but they also reflect a change to a much sparser city region that include not only urban activities and land use but also former rural activities and land use that have been integrated in the urban fabric (Westlund, 2018). - Urban expansion inevitably covers some agricultural land and urban centers do often expand over productive agricultural land as most urban centers grew there because of fertile soils (Nilsson and Johansson, 2013). Fig. 6a and b illustrates the change in land use devoted to arable land and pasture in the Stockholm region during the same period of time (1990–2012). The figures display a decreasing development trend in agricultural land use, most notably for cultivated (arable) land, which share has decreased in 27 out of the 37 municipalities included in the metropolitan region. All in all, the figures indicate a decline in land devoted to land based agricultural activities but may also reflect a change in agricultural activities to become part of, or to adapt to, the urban structure, as reflected in the increase in the share of pasture in the outer parts of the Stockholm region, partly as a response to the popularity of riding horses. Some municipalities do also show an increase of arable land, which probably indicates another
Fig. 6. a Percentage change 1990–2012 land use devoted to arable land in the stockholmegion, b Percentage change 1990–2012 land use devoted to arable land in the stockholmegion, c Percentage change 1990–2012 land use devoted to arable land in the stockholmegion. n j=1
Gi* =
wi, j Xj
n
S
X
n 2 j = 1 wi, j
n
n j=1
wi, j
n j = 1 wi, j
1
2
(1)
Where x j is the attribute value for feature j , wi, j is the spatial weigh between feature i and j , n is equal to the total number of features and3:
X =
n j =1
n
xj (2)
Fig. 4a and b shows the spatial distribution of the sample used in the empirical analysis and GiZ scores from cluster analysis with respect to sales price, classified using standard deviations (Getis and Ord, 1992). The price of arable land (Fig. 4a) is shown to be high in the southern 3
The Gi* statistic returned for each transaction in the dataset is a z-score. For statistically significant positive z-scores, the larger the z-score is, the more intense the clustering of high values (hot spot). For statistically significant negative z-scores, the smaller the z-score is, the more intense the clustering of low values (cold spot). 7
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Fig. 7. Percentage change in the share of diversified agricultural firms in Sweden and the Stockholm region, 1995–2015.
is not just the result of urbanization but also (in most cities) a result of declining urban densities. Since urbanization entails fewer rural people as well as more urban people, it may reduce rural building and so, in part, counteract the effects of urbanization expanding over cultivated land. Fig. 6c display another key development trend that is highly relevant in Sweden, as well as in many middle- and high-income countries, namely the conversion of land for the expansion of recreational activities e.g., open spaces, golf courses and urban parks. The land areas being used for golf courses in Stockholm county increased by 35 percent between the year 2000 and 2005 (source Statistics Sweden) and the figure display a striking increase in land use devoted to such use, up to 3.5 percent of total land in some of the central municipalities of the region. In summary, these trends are all key features of land use and agricultural transformation that exemplify the development trends that underlie the transition to a post-urban world. 5. Transitions in urban agriculture - Besides causing changes in the price and use of land, as discussed above, urbanization and the expansion of urban demand also result in altered supply of and demand for agricultural products, which spurs a transition of the sector. Urbanization and structural change are strongly related to each other, but may also imply competitive movements, especially in city regions. The most fertile agricultural lands provide home for most people, but the conversion of agricultural land into built up land is the largest in those regions (Herrendorf et al., 2013). The number of agricultural holdings has decreased rapidly in Sweden, as in most European countries. In the middle of the 1920s there were more than 427 000 agricultural firms in Sweden of which 307 395 farmed more than 2 ha of arable land. Although the number of firms where stable until the end of the World War II, structural rationalization brought fewer and larger farms. Until the beginning of 1950 more than a majority of the arable land was found in firms in-between 2 and 20 ha. The same share in 2010 was around 13 percent (source The Swedish Board of Agriculture). The consequences are that the use of agricultural land is concentrated to the central agricultural areas where large scale
Fig. 8. a. Change in the number of milk cows, 2002–2015, Stockholm region, 8b. Change in the number of sheep, 2002–2015, Stockholm region.
growing tendency of the post-urban agricultural land use, viz. city-close horticulture. - Moreover, the loss of agricultural land to the spatial expansion of urban areas and the resulting declining proportion of land used for agriculture around a city can also be followed by more intensive production of the land that remains in agriculture (see Shi et al., 1997). Moreover, as discussed in Westlund (2014), the expansion of urban land
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Fig. 9. a. Change in the number of employees in horticulture 2002–2015, Stockholm region, 9b. Change in average turnover (in thousand SEK) of horticulture firms 2002–2015, Stockholm region.
agriculture is made possible. The less productive, and often the smallscale farming, is abandoned or converted into forest land. Between 1951 and 2010 there was a fall in arable land by more than 1 million hectares (source The Swedish Board of Agriculture). A key question that arises in this context is whether the growing and changing demands for agricultural products, brought by an increasingly urbanized population, can improve agricultural productivity and bring rural development through various linkages e.g., to urban demand and to urban enterprises that can provide producer and consumer services to rural areas.
metropolitan areas and in areas around mid-sized cities. Hence, changes in the demand and the structure of the agricultural sector have accelerated the pace of adjustment to new market conditions facing agricultural firms. The studies by Hansson et al. (2013) and Barnes et al. (2015) argue along these lines and present evidence that agricultural firms that locate nearby areas with a more diversified industrial structure have a greater potential to develop economies of scope in production, because it makes them more flexible to adapt to changing market conditions. Fig. 7 illustrates the development of diversified agriculture in Sweden and the Stockholm metropolitan area for the period 1995–2015 and Fig. 8a and b illustrates a more detailed change in city closer agriculture e.g., the change in the structure of livestock keeping and dairy farming. The first figure (Fig. 7) displays the change in the share of agricultural firms that are diversified (defined using their main activity after SIC belonging) out of the total number of agricultural firms in the municipality. The development trends indicated in the figures reveal that diversified farming, horticulture (Fig. 9a and b) and sheep farming (Fig. 8b) has evolved in areas nearby and surrounding the big cities, which is broadly in line with the idea that agricultural firms are faced with new market conditions and that diversification can make them more flexible to adapt to such conditions. Specifically, during the 19year period that is displayed, diversified farming seems to have decreased in the rural areas in the northern part of Sweden and increased
5.1. Development of city-close agriculture - There are several key features of land use and agricultural transformation that exemplify the development trends that underlie the transition to an emerging post-urban world. One important trend, discussed above, is the decline of the relations between city regions and their outer hinterlands and the growing importance of their networks to other city regions (Westlund, 2014). This stems from the growing importance of human capital as the main production and location factor. The result is that diversified and large labor markets of city-regions have become a key location factor for business and labor. This development trend is particularly evident within the agricultural sector, which has transformed to become increasingly diversified in
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extended city regions, and one peripheral part, for which the only potential to survive is to specialize and thus be able to competitively meet certain urban demand. These changes support the post-urban hypothesis presented above. 5.2. Similarity search One way to summarize the development trends discussed above is to consider them as knowledge and information spillover effects that occur among agricultural firms that are clustered in certain geographical settings. One conclusion so far is that there are a series of studies that underline the importance of agricultural and non-agricultural spillover effects for the growth of both farm and non-farm enterprises in urban regions. A similarity search can be used to identify which municipalities or groups of municipalities are most similar (or most dissimilar), based on a specified number of variables of interest. The aim is to find other municipalities or groups of municipalities in Sweden that share the same agricultural transformation that the Stockholm region. A simiarity index can be expressed in the following:
Cosine similarity index =
n i=1 n i=1
(Ai
)2
Ai Bi n i=1
(Bi )2
(3)
The results, presented in Fig. 10, indicate that the Stockholm region is leading in the transformation to a post-urban agriculture, and it is followed by the cities of Gothenburg and Malmö and some large regional centers in Sweden. 6. Concluding remarks This paper's contribution to the rural social science literature is that it puts current spatial and temporal development trends in agriculture and land-use in the context of a new paradigm: the post-urban world. By suggesting that current trends in metropolitan regions are parts of a global change in urban-rural relations brought by the emergence of a post-urban world, the paper links the land-use changes of city-regions to a global socio-economic transformation. The empirical analysis reveals a striking decline in land use devoted to agriculture, across Sweden, and especially in areas surrounding the larger cities and the capital region Stockholm. The analysis of agricultural land prices indicates that prices are influenced by traditional factors, the quality of land in terms of its capacity to produce agricultural products, but most notably by non-agricultural factors, which are linked to urbanization, accessibility to markets and urban demand. This is particularly the case for pasture, which is converted to give space for land-based tourism and leisure activities. For instance, the land areas being used for golf courses in Stockholm county increased by 35 percent between 2000 and 2005. The descriptive analysis also reveals that diversified farms has increased in number in areas nearby and surrounding the big cities. Small agricultural firms (in terms of employees and land) have increased their concentration near city regions and agricultural activities and the use of arable land have also changed markedly as a response to changing urban demand and to increasing land prices. Comparing development trends across Sweden, the Stockholm region seems to be leading the transformation, followed by the cities of Gothenburg and Malmö, and some regional centers. These findings support earlier studies of land-use and agriculture in metropolitan regions (e.g. Heimlich and Brooks, 1989) and correspond well with the general implications of the post-urban hypothesis. Just like Lefebvre's hypothesis on “complete urbanization”, the hypothesis on the post-urban world is based on development trends principally in the developed western world, and our case study region is a high-developed western metropolitan region as well. An obvious
Fig. 10. Results of similarity search of municipalities that have similar development trends in agriculture as the Stockholm region 2002–2015 (most similar = 1).
in the Stockholm and Gothenburg regions, in which markets have become more diversified in general. Naturally, this trend does also reflect changes in the capital-to-labor ratio and that farms that lack the sufficient accessibility to cultivable land, which is being increasingly converted into urban use, must transform and diversify to survive (Hansson et al., 2013). - Agricultural firms in the more peripheral cities, towns and rural areas, on the other hand, suffer of lack of sufficient concentrations of the now most important production factor to develop diversified markets, human capital, which means that they are becoming increasingly specialized and dependent on location specific raw materials and inputs to agricultural production (e.g., cultivable land and/or pasture). Fig. C1 in Appendix C display a similar trend e.g., that it is the small agricultural firms (less than 10 ha of land) that increase their concentration near large and diversified markets, presumably because they are more vulnerable to changing market conditions and therefore anticipated to have a higher motivation to undertake actions that make them more productive, compared with large firms (Acs and Audretsch, 1990). Such actions may include diversification into non-agricultural markets to spread or avoid risk (Nilsson, 2017). From the perspective of the agricultural sector, the trends discussed above indicate a division in two parts: one diversified city-close part that is being integrated in the
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question is then to what extent the research findings are transferable to other types of regions, e.g. in the developing world. In the introduction, we assumed that the general aspects of the post-urban world that we can observe in the developed countries, are, or will be, reflected in similar (even if not identical) development trends in the developing countries. Regarding the empirical results of the Stockholm case study, we can with the emergence of an urban middle-class, find examples across the world of that rural areas become integrated in growing cityregions, with land-use changes following the emergence of new, urban demand. Thus, even if the developing world is still undergoing a rapid, traditional urbanization, several features of the post-urban world is in varying degree already there, including transformation of agricultural land to housing, areas of various types of recreation, or diversified, post-urban agriculture. It should be underscored that this study merely has investigated agriculture and land-use in one metropolitan region. It is certainly not a “test” of the post-urban hypothesis, but just an illustration of how it can
be applied on this specific topic. Many other, related issues, e.g. the future of countryside's situated outside the city-regions have not been dealt with (but see Li et al., 2019). Also, regarding the specific focus of this study, a number of issues remain to be scrutinized by future research. One such issue is to what extent the more detailed findings for the Stockholm region correspond with the development in other city regions in Europe and the rest of the world. Another issue is the effect of increasing land prices on type of agricultural production and use of agricultural land. Which products are being produced by the metropolitan agriculture and which products are being abandoned? This question is also connected to the diversification trend in metropolitan agriculture. Which are the contents of the diversification and which are the drivers behind it? Conflicts of interest There exist no conflict of interest between the authors.
Appendix A Table A1
Variable definitions and data sources Variable
Definition
Population density Fig. 1 Land price, arable Fig. 2a and b Land price, pasture Fig. 3a and b Clusters high prices, arable Fig. 4a Clusters of high prices, pasture Fig. 4b Built-up land Fig. 5 Land use, arable Fig. 6a Land use, pasture Fig. 6b Land use, golf courses Fig. 6c Diversified agriculture Fig. 7 Dairy farming Fig. 8a Sheep farming Fig. 8b Horticulture, employees Fig. 9a Horticulture, turnover Fig. 9b Ecological farming Fig. 10 Urban agriculture, Sweden Fig. 10 Land transactions, arable and pasture Fig. A1 and A2 Firm size, agriculture Fig. B1 Dairy and sheep farming Fig. C1 and C2
Population per square kilometer in municipality, 2015. Source: Statistics Sweden. The average municipal per hectare price of market transacted arable land, sold during 2007–2008. Source: The Swedish land registration and cadastral authority The average municipal per hectare price of market transacted pasture, sold during 2007–2008. Source: The Swedish land registration and cadastral authority Estimated spatial clusters of high and low prices of arable land using Equation (1). Estimated spatial clusters of high and low prices of pasture using Equation (1). Change in the share of built-up land in the municipality, 1990–2012. Source: Statistics Sweden Change in the share of arable land in the municipality, 1990–2012. Source: Statistics Sweden Change in the share of pastureland in the municipality, 1990–2012. Source: Statistics Sweden Change in the share of land in the municipality devoted to golf courses, 1990–2012. Source: The County Administrative Boards Change in the share of agricultural firms that are diversified according to their main economic activity and SIC belonging (SIC = 1500). Source: Statistics Sweden Change in the absolute number of milk cows in the municipality 2002–2015. Source: Source: The Federation of Swedish Farmers (LRF). Change in the absolute number of sheep in the municipality 2002–2015. Source: The Federation of Swedish Farmers (LRF). Change in the number of employees in horticulture in the municipality 2002–2015. Source: The Federation of Swedish Farmers (LRF). Change in the average turnover of horticulture firms in the municipality 2002–2015. Source: The Federation of Swedish Farmers (LRF). The share of land in ecological farming. Source: The Federation of Swedish Farmers (LRF). Similarity search of municipalities that share similar development trends in agriculture as the Stockholm region using the variables described above and Equation (3). Spatial distribution of market sold arable and pastureland and their per hectare price 2007–2008, Sweden. Source: The Swedish land registration and cadastral authority Change in the share of agricultural firms that have less than 10 ha of agricultural land 1951–1995. Source: Statistics Sweden Change in the number of milk cows and sheep, 2002–2015, Sweden. Source: The Federation of Swedish Farmers (LRF).
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Appendix B
Fig. B2. Spatial distribution of market sold arable land and its per hectare price 2007–2008, Sweden.
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Fig. B1. Spatial distribution of market sold pastureland and its per hectare price 2007–2008, Sweden.
Appendix C
Fig. C1. Change in the share of small agricultural firms (< 10 ha) 1951–1995 13
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Appendix A. Supplementary data Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.07.002.
41 (1), 1–9. Heimlich, R.E., Brooks, D.H., 1989. Metropolitan Growth and Agriculture: Farming in the City's Shadow. Resources and Technology Division, Economic Research Service. U.S. Department of Agriculture. Agricultural Economic Report No. 619. Herrendorf, B., Rogerson, R., Valentinyi, A., 2013. Growth And Structural Transformation (No. W18996). National Bureau of Economic Research (Accessed 2017-08-16). http://www.ruaf.org/urban-agriculture-what-and-why. Hopkins, J., 1998. Sign of the post-rural: marketing myths of a symbolic countryside. Geogr. Ann. B Hum. Geogr. 80 (2), 65–81. Jedwab, R., Christiaensen, L., Gindelsky, M., 2017. Demography, urbanization and development: rural push, urban pull and… urban push? J. Urban Econ. 98, 6–16. Latruffe, L., Davidova, S., Douarin, E., Gorton, M., 2010. Farm expansion in Lithuania after accession to the EU: the role of CAP payments in alleviating potential credit constraints. Eur. Asia Stud. 62 (2), 351–365. Lefebvre, H., 2003. The Urban Revolution. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (French original first published 1970). Li, Y., Westlund, H., Liu, Y., 2019. Why some rural areas decline while some others not: an overview of rural evolution in the world. J. Rural Stud. https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.jrurstud.2019.03.003. Murdoch, J., Pratt, A.C., 1993. Rural studies: modernism, postmodernism and the ‘Postrural’. J. Rural Stud. 9 (44), 411–427. Nilsson, P., 2017. Productivity effects of CAP investment support: evidence from Sweden using matched panel data. Land Use Policy 66, 172–182. Oltmer, K., Florax, R.J., 2001. Impacts of Agricultural Policy Reform on Land Prices: A quantitative analysis of the literature. No. 374-2016-19687. Nilsson, P., Johansson, S., 2013. Location determinants of agricultural land prices. Jahrb. Regionalwiss. 33 (1), 1–21. Plantinga, A.J., Lubowski, R.N., Stavins, R.N., 2002. The effects of potential land development on agricultural land prices. J. Urban Econ. 52 (3), 561–581. Sharpley, R., Vass, A., 2006. Tourism, farming and diversification: An attitudinal study. Tourism manag. 27 (5), 1040–1052. Shi, Y.J., Phipps, T.T., Colyer, D., 1997. Agricultural land values under urbanizing influences. Land Econ. 73 (1), 90–100. Soja, E.W., 2011. From metropolitan to regional urbanization. In: Companion to Urban Design. Routledge, pp. 567–576. Westlund, H., 2014. Urban futures in planning, policy and regional science: are we entering a post-urban world? Built. Environ. 40 (4), 447–457. Westlund, H., 2018. Urban-rural relations in the post-urban world. In: Haas, Tigran, Westlund, Hans (Eds.), In the Post-Urban World. Routledge, London, pp. 70–81. Westlund, H., Haas, T., 2018. In the post-urban world: an introduction. In: Haas, Tigran, Westlund, Hans (Eds.), In the Post-Urban World. Routledge, London, pp. 1–12.
References Acs, Z.J., Audretsch, D.B., 1990. The determinants of small-firm growth in US manufacturing. Appl. Econ. 22 (2), 143–153. Andersson, Å.,E., 1985. Creativity – the Future of Metropolitan Regions. (Stockholm, Prisma). Andersson, Å.E., Batten, D.F., 1987. Creative nodes, logistical networks, and the future of the metropolis. Transportation 14 (4), 281–293. Bae, C.H.C., 2017. Urban Sprawl in Western Europe and the United States. Routledge. Barnes, A.P., Hansson, H., Manevska–Tasevska, G., Shrestha, S.S., Thomson, S.G., 2015. The influence of diversification on long-term viability of the agricultural sector. Land Use Policy 49, 404–412. Beale, C.L., 1975. “The Revival of Population Growth in Non-metropolitan America” Economic Research Service. US Department of Agriculture, Washington, DC Publication 605. Berry, B.J.L., 1976. The counterurbanization process: urban America since 1970. In: Berry, B.J.L. (Ed.), Urban Affairs Annual Review. vol. 11. Sage, Beverly Hills, CA, pp. 17e30. Brueckner, J.K., 2000. Urban sprawl: diagnosis and remedies. Int. Reg. Sci. Rev. 23 (2), 160–171. Busby, G., Rendle, S., 2000. The transition from tourism on farms to farm tourism. Tourism Manag. 21 (6), 635–642. Capozza, D.R., Helsley, R.W., 1989. The fundamentals of land prices and urban growth. J. Urban Econ. 26, 295–306. Capozza, D.R., Helsley, R.W., 1990. The stochastic city. J. Urban Econ. 28, 187–203. Capozza, D.R., Sick, G.A., 1994. The risk structure of land markets. J. Urban Econ. 35 (3), 297–319. Cavailhès, J., Wavresky, P., 2003. Urban influences on periurban farmland prices. Eur. Rev. Agric. Econ. 30 (3), 333–357. Deng, X., Huang, J., Rozelle, S., Zhang, J., Li, Z., 2015. Impact of urbanization on cultivated land changes in China. Land Use Policy 45, 1–7. Farrell, K.R., 2017. The rapid urban growth triad: a new conceptual framework for examining the urban transition in developing countries. Sustainability 9, 1407. https:// doi.org/10.3390/su9081407. 2017. Getis, A., Ord, J.K., 1992. The analysis of spatial association by use of distance statistics. Geogr. Anal. 24 (3). Halfacree, K.,H., 2009. Rurality and post-rurality. In: International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Elsevier, pp. 449–456. Hansson, H., Ferguson, R., Olofsson, C., Rantamäki–Lahtinen, L., 2013. Farmers' motives for diversifying their farm business – the influence of family. J. Rural Stud. 32, 240–250. Harvey, R.O., Clark, W.A., 1965. The nature and economics of urban sprawl. Land Econ.
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Agriculture's transformation and land-use change in a post-urban world: A case study of the Stockholm region Hans Westlunda,**, Pia Nilssonb,* a
CEnSE – Centre for Entrepreneurship and Spatial Economics, Jönköping International Business School, Jönköping, Sweden and Professor in Urban and Regional Studies, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Drottning Kristinas Väg 30, SE-111 44, Stockholm, Sweden b CEnSE – Centre for Entrepreneurship and Spatial Economics, Jönköping International Business School, Gjuterigatan 5, SE-551 11, Jönköping, Sweden
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is to address the hypotheses of complete urbanization and the post urban world with an emphasis on the agricultural sector. The paper studies spatial and temporal changes in land-use and agricultural activities in one rapidly growing metropolitan region, the Stockholm region. We explore the number and size of agricultural firms, changes in their main activity and trends of diversification and land prices for various types of land and location, all in a disaggregated spatial dimension. The results contribute to a deeper understanding of agriculture's function in metropolitan regions and shed new light on the possibilities of the agricultural sector to transform in a world where the traditional urban-rural relations are ceasing to exist.
1. Introduction As early as 1970, the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre pointed out that “… agricultural production has lost all its autonomy in the major industrialized nations and as part of a global economy. It is no longer the principal sector of the economy (…) as a result, the traditional unit typical of peasant life, namely the village, has been transformed. (…) it has become an integral part of industrial production and consumption. (…) In this sense, a vacation home, a highway, a supermarket in the countryside are all part of the urban fabric. (…) the only regions untouched by it are those that are stagnant or dying, those that are given over to ‘nature’” (Lefebvre, 2003/2003, p 3). Lefebvre called the result of this process “complete urbanization” but underscored that it was an anticipatory hypothesis of a development that he, at that time, had seen tendencies of. During the 1970s Lefebvre's hypothesis seemed to be completely wrong. Scholars across the western world noticed a new trend in migration and population development. Metropolitan areas lost population at the expense of rural areas and small cities and towns. In this decade, counterurbanization seemed to be a historic trend shift (Beale, 1975; Berry, 1976). Looking at the phenomenon forty years later, we can conclude that the counterurbanization coincided with the great crisis of the manufacturing industry. The breakthrough of information technology in the 1980s marked the emergence of the knowledge economy and with that, a new wave of urbanization, not only in a pure demographic sense, but also in an economic, social and cultural sense
*
(Andersson and AuthorAnonymous, 1985). In the western world, this urbanization of the knowledge economy has meant both densification of metropolitan regions and, in combination with improved means of transportation and commuting, spatial extension of metropolitan labor market regions (Andersson and Batten, 1987). Urbanization is rapidly increasing in the developing world as well. As pointed out by Farrell (2017), current urban growth in developing countries is even faster than it was in the corresponding period of developed countries. Specifically, in China, the rapid urbanization has hollowed out the villages' population and caused uncertainties about future food supply. In China, as well as the rest of the developing world, there is a clear need for raising agriculture's productivity to levels where fewer farmers can feed the increasing urban populations, while they at the same time can raise their incomes and narrow the income gap to the urban income earners. New housing and infrastructure in the expanding city-regions have received much attention in research and policy. As mentioned above, in China and other countries, there are also concerns about agriculture's future in the vast countrysides that are “given over to nature”. However, the main bulk of studies have focused on the transformation of agricultural land to built-up areas (Harvey and Clark, 1965; Brueckner, 2000; Bae, 2017) and the impact of urbanization on the change in cultivated land (Deng et al., 2015). Much less attention has been given to agricultural transformation and use of unbuilt-up land in metropolitan regions. A pioneering work in this field was published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1989 and one conclusion is that
Corresponding author. Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (H. Westlund), [email protected] (P. Nilsson).
**
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.07.002 Received 29 March 2018; Received in revised form 16 April 2019; Accepted 7 July 2019 0743-0167/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article as: Hans Westlund and Pia Nilsson, Journal of Rural Studies, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.07.002
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metro farms are generally smaller, have a higher land intensity in their production, are more diverse and focused on high-value production compared to farms elsewhere (Heimlich and Brooks, 1989, p. iii). This study contributes to the literature by putting current spatial and temporal development trends in agriculture and land-use into the context of a new paradigm: the post-urban world. This is being done by exploring spatial and temporal changes in agriculture and land-use in the Stockholm region, which belong to one of the fastest growing urban regions in Europe in terms of population and income per capita, and by comparing Stockholm with the rest of Sweden. The Stockholm region shows signs of many of the development trends that are central behind the idea of the post-urban world (Westlund, 2018). This includes changing land use and density patterns, the rapidly increasing urban character of agricultural activities and a disappearing dichotomy between the urban and the rural. As Westlund (2018) notes, during the agricultural period, cities were strongly dependent on foodstuff and raw material from the hinterlands and increasingly also on markets and inputs from other cities. In the current knowledge economy, the dependency on hinterlands foodstuff and raw material is small while the dependency of exchange with other city regions has increased rapidly. Hence, under the knowledge economy, rural areas are in a transition and their development is strongly influenced by the global networks. Rural areas are also transformed from spaces of production and consumption to spaces where tourism and land-based leisure activities play an increasingly important role. Rurality in the city-region has become a lifestyle for the urban inhabitants to pursue, to escape from the urban daily life. Correspondingly, several scholars use the term “post-rural” to re-understand the changing role of rural areas (Murdoch and Pratt, 1993; Hopkins, 1998; Halfacree, 2009). This paper examines different dimensions of agricultural transformation and land use change using disaggregated spatial data that cover long time-periods and the whole Swedish geography. The analysis is descriptive and focuses on spatial autocorrelations using cluster analysis and other spatial statistical methods. The descriptive analysis reveals that small and diversified farms have increased in areas nearby and surrounding the big cities in Sweden and that agricultural activities and the use of arable land has changed markedly over the last two decades. Although we do not study the causes of these observed changes, we argue that they may be linked to changing urban demand and increases in land prices within and surrounding rapidly growing urban areas. Comparing agricultural development trends across Sweden shows that the capital region Stockholm seems to be leading the transformation, followed by the second and third largest cities and their surrounding hinterlands (Gothenburg and Malmö). Given the rapidly increasing diversification of city-close agriculture, emerging from the analyses, particularly among the smaller farms, calls for further analyses in this direction. The remainder of the paper is organized in the following. Section 2 reviews the post-urban world hypothesis and the subsequent section outlines the case-study region and the data used in the descriptive analyses. Section 4 describes prices of agricultural land in Sweden and in the Stockholm region and land-use changes in the Stockholm region. Section 5 investigates the spatial extensions of the Stockholm region and changes in the number and size of farms, changes in their main activity, trends of diversification over time, and compares the development of the Stockholm region with the rest of Sweden. The last section summarizes the contribution of this paper, discusses the transferability of the research findings to other regional contexts and the limitations of the study, and proposes further studies of agriculture's role in the metropolitan regions of the post-urban world.
counterpart to the ‘complete’ urban. Westlund (2014, 2018) and Westlund and Haas (2018) take this circumstance as the foundation for their hypothesis on a post-urban world. According to the hypothesis, former rural areas are being dissolved in two categories. The first category, the city-close countryside, becomes integrated with the growing urban regions, or with Lefebvre's words more or less “totally urbanized”. The second category, the vast rural areas (but also peripheral cities and towns) outside the positive influence of the growing cityregions, are shrinking and “given over to nature”, apart from a few areas that can respond to certain niches of urban demand. Westlund and Haas (2018) highlight four aspects of the post-urban world that have been central behind the densification of metropolitan regions and the spatial extension of their labor market regions. The first is the re-urbanization of the western world, which deviates somewhat from the traditional understanding of urbanization that consists of migration from countryside to cities (and often within the same region). The re-urbanization of the western world include migration from declining manufacturing cities and regions to expanding knowledge- and service sector, cities and regions, or from the centers of declining manufacturing cities to suburbs. It also included upward migration within the national urban hierarchies from smaller urban settlements to bigger ones, partly affected by increasing immigration from low-income, or war affected countries. The second is densification of city regions, and particularly densification of suburbs. Soja (2011) emphasize the transformation of big cities from dense centers with lowdensity suburbs, to polycentric city regions with relatively high density all over. In areas where this process is most pronounced, the longstanding urban-suburban dualism of metropolitan urbanization has almost disappeared. In his view, the age of mass suburbanization has shifted to regional urbanization, a filling in of the entire metropolitan area (Soja 2011, p 684). The third is the region enlargement of labor markets due to improved transportation infrastructure and public transportation. This means that the city regions have not only been densified within a given area, as noted above but also become sparser when more distant centers (and their suburbs and adjacent rural areas) have become integrated in the metropolitan transportation networks. Lastly, the fourth is the downgrading of the relations between cities and their outer hinterlands and upgrading of the networks between cityregions that has emerged with the expansion of the knowledge economy. When human capital replaces raw materials and physical capital as the main production and location factor, the large, diversified labor markets of city-regions have become a key location factor for both businesses and labor. With the decreased relative importance of raw materials, the importance of peripheral areas' exchange with the city regions decreases. Instead, the city regions’ exchange increasingly takes place with other city regions, as their import- and export markets are much larger than those of their peripheral hinterlands. For rural areas, this means a division in two parts: one city-close part that becomes integrated in the growing city regions, and one peripheral part that is less and less needed in the knowledge economy. Different parts of the world are in various phases of the post-urban transition. All the abovementioned four aspects of the post-urban world hold in principle for the developed, western world, in which the traditional urbanization through migration from rural areas to urban ones largely has ceased. In the developing world, the traditional urbanization is still the dominating trend and re-urbanization is mainly insignificant. However, densification of city-regions and region enlargement are frequently occurring as a consequence of urbanization, although not exactly in the same way as in the developed countries. The fourth aspect, downgrading of relations with outer hinterlands and upscaling of relations with other city-regions, probably varies between developing countries depending on their development level; in China, for example, it is already a reality. This means that even if we cannot expect that the developing world will follow exactly the same development pattern as the western world, we should be able to assume that the post-urban pattern is already, or will be, reflected in similar trends there.
2. Background The development after 1970 has in many ways confirmed Lefebvre's hypothesis on complete urbanization. However, given complete urbanization there can, by definition, not be anything ‘rural’ as a 2
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Fig. 1. Population per square kilometer in the municipalities of the Stockholm region.
Swedish capital city Stockholm with almost 1 million inhabitants. The region is the largest in Sweden, in terms of population and it has undergone a transformation to a global polycentric city region in that many of its surrounding rural hinterland municipalities have been integrated and become a part of the metropolitan region. The Stockholm labor market region consist of 37 municipalities and has a population of over 2.2 million, illustrated in Fig. 1. The region makes up around 30% of Sweden's GNP (Gross National Product) and more than every third company in Sweden is located here, hosting around 240 thousand companies (Statistics Sweden). Although the largest proportion of economic activity takes place in the service sector, about one percent of the firms have agriculture as their main economic activity. In terms of economic performance and new firm formation (around 25 thousand new firms started in the region in 2017), the region places itself among the ten strongest regions in the EU. The rationale for focusing on this particular region is that it shows signs of many of the development trends that are central in the concept of post-urban transition, including changing land-use and density patterns, the rapidly increasing urban character of agricultural activities and the signs of a disappearing dichotomy between the urban and the rural. Table A1 in Appendix 1 summarizes and defines the variables used in the analysis of spatial and temporal urban development trends, with the overall goal to shed new light on central aspects on the future of urban-rural relations and integrated city regions with a focus on the agricultural sector. For analytical purposes, the municipality, which is the main political and administrative unit in Sweden, is used as the unit of observation in the empirical analyses.
This paper takes the post-urban dissolution of rural areas into two categories as the starting point for its case study. When rural areas up to a certain distance from the city (that varies with the size of the urban core and other characteristics of the region) become integrated in the city-regions, their land-use undergoes significant changes. The posturban transition means that the land-use within the city-regions adapts to the changing demands of the urban populations. “Post-rural” land, including arable land is transformed to land for housing, industry, transportation infrastructure and recreation. The use of remaining arable land is most often expressed in terms of that agriculture becomes “urban”, meaning a movement of the growing of plants and the raising of animals to within and around cities: “The most striking feature of urban agriculture, which distinguishes it from rural agriculture, is that it is integrated into the urban economic and ecological system: urban agriculture is embedded in -and interacting with-the urban ecosystem. Such linkages include the use of urban residents as laborer's, use of typical urban resources (like organic waste as compost and urban wastewater for irrigation), direct links with urban consumers, direct impacts on urban ecology (positive and negative), being part of the urban food system, competing for land with other urban functions, being influenced by urban policies and plans, etc. Urban agriculture is not a relic of the past that will fade away (urban agriculture increases when the city grows) nor brought to the city by rural immigrants that will lose their rural habits over time. It is an integral part of the urban system” (http://www.ruaf.org/urbanagriculture-what-and-why). In line with the post-urban hypothesis that we base this paper on, we here use the term “post-urban agriculture” for this phenomenon.
3.1. Indicators of a post-urban world
3. Study region and description of data
The empirical approach to analyze key characteristics of a posturban transition with a focus on the agricultural sector is to use data that describe changes in the composition of agricultural activity, land
The Stockholm region belongs to one of the fastest growing regions in Europe in terms of population and GDP per capita and hosts the 3
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Fig. 2. a. Average per hectare price in SEK of arable land, Sweden 2007–2008, 2b. Average per hectare price in SEK of arable land in the Stockholm region, 2007–2008.
use and the price of various types of land at different locations in the study region (see table A1 in Appendix A). In Sweden, prices of arable and pasture land have been increasing over time and explanations can be found in both agricultural and non-agricultural factors e.g., related to urbanization and growth in agricultural related markets (Oltmer and Florax 2001; Nilsson and Johansson, 2013). Another issue is the accession to the EU and the European Common Agricultural Policy, which has brought changes in institutional factors, agricultural land prices and the structure of the agricultural sector (Latruffe et al., 2010). The key feature of the data used for the present paper is that they provide consistent information across time and space, which offer a comprehensive picture of the scale and transition of agricultural activities. The main source of data used for the analyses is Statistics Sweden, although several other sources are used as well, and the analytical frame covers the whole Swedish geography.
and Rendle 2000; Sharpley and Vass 2006). In Sweden, agricultural related tourism in combination with farming is indicated to turn over about 1 billion SEK each year (Nilsson and Johansson, 2013). These activities tend to locate in rural areas that are relatively close to the largest cities, Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö, which influences the prices of market sold agricultural land, including both pasture and arable land. It is a well-known fact that prices of agricultural land are determined simultaneously by agricultural and non-agricultural factors and that the later can be most profoundly linked to urbanization which tends to increase the conversion of land from agricultural to non-agricultural uses (Capozza and Helsley, 1989, 1990; Shi et al., 1997; Cavailhès and Wavresky, 2003). Nilsson and Johansson (2013) show that urbanizing influences are the main factors lifting the price of agricultural land in Sweden.1 To examine spatial patterns in the price of agricultural land in the study region, and compared with Sweden as a whole, this paper applies a cross-regional approach where the unit of observation is the market
4. The price of land for different types of land and location One trend, which can be witnessed throughout Europe, is the diversification of agricultural activities and the growth of agricultural related markets, such as tourism, culinary markets, experiences and horse breeding, in rural areas surrounding many city regions (Busby
1 This study follows the approach that agricultural land prices can be decomposed into expected returns from land in its current agricultural use and expected returns from its potential use (e.g., Capozza and Sick, 1994; Plantinga et al., 2002).
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Fig. 3. a. Average per hectare price in SEK, pasture, Sweden, 3b. Average per hectare price in SEK, pasture, Stockholm region.
transacted per hectare price of agricultural land (arable and pasture).2 The possibility to observe Swedish agricultural land prices in a consistent way over time is limited because Statistics Sweden do only report yearly agricultural land prices at the aggregated county or NUTS3 level, which prevent spatial analyses at a disaggregated level. There are also relatively few sales of exclusively agricultural land each year as most of the transactions comprise a residential unit in combination with other types of farm buildings and agricultural land. To obtain the per hectare price of agricultural land at the municipality level, which is a
more disaggregated unit of observation than both the county- and NUTS3 level, we use a sample of 11 thousand market transacted farms across the Swedish geography. Fig. B1 and B2 in Appendix B illustrate the spatial distribution of these land transactions and the estimated per hectare price of arable- and pastureland across Sweden. Fig. 2a and b shows the average price of land at the municipality level (aggregated from the sales data). From the figures, it is evident that agricultural land prices in Sweden are under strong influence of urbanizing factors as prices in city regions and in areas with good accessibility conditions, surrounding the three metropolitan areas in Sweden (Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö), are generally much higher than elsewhere. High prices in these areas reflect a higher demand for land in city close regions, which is tied to possibilities for future gains after land has been converted to urban uses, and to its current agricultural use or value (Capozza and Sick, 1994; Plantinga et al., 2002). Fig. 3a and b shows the average price of pasture at the municipality level (aggregated from the sales data) indicating that the price of pasture is also under the influence of urbanizing factors in that prices are high in the urbanized regions and in areas surrounding the city regions. High prices of pasture land in these municipalities reflect that the land
2 These data are obtained from the Swedish Mapping, Cadastral and Land Registration Authority, and include transactions from the period January 2007 to December 2008. To obtain the municipal per hectare price of agricultural land from this sample we follow the approach taken by Statistics Sweden and Nilsson and Johansson (2013). This implies that the price of land is calculated by deducting the value of the housing units, in cases the transaction includes both housing and land. Tax assessment values are available in the data which allows us to calculate the value of land based on the assumption that the price of agricultural land in relation to the purchase price is the same as the tax assessment value of agricultural land in relation to the total tax assessment value.
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Fig. 4. a. Cluster analysis of land prices, arable, 4b. Cluster analysis of land prices, pasture.
offers possibilities for alternative use, or agricultural-related tourism activities, e.g., activities related to tourism and/or horse breeding. To explore the pattern of land prices in more detail, we employ cluster analysis to identify statistically significant patterns with land that sell for prices above the average. The Hot Spot Analysis tool is used to calculate the Gi* statistic for each of the transacted land lots included in the dataset (Getis and Ord, 1992). The resultant z-scores and p-values reflect where land with either high or low values cluster spatially by comparing each transaction within the context of neighboring transactions. A transaction with a high value is interesting but may not be a statistically significant high price cluster. To be a statistically significant cluster, a transaction must have a high price and be surrounded by other high-priced land lots. Hence, the local sum for a land transaction and its neighbors is compared proportionally to the sum of all transactions; when the local sum is very different from the expected local sum, and when that difference is too large to be the result of random chance, a statistically significant z-score results. The Gi* statistic is calculated in the following:
Fig. 5. Percentage change 1990–2012 in built-up land Stockholm region.
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parts of the country with conducive climate and accessibility conditions and surrounding the most urbanized areas (Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö). Prices significantly below the average are found in the northern parts of the country, where coniferous forests dominate the landscape and where natural prerequisites for agriculture and accessibility conditions are generally poorer. The price of pasture (Fig. 4b) show a similar pattern in that prices are high surrounding the metropolitan areas (Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö) and that prices significantly below the average in the northern parts of the country. The Figures also indicate differences in the spatial patterns of the prices of pasture and arable land. One observation is that the price of arable land seems to be more linked to agricultural factors (e.g., the quality of the soil), as prices are high in areas with better agricultural preconditions. Pasture, on the other hand, seems to be more heavily under the influence of urbanizing factors, which can be seen from the clusters of high prices of pasture surrounding the largest metropolitan areas (Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö). This also reflects a demand for land from urban residents for uses other than agriculture, including various types of land based leisure activities (golf) and horse breeding. 4.1. Land use and spatial extension of the city region - Although agriculture comprise a small share of income and employment in Sweden, as in most developed countries, it plays an important role in land use. Urbanization is often considered as having negative impacts on agriculture, for instance, from the loss of agricultural land to urban expansion or resulting from an urban bias in public funding for infrastructure and services (Deng et al., 2015; Jedwab et al., 2017). One connected feature, highlighted in the concept of the emerging post-urban world, is the ‘region enlargement’ in the form of spatial extensions of the city region and the resulting changing density patterns and land uses within the city region. As discussed, urban regions tend to become denser within a given area, but also more dispersed as distant centers (and their suburbs and adjacent rural areas) become integrated in the metropolitan networks (Westlund, 2018). These development trends are reflected in changing density patterns and in land use change within the city region with more land being converted into urban use e.g., to built-up areas and transportation networks. Figs. 5 and 6a-6c illustrates development trends connected to land use change and regional enlargement in the municipalities included in the Stockholm metropolitan region for the period 1990–2012. Fig. 5 display the percentage change in built up land in the Stockholm metropolitan area during 1990–2012. The Figure show a striking increase in the share of built up land in the central municipalities of the city region (up to 50 percent in the most central parts), followed by increases in all the surrounding municipalities. Certainly, these developments are reflections of urban sprawl in that the Stockholm metropolitan region has enlarged, but they also reflect a change to a much sparser city region that include not only urban activities and land use but also former rural activities and land use that have been integrated in the urban fabric (Westlund, 2018). - Urban expansion inevitably covers some agricultural land and urban centers do often expand over productive agricultural land as most urban centers grew there because of fertile soils (Nilsson and Johansson, 2013). Fig. 6a and b illustrates the change in land use devoted to arable land and pasture in the Stockholm region during the same period of time (1990–2012). The figures display a decreasing development trend in agricultural land use, most notably for cultivated (arable) land, which share has decreased in 27 out of the 37 municipalities included in the metropolitan region. All in all, the figures indicate a decline in land devoted to land based agricultural activities but may also reflect a change in agricultural activities to become part of, or to adapt to, the urban structure, as reflected in the increase in the share of pasture in the outer parts of the Stockholm region, partly as a response to the popularity of riding horses. Some municipalities do also show an increase of arable land, which probably indicates another
Fig. 6. a Percentage change 1990–2012 land use devoted to arable land in the stockholmegion, b Percentage change 1990–2012 land use devoted to arable land in the stockholmegion, c Percentage change 1990–2012 land use devoted to arable land in the stockholmegion. n j=1
Gi* =
wi, j Xj
n
S
X
n 2 j = 1 wi, j
n
n j=1
wi, j
n j = 1 wi, j
1
2
(1)
Where x j is the attribute value for feature j , wi, j is the spatial weigh between feature i and j , n is equal to the total number of features and3:
X =
n j =1
n
xj (2)
Fig. 4a and b shows the spatial distribution of the sample used in the empirical analysis and GiZ scores from cluster analysis with respect to sales price, classified using standard deviations (Getis and Ord, 1992). The price of arable land (Fig. 4a) is shown to be high in the southern 3
The Gi* statistic returned for each transaction in the dataset is a z-score. For statistically significant positive z-scores, the larger the z-score is, the more intense the clustering of high values (hot spot). For statistically significant negative z-scores, the smaller the z-score is, the more intense the clustering of low values (cold spot). 7
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Fig. 7. Percentage change in the share of diversified agricultural firms in Sweden and the Stockholm region, 1995–2015.
is not just the result of urbanization but also (in most cities) a result of declining urban densities. Since urbanization entails fewer rural people as well as more urban people, it may reduce rural building and so, in part, counteract the effects of urbanization expanding over cultivated land. Fig. 6c display another key development trend that is highly relevant in Sweden, as well as in many middle- and high-income countries, namely the conversion of land for the expansion of recreational activities e.g., open spaces, golf courses and urban parks. The land areas being used for golf courses in Stockholm county increased by 35 percent between the year 2000 and 2005 (source Statistics Sweden) and the figure display a striking increase in land use devoted to such use, up to 3.5 percent of total land in some of the central municipalities of the region. In summary, these trends are all key features of land use and agricultural transformation that exemplify the development trends that underlie the transition to a post-urban world. 5. Transitions in urban agriculture - Besides causing changes in the price and use of land, as discussed above, urbanization and the expansion of urban demand also result in altered supply of and demand for agricultural products, which spurs a transition of the sector. Urbanization and structural change are strongly related to each other, but may also imply competitive movements, especially in city regions. The most fertile agricultural lands provide home for most people, but the conversion of agricultural land into built up land is the largest in those regions (Herrendorf et al., 2013). The number of agricultural holdings has decreased rapidly in Sweden, as in most European countries. In the middle of the 1920s there were more than 427 000 agricultural firms in Sweden of which 307 395 farmed more than 2 ha of arable land. Although the number of firms where stable until the end of the World War II, structural rationalization brought fewer and larger farms. Until the beginning of 1950 more than a majority of the arable land was found in firms in-between 2 and 20 ha. The same share in 2010 was around 13 percent (source The Swedish Board of Agriculture). The consequences are that the use of agricultural land is concentrated to the central agricultural areas where large scale
Fig. 8. a. Change in the number of milk cows, 2002–2015, Stockholm region, 8b. Change in the number of sheep, 2002–2015, Stockholm region.
growing tendency of the post-urban agricultural land use, viz. city-close horticulture. - Moreover, the loss of agricultural land to the spatial expansion of urban areas and the resulting declining proportion of land used for agriculture around a city can also be followed by more intensive production of the land that remains in agriculture (see Shi et al., 1997). Moreover, as discussed in Westlund (2014), the expansion of urban land
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Fig. 9. a. Change in the number of employees in horticulture 2002–2015, Stockholm region, 9b. Change in average turnover (in thousand SEK) of horticulture firms 2002–2015, Stockholm region.
agriculture is made possible. The less productive, and often the smallscale farming, is abandoned or converted into forest land. Between 1951 and 2010 there was a fall in arable land by more than 1 million hectares (source The Swedish Board of Agriculture). A key question that arises in this context is whether the growing and changing demands for agricultural products, brought by an increasingly urbanized population, can improve agricultural productivity and bring rural development through various linkages e.g., to urban demand and to urban enterprises that can provide producer and consumer services to rural areas.
metropolitan areas and in areas around mid-sized cities. Hence, changes in the demand and the structure of the agricultural sector have accelerated the pace of adjustment to new market conditions facing agricultural firms. The studies by Hansson et al. (2013) and Barnes et al. (2015) argue along these lines and present evidence that agricultural firms that locate nearby areas with a more diversified industrial structure have a greater potential to develop economies of scope in production, because it makes them more flexible to adapt to changing market conditions. Fig. 7 illustrates the development of diversified agriculture in Sweden and the Stockholm metropolitan area for the period 1995–2015 and Fig. 8a and b illustrates a more detailed change in city closer agriculture e.g., the change in the structure of livestock keeping and dairy farming. The first figure (Fig. 7) displays the change in the share of agricultural firms that are diversified (defined using their main activity after SIC belonging) out of the total number of agricultural firms in the municipality. The development trends indicated in the figures reveal that diversified farming, horticulture (Fig. 9a and b) and sheep farming (Fig. 8b) has evolved in areas nearby and surrounding the big cities, which is broadly in line with the idea that agricultural firms are faced with new market conditions and that diversification can make them more flexible to adapt to such conditions. Specifically, during the 19year period that is displayed, diversified farming seems to have decreased in the rural areas in the northern part of Sweden and increased
5.1. Development of city-close agriculture - There are several key features of land use and agricultural transformation that exemplify the development trends that underlie the transition to an emerging post-urban world. One important trend, discussed above, is the decline of the relations between city regions and their outer hinterlands and the growing importance of their networks to other city regions (Westlund, 2014). This stems from the growing importance of human capital as the main production and location factor. The result is that diversified and large labor markets of city-regions have become a key location factor for business and labor. This development trend is particularly evident within the agricultural sector, which has transformed to become increasingly diversified in
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extended city regions, and one peripheral part, for which the only potential to survive is to specialize and thus be able to competitively meet certain urban demand. These changes support the post-urban hypothesis presented above. 5.2. Similarity search One way to summarize the development trends discussed above is to consider them as knowledge and information spillover effects that occur among agricultural firms that are clustered in certain geographical settings. One conclusion so far is that there are a series of studies that underline the importance of agricultural and non-agricultural spillover effects for the growth of both farm and non-farm enterprises in urban regions. A similarity search can be used to identify which municipalities or groups of municipalities are most similar (or most dissimilar), based on a specified number of variables of interest. The aim is to find other municipalities or groups of municipalities in Sweden that share the same agricultural transformation that the Stockholm region. A simiarity index can be expressed in the following:
Cosine similarity index =
n i=1 n i=1
(Ai
)2
Ai Bi n i=1
(Bi )2
(3)
The results, presented in Fig. 10, indicate that the Stockholm region is leading in the transformation to a post-urban agriculture, and it is followed by the cities of Gothenburg and Malmö and some large regional centers in Sweden. 6. Concluding remarks This paper's contribution to the rural social science literature is that it puts current spatial and temporal development trends in agriculture and land-use in the context of a new paradigm: the post-urban world. By suggesting that current trends in metropolitan regions are parts of a global change in urban-rural relations brought by the emergence of a post-urban world, the paper links the land-use changes of city-regions to a global socio-economic transformation. The empirical analysis reveals a striking decline in land use devoted to agriculture, across Sweden, and especially in areas surrounding the larger cities and the capital region Stockholm. The analysis of agricultural land prices indicates that prices are influenced by traditional factors, the quality of land in terms of its capacity to produce agricultural products, but most notably by non-agricultural factors, which are linked to urbanization, accessibility to markets and urban demand. This is particularly the case for pasture, which is converted to give space for land-based tourism and leisure activities. For instance, the land areas being used for golf courses in Stockholm county increased by 35 percent between 2000 and 2005. The descriptive analysis also reveals that diversified farms has increased in number in areas nearby and surrounding the big cities. Small agricultural firms (in terms of employees and land) have increased their concentration near city regions and agricultural activities and the use of arable land have also changed markedly as a response to changing urban demand and to increasing land prices. Comparing development trends across Sweden, the Stockholm region seems to be leading the transformation, followed by the cities of Gothenburg and Malmö, and some regional centers. These findings support earlier studies of land-use and agriculture in metropolitan regions (e.g. Heimlich and Brooks, 1989) and correspond well with the general implications of the post-urban hypothesis. Just like Lefebvre's hypothesis on “complete urbanization”, the hypothesis on the post-urban world is based on development trends principally in the developed western world, and our case study region is a high-developed western metropolitan region as well. An obvious
Fig. 10. Results of similarity search of municipalities that have similar development trends in agriculture as the Stockholm region 2002–2015 (most similar = 1).
in the Stockholm and Gothenburg regions, in which markets have become more diversified in general. Naturally, this trend does also reflect changes in the capital-to-labor ratio and that farms that lack the sufficient accessibility to cultivable land, which is being increasingly converted into urban use, must transform and diversify to survive (Hansson et al., 2013). - Agricultural firms in the more peripheral cities, towns and rural areas, on the other hand, suffer of lack of sufficient concentrations of the now most important production factor to develop diversified markets, human capital, which means that they are becoming increasingly specialized and dependent on location specific raw materials and inputs to agricultural production (e.g., cultivable land and/or pasture). Fig. C1 in Appendix C display a similar trend e.g., that it is the small agricultural firms (less than 10 ha of land) that increase their concentration near large and diversified markets, presumably because they are more vulnerable to changing market conditions and therefore anticipated to have a higher motivation to undertake actions that make them more productive, compared with large firms (Acs and Audretsch, 1990). Such actions may include diversification into non-agricultural markets to spread or avoid risk (Nilsson, 2017). From the perspective of the agricultural sector, the trends discussed above indicate a division in two parts: one diversified city-close part that is being integrated in the
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question is then to what extent the research findings are transferable to other types of regions, e.g. in the developing world. In the introduction, we assumed that the general aspects of the post-urban world that we can observe in the developed countries, are, or will be, reflected in similar (even if not identical) development trends in the developing countries. Regarding the empirical results of the Stockholm case study, we can with the emergence of an urban middle-class, find examples across the world of that rural areas become integrated in growing cityregions, with land-use changes following the emergence of new, urban demand. Thus, even if the developing world is still undergoing a rapid, traditional urbanization, several features of the post-urban world is in varying degree already there, including transformation of agricultural land to housing, areas of various types of recreation, or diversified, post-urban agriculture. It should be underscored that this study merely has investigated agriculture and land-use in one metropolitan region. It is certainly not a “test” of the post-urban hypothesis, but just an illustration of how it can
be applied on this specific topic. Many other, related issues, e.g. the future of countryside's situated outside the city-regions have not been dealt with (but see Li et al., 2019). Also, regarding the specific focus of this study, a number of issues remain to be scrutinized by future research. One such issue is to what extent the more detailed findings for the Stockholm region correspond with the development in other city regions in Europe and the rest of the world. Another issue is the effect of increasing land prices on type of agricultural production and use of agricultural land. Which products are being produced by the metropolitan agriculture and which products are being abandoned? This question is also connected to the diversification trend in metropolitan agriculture. Which are the contents of the diversification and which are the drivers behind it? Conflicts of interest There exist no conflict of interest between the authors.
Appendix A Table A1
Variable definitions and data sources Variable
Definition
Population density Fig. 1 Land price, arable Fig. 2a and b Land price, pasture Fig. 3a and b Clusters high prices, arable Fig. 4a Clusters of high prices, pasture Fig. 4b Built-up land Fig. 5 Land use, arable Fig. 6a Land use, pasture Fig. 6b Land use, golf courses Fig. 6c Diversified agriculture Fig. 7 Dairy farming Fig. 8a Sheep farming Fig. 8b Horticulture, employees Fig. 9a Horticulture, turnover Fig. 9b Ecological farming Fig. 10 Urban agriculture, Sweden Fig. 10 Land transactions, arable and pasture Fig. A1 and A2 Firm size, agriculture Fig. B1 Dairy and sheep farming Fig. C1 and C2
Population per square kilometer in municipality, 2015. Source: Statistics Sweden. The average municipal per hectare price of market transacted arable land, sold during 2007–2008. Source: The Swedish land registration and cadastral authority The average municipal per hectare price of market transacted pasture, sold during 2007–2008. Source: The Swedish land registration and cadastral authority Estimated spatial clusters of high and low prices of arable land using Equation (1). Estimated spatial clusters of high and low prices of pasture using Equation (1). Change in the share of built-up land in the municipality, 1990–2012. Source: Statistics Sweden Change in the share of arable land in the municipality, 1990–2012. Source: Statistics Sweden Change in the share of pastureland in the municipality, 1990–2012. Source: Statistics Sweden Change in the share of land in the municipality devoted to golf courses, 1990–2012. Source: The County Administrative Boards Change in the share of agricultural firms that are diversified according to their main economic activity and SIC belonging (SIC = 1500). Source: Statistics Sweden Change in the absolute number of milk cows in the municipality 2002–2015. Source: Source: The Federation of Swedish Farmers (LRF). Change in the absolute number of sheep in the municipality 2002–2015. Source: The Federation of Swedish Farmers (LRF). Change in the number of employees in horticulture in the municipality 2002–2015. Source: The Federation of Swedish Farmers (LRF). Change in the average turnover of horticulture firms in the municipality 2002–2015. Source: The Federation of Swedish Farmers (LRF). The share of land in ecological farming. Source: The Federation of Swedish Farmers (LRF). Similarity search of municipalities that share similar development trends in agriculture as the Stockholm region using the variables described above and Equation (3). Spatial distribution of market sold arable and pastureland and their per hectare price 2007–2008, Sweden. Source: The Swedish land registration and cadastral authority Change in the share of agricultural firms that have less than 10 ha of agricultural land 1951–1995. Source: Statistics Sweden Change in the number of milk cows and sheep, 2002–2015, Sweden. Source: The Federation of Swedish Farmers (LRF).
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Appendix B
Fig. B2. Spatial distribution of market sold arable land and its per hectare price 2007–2008, Sweden.
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Fig. B1. Spatial distribution of market sold pastureland and its per hectare price 2007–2008, Sweden.
Appendix C
Fig. C1. Change in the share of small agricultural firms (< 10 ha) 1951–1995 13
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Appendix A. Supplementary data Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.07.002.
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