Analyzing Western Urban Agriculture through the Concept of Environmental Capital
Experienced for a long time in emerging countries, urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) knows a growing interest in Western countries since the end of the 19th century. In France, the first concrete examples of these new agricultural practices in the city centers or in the inner suburbs are those of the allotment gardens which appear in the wake of the French League of Coin de Terre et du Foyer, created in 1896 at the initiative of Father Jules-Auguste Lemire. Then, in the early 1970s, the Green Guerillas as well as the community gardens have changed northern american cities such as New York. Since then, cities in industrialized countries have increasingly been affected by a paradigm shift that shows a strong comeback of the countryside and nature in the city. In fact, the importance of new UPA practices is evident in the sense that they arouse the interest of several institutions and governments at all scales. In addition, the functions and objectives of the UPA are multiple. It raises both the question of urban food resources, the improvement of the living environment, the revaluation of abandoned wasteland or, more generally, the sustainable development and preservation of natural ecosystems. Polymorphic, multifunctional and a solution based on nature, UPA is therefore distinguished by a wide variety of agricultural practices which abound and multiply in French and European cities regardless of their size. Such diversity necessarily translates into many questions and issues that directly affect urban and peri-urban territories. This contribution proposes to analyze UPA projects by focusing more specifically on the concepts of environmental capital. Thus, the objective of this work is to analyze the economic models involved in the French UPA projects, through a theoretical grid of environmental capital. This means shedding new light on the already well-documented concept of UPA, with the aim of formalizing a new mapping of contemporary UPA projects in France.