Peri-urban agriculture as quiet sustainability: Challenging the urban development discourse in Sogamoso, Colombia

Abstract

This article advances academic and policy debates on peri-urban agriculture (PUA) by examining the phenomenon in the city of Sogamoso, Colombia. Planners, developers, and local authorities in Sogamoso have explicitly framed PUA as a barrier to development: a backwards, localized, low-tech and economically poorly performing activity that needs to make space for a more ‘productive’ ‘modern’ economy. Based on a survey of 160 peri-urban farming and gardening households, this study identifies PUA forms of food self-provisioning and exchange (FSPE) and further characterizes the practice’s social embeddedness, barriers, and opportunities as perceived by peri-urban farmers. The article combines scholarship on PUA and ‘quiet sustainability’ (Smith and Jehlička, 2013) to propose a novel perspective that could help transform the terms of discourse on the role and future of PUA in urban sustainable development from arguments founded in productivity metrics to the appreciation of FSPE as an environmentally sustainable practice that strengthens the social fabric of local communities, thus contributing to their sense of purpose, meaning, and resilience. This study has implications not only for Sogamoso, but also for many other cities in Latin America and the Global South, where the role of PUA in relation to sustainable urban development is being actively contested.