Abstract
This chapter introduces the main theme of the book – the challenges of planning for peri-urban agriculture in a culturally diverse, high growth city- through the story of Sydney’s culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) fringe farmers. The experiences of these small-scale family farmers in many ways reflect issues faced by peri-urban agriculture in other developed countries: an increasing level of public support for localized food systems paralleled with an ongoing threat from urban development and pressures on their economic viability from the mainstream food system.
The diversity of Sydney’s growers adds a further dimension to their story, however, as it melds urban sustainability concerns with another of the key challenges for twenty-first century cities – the co-existence of increasingly culturally diverse populations and their diverse land uses, as a result of global migration flows. Run by first and second-generation migrants, Sydney’s farms represent multi-faceted cultural, economic and environmental values in land. They have largely been invisible to city planners and neglected in any official vision for the city’s growth. This is due, in part at least, to the diversity of the growers and the urban nature of their farms. This chapter argues for greater recognition of these farms by city planners, and outlines how the book will consider the efficacy of advocacy discourses around the heritage and sustainability of Sydney’s urban agriculture in achieving this recognition. This chapter, and book more broadly, argues that, in contributing to urban sustainability, such peri-urban agriculture represents a ‘common good’ with the potential to unite a diverse population towards a shared future. It emphasizes that these fringe farms need to be recognized as an integral part of, rather than separate from, the city.
The original version of this chapter was revised. An erratum to this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32235-3_8
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Notes
- 1.
This book uses the term ‘Bringelly’ throughout to refer to the area around the South West Growth Centre now designated for housing growth. The South West Growth Centre encompasses the actual suburb of Bringelly as well as that of Kemps Creek, Austral, Catherine Fields, Rossmore, Leppington, Marylands, Oran Park, and Edmondson Park. The term Bringelly is used for this whole area, reflecting public and governmental use this term (see Department of Environment and Planning 1988: Planning 1995). The actual suburb of Bringelly is delineated as such within this book from this broader use.
- 2.
The term ‘Sydney Basin’ is used throughout this book to denote the greater Sydney Region as defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (see Fig. 1.2). This includes Wollondilly Local Government area in the South and Gosford and Wyong in the North. Gosford and Wyong are sometimes separated from Sydney as part of the ‘Central Coast’ but are included in the ABS definition. The area of Sydney bounded by these regions is smaller than the geological greater Sydney Basin that stretches up to the Hunter region to the north of Sydney city (more than 4 h away) and the city of Wollongong to the south. The smaller geographic area has been described as the Sydney Basin in this book reflecting the area described by this term in the various reports and public debates described within this book.
- 3.
The concept of the ‘western’ city is over-invested with notions of progress and development (Robinson 2006). This self-ascribed status of cities in the ‘west’ or the ‘global north’ as pinnacles of civilisation and progress has been based upon a distinction from cities in the so-called ‘developing world’ (Robinson 2006) as well as the (attempted) exclusion of natural and cultural others such as Indigenous peoples and the natural environment in settler countries like Australia (Anderson 1993; Jacobs 1996; Blomley 2004). This book contributes to contemporary scholarship that troubles a narrow and homogenising definition of ‘the city’ (Amin and Thrift 1997; Robinson 2006) by drawing attention to the internal heterogeneity of cities in the global north such as Sydney due to the presence of such natural and cultural ‘others’.
- 4.
These different estimates of farms and farmers are indicative of a lack of exact information on the Sydney Basin agricultural industry. The count of 1500 farms does not distinguish between the vegetable market gardens and the orchards, turf or poultry farms run by these growers. The lack of precise data makes it difficult to pinpoint an exact number of market gardens in Sydney.
- 5.
This research received approval from the Human Ethics committee of the University of Western Sydney.
- 6.
As part of this research a number of interviews were also taken with representatives from Aboriginal organisations within Sydney but they are not presented in this book.
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James, S. (2016). Sydney’s ‘Invisible’ Farmers. In: Farming on the Fringe. Urban Agriculture. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32235-3_1
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