Urban Areas - Rural Areas and Recycling - The organic way forward? Proceedings from NJF-seminar No. 327. Copenhagen, Denmark 20-21 August 2001

Summary

In society as a whole there is a wish to support a sustainable development. In recent years the public has been concerned with agriculture, and the population has been particularly supportive of organic farming in their consumer behaviour. To this date there has been rather less concern with the sustainable functioning of the urban areas, and only a few persons have started to talk about "organic cities".
One of the more fundamental problems in present-day-society is the dissociation of urban areas from the rural surroundings. This has given rise to a cultural estrangement in view of the fact that many if not most, urbanites no longer have close ties to rural life. Another aspect of this dissociation is the lack of recycling of nutrients and organic matter from urban areas. For years agriculture has spent huge resources on energy-intensive synthetic fertilizers, while nutrients lost from the urban areas pollute the environment – nutrients that may have replaced some of the synthetic fertilizers used in agriculture. In one provocative chapter of these proceedings it is argued that the energy requirements of the currently dominant food production and distribution system by far exceeds that of both private housing and transportation systems, and that future limitations in fossil fuel use should lead to a ruralisation of urban settlements to allow a better integration of the various life support systems.
The sustainable functioning of urban areas has thus been of growing concern in the Nordic countries, and a number of researchers have set out to investigate possibilities for establishment of more sustainable food systems, with a focus on commercially viable strategies.
The aim of the seminar "Urban Areas - Rural Areas And Recycling. The Organic Way Forward?" held in August 2001 at KVL was to present and stimulate research in a number of different themes:
· Qualitative, ethical, environmental, and resource conservation consequences of local
integration of food production, food processing, distribution, and consumption
· Documented sociological and financial experiences of local cooperation between
consumers, processors, distributors, and farmers
· Aspects of recycling in the whole food chain (within farming systems and between town
and countryside, including distribution and processes)
· Scientific and personal experiences of eco-villages, nutrient recycling, local self-
sufficiency in food, and other resources
· Rural and urban co-development, now and in the future
· Methodological aspects of research in organic farming related to the themes
These themes are by and large covered by the 19 contributions to these proceedings. For the sake of clarity the volume has been structured into two parts, the first being concerned mainly with the food supply and distribution systems and the second with a focus on the recycling of nutrients and organic matter.