Metropolitan Food Governance

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DISSERTATION METROPOLITAN FOOD GOVERNANCE How agriculture in peri-urban areas is shaped by multi-stakeholder networks and European policies: the cases of Rome and Vienna ausgeführt zum Zwecke der Erlangung des akademischen Grades einer Doktorin/ eines Doktors der technischen Wissenschaften unter der Leitung von

Prof. Richard Stiles E260/L Fachbereich für Landschaftsplanung und Gartenkunst Institut für Städtebau, Landschaftsarchitektur und Entwerfen, TU Wien

Prof. Dr. Wil Zonneveld Chair of Urban and Regional Development, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft

eingereicht an der Technischen Universität Wien Fakultät für Architektur und Raumplanung Daniela Patti Matrikel nummer: 1029439

Wien, 20.04.2017

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Abstract Keywords: peri-urban landscape, short food chains, metropolitan governance, European policy.

This dissertation investigates how agriculture and short food chains in peri-urban areas are shaped by multi-stakeholder networks and European policies. The research focuses on the modalities in which peri-urban landscape around Vienna and Rome is being used, with particular attention on the relationships developed between the landscape, the governance networks and the policies adopted when pursuing active landscape protection.

Peri-urban landscape has co-existed with cities from the very start of their creation, when producing food for the urban population. This landscape, identifiable by its interaction between Man and Nature, is a common resource for its local inhabitants. Although it is recognised as important under social, economic and environmental aspects, its identity has rapidly evolved and transformed, now accommodating alongside agricultural land also new functions, often undesired in the urban areas. Food production, a fundamental element of peri-urban areas, is currently struggling to survive due to urban pressure, which increases land prices, and delocalisation of the food production, which slowly eradicates the local market. Yet this landscape is gradually reinventing itself through multifunctional land uses and short food distribution chains.

These new models in the peri-urban landscape entail actor constellations, where stakeholders not only develop new skills and roles, but also create new alliances and competences. Whilst these new relations can appear to be more fluid and democratic, they can also raise legitimacy issues. Within the context of peri-urban areas, such situations are particularly evident in the stakeholder coordination of metropolitan areas, where the landscape overarches different municipal boundaries. In such a fragmented governance scenario, once again it is in the peri-urban landscape that experiences where local communities having developed competences and cooperations are encountered. In some cases, these initiatives have been supported by collaborative planning processes that enabled a wider participation in the decision-making process, often moderated by the administration.

Undoubtedly, these new dynamics in the peri-urban areas are embedded in a complex policy framework. Policies addressing the peri-urban areas are multi-level, from European to local, and inter-disciplinary, with various themes interacting. Such local policies are recognised as being relevant to this landscape, even though fragmented. At the same time European policy has a strong impact on the territorial dimension of the peri-urban areas, even though it has no official jurisdiction over spatial planning. This is how, when the Common Agriculture Policy and the Cohesion Policy define development goals and allocate resources for their implementation in the territory, local spatial policies are not aligned with them. Such complexity further contributes to the peri-urban landscape’s fragmentation and the lack of stakeholder coordination. Nonetheless, there are cases in which community involvement in planning has ensured to bridged some of the discrepancies between European and local policies.

The argumentation of this research is that active landscape protection of agricultural periurban areas can be pursued through short food chains and multi-functional land uses. For this to be effectively implemented, a self-governance of the local communities should be 2

integrated in the decision-making process through collaborative planning processes.

Given the important role of both European and local policies on the peri-urban territory and stakeholders, this may only happen if the policy framework in place is adequately integrated between levels, actively involving relevant stakeholders. These interaction between the landscape, the governance and the policy is investigated in case study areas in Rome and Vienna. 

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INDEX 1. Introduction 1.1. Problem statement

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7 8 9

1.2. Research Question 1.3. Research Layers and Sub-Questions 1.3.1. The Landscape 1.3.2. The Governance 1.3.3. The Policy 1.4. Case Study Cities

9 11 12

13 14

1.5. Research Structure 2. Methodology 2.1. Case Studies

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15 18

2.3. Analytical tools 2.3.1. Literature Review 2.3.2. Interviews 2.3.3. Land Use Mapping 2.3.5. Actor network maps 3. Analytical framework 3.1. Outline

18 19 20 21 22

3.2. Peri-urban landscape 3.2.1. Defining Peri-Urban Landscape as a Commons 3.2.2. The challenges of urban pressure and delocalised food systems 3.2.3. Multi-Functionality and Short Food Chains for landscape protection 3.2.4. Research Sub-Question 3.3. Metropolitan Governance 3.3.1. Defining governance as a network 3.3.2. The challenge of coordination within metropolitan areas 3.3.3. Administration as enabler of Self-governance and Collaborative Planning 2.3.4. Research Sub-Question 3.4. Policy Integration 3.4.1. Defining European policies as impactful on the peri-urban landscape 3.4.2. The challenge of integration 3.4.3. Aligning EU and local policies through community-led planning 3.4.4. Research Sub-Question 3.5. Analytical Framework overview 3.5.1 Analytical Framework Overview 4. Rome Case Study 4.1. The City of Rome 4.1.1. Peri-Urban Landscape 4.1.2. The metropolitan governance 4.1.3. Policy 4.2. The case study areas 4.2.1. Casal del Marmo 4.2.2. Marcigliana 4.2.3. Frascati 4.3. Conclusions 4.3.1. Rome Case Studies Overview 5. Vienna Case Study 5.1. The City of Vienna 5.1.1. The peri-urban landscape 5.1.2. Multi-level Governance 5.1.3. Policy 5.2. Case Study areas 5.2.1. EĂ&#x;ling 5.2.2. Siebenhirten 5.2.3. Schwechat 5.2.4. Conclusions 6. Conclusions

22 24 25 30 35 40

43 44 48 52 57

59 60 69 72 76

78 80 81

81 82 89 98

108 110 125 139

159 161 164

164 165 176 186 199 201 219

231 245 251 5

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6.1 Comparative analysis 6.1.1. Peri-urban Landscape 6.1.2. Metropolitan Governance 6.1.3. Integrated Policy 6.2. Final considerations 6.2.1. Methodological considerations 6.2.2. Questions for further research 7. Bibliography

254 260 266

271 271 272 274

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1. Introduction The painting “Allegory of the Good Government” depicted in the City Hall of Siena represents a lively urban fabric contained by city walls and surrounded by a productive and well kept landscape. The painting, with its clear didascalic intention, is faced in the same room by the Allegory of the Bad Government, where a tyrant governs a city that is devastated by poverty, delinquency and hunger is surrounded by desolate fields with few starving animals. The Allegories, painted back in the XIV cent., depict something that is evocative still today: the effects of governments and their policies on the territory.

Figure 1: “The Allegory of the Good Government” by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Palazzo Pubblico of Siena, Italy (1338-1339). Source: www.stampediarte.it

Today, when the walls are no longer surrounding cities but sprawling houses and scattered industries or infrastructures blend between the urban core and the surrounding rural areas, the harmony of the Good Government would surely be painted differently.

1.1. Problem statement Nowadays, when driving, or traveling by train, outside the city centre, the landscape one encounters is made up of fragmented single housing settlements, light industry, large shopping facilities but also resource management plants (for waste or energy) and large infrastructures, like the motorway one might be driving on. In between all these functions, lie small pockets of agricultural land, often underused if not totally abandoned. This is what makes the peri-urban landscape, the urban fringe, today (Gallent, 2006). Even though this landscape still plays an important role by hosting many relevant functions for cities, these are often positioned in lower density peri-urban areas because they are undesired in more urban contexts. Even though essential to everybody’s lives, nobody wants a waste plant close to home, and even though many people enjoy shopping in malls, this does not mean they enjoy the sight of them on a daily basis. Furthermore, the surface and logistics necessary to accommodate such functions are simply unavailable in core cities. As a result, peri-urban areas are the new urban development frontier, as European cities have seen an increase in urbanised land by 78% since the ‘50s (EEA, 2010).

By having lost its original agricultural identity, this territory is now hosting new functions and creating new uses of its land, but this is not creating a valuable environment for its citizens. The peri-urban landscape of European cities, today offers a sight of poor quality, a miscellany of, apparently, incoherent functions and an increasing reduction of agricultural land to give way to more urban land uses. Elements of such problem can be isolated as: - aesthetic: poor visual quality of the peri-urban landscape 7

- functional: fragmentation of land uses that are, apparently, incohesive with one another - environmental: increasing reduction of green land - food security: loss of agricultural surface and access to locally produced food These are clearly issues that cannot be isolated from one another: the poor aesthetic quality of the landscape is connected to its miscellaneous uses and the limited access to locally produced food is connected to the reduction of green agricultural land. The common reasons for such challenges can be traced back to the increasing urban pressure on these areas in combination with the delocalisation of food production, away from the peri-urban landscape, that consequently loses its historical agrarian function to new but uncoordinated land uses.

Such challenges are caused by the governance fragmentation at metropolitan level, where various institutions are responsible for different portions of the peri-urban areas, and often struggle in coordinating actions with one another. Furthermore, key stakeholders are not only institutional, but also private, from large retail companies but also from small family-run farms; civic representing both local inhabitants but also thematic NGOs; and finally research and eduction institutions, that from private and public sectors, from different fields and levels of education, play an important role in training stakeholders and researching the field. The way in which these stakeholders may, or may not, be involved in the decision-making processes can have a direct effect on the physical dimension of the peri-urban landscape. Finally, the territory and the stakeholders acting therein are embedded within a policy context that formalises their relations and procedures. Here too, the fragmentation between local, regional, national and ultimately European policies may create rather grey zones of competence and strategy. With different policies, zoning plans and funding sources being in place in different parts of the landscape and applying to different stakeholders, policies in the peri-urban territory struggle to ensure the active involvement of all the aforementioned actors.

To summarise, the essential problem of the peri-urban landscape is its loss of agricultural land to fragmented new uses, from which the other identified problems and challenges often derive.

As further elaborated in the Analytical Framework chapter, the reasons for this loss are the urban pressure, causing the increasingly scattered land uses, the green land consumption and the poor aesthetic quality; and the delocalisation of food production, which in turn fosters the abandonment of agricultural land and the limited access to locally produced food. These problems are embedded in a fragmented metropolitan governance, that struggles to provide the involvement of all relevant stakeholders over the entire territory, and not to mention an uncoordinated policy dimension, where uncoordinated strategies and funds thereby increase the landscape fragmentation.

1.2. Research Question Having identified the main challenge in the loss of agriculture and its relation to the governance and policy dimensions of the peri-urban landscape, the main research question of this research is: how is agriculture in the peri-urban landscape shaped by stakeholders and policies?

Addressing this question means looking into how agriculture takes place in the peri-urban landscape, investigating what features it develops on site and what role it takes on the metropolitan scale of a city. What is the relationship between the different stakeholders with the agricultural land uses but also what are their relationships with one another, and how these effect the landscape. What policies are in place at the different levels, from local to European, and what are the different themes that intersect agriculture, from land management to to waste disposal. Ultimately, the question investigates the relationship between the three elements (the agriculture, the governance and the policy in the peri-urban landscape) and the way in which this shapes the territory outside the cities.

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The research investigates how agriculture in peri-urban landscape may survive the current challenges thanks to a strong involvement of a multi-stakeholders governance and integration of policies between different levels and themes. For agriculture to overcome urban pressure and provide an alternative to delocalised food production, it must develop new forms of functioning that ensure the economic sustainability of the practice. It must allow for a broader public recognition of the value of this land, not only in economic but also environmental and social terms. In this direction, an upcoming potential may be identified in the landscape multifunctionality and short food chains. For these to take place, a broad range of relevant stakeholders require being actively involved in the decision-making process, so to overcome the metropolitan fragmentation and include the various interests at stake. Such argumentation also requires policies to be integrated from local to European level, but also across relevant thematic areas, so to reduce the current lack of coordination between policy ambitions and implemented strategies.

The dissertation explores the relationship between the research layers, as it expects that different synergies between the landscape, the governance and the policy will have considerably different effects on the agricultural practice. The way in which different stakeholder constellations carry out short food chains and multi-functional land uses or the way in which various policies are integrated, will effect the agricultural practice in the peri-urban landscape in many ways. Intuitively, these are all relevant variables to the peri-urban landscape, but the weight that these may have on the agricultural practice in the different contexts is a valuable insight that could contribute to recommendations not only for Rome and Vienna but also in other cities.

1.3. Research Layers and Sub-Questions To investigate how agriculture in the peri-urban landscape is shaped by stakeholders and policies, the research has identified three research layers: landscape, governance and policy.

Individually, each one has a relationship with agriculture in the peri-urban landscape that requires a specific understanding. For this reason, each research layer is accompanied by a research sub-question that feeds into the main one by providing a specific focus on the given layer. These individual considerations then feed into an analysis of the relationship between these three research layers and agriculture in the peri-urban landscape.

1.3.1. The Landscape The first layer to be investigated is the landscape. Historically, the green areas around cities have offered a series of services from an economic point of view, such as food production; an environmental one, due to to their ecological corridors; and a social, cultural and aesthetic one, owing to the recreational spaces offered. However, today, the landscape on the outskirts of cities presents also scattered and fragmented land uses that often are the addition of functions most undesirable in more urbanised areas: such as waste disposal, shopping malls, airports or motorways. Metropolitan conurbations have generated a land type, defined as peri-urban, that is positioned in between urban and rural areas but with specific characteristics. This territory is unarguably changing very rapidly and its activities often appear not to be related to one another, thus contributing to a generalised perception of disorder and poor quality. Because of the increasing urban pressure on the land, agricultural activities are constantly diminishing, making way for more profitable functions to take place, whereby such phenomena, as building speculation on the one hand or land abandonment on the other, are generated. This territory, even more 9

so than all landscapes, is shaped by the relationship between natural surroundings and human beings, between rural and urban dimensions. Its agricultural dimension, because of the manifold services it delivers to society, is a resource to be preserved for the collectivity.

Even though there has been much attention paid over the last century to the development of fringe landscape protection, as in the case of the greenbelts, these appear not to be sufficient in effectively preserving the landscape from further construction. This is what emerged also in the interview with the London Greenbelt Council, denouncing much new construction as having taken place despite the protection. Under current circumstances, such an important common resource is not being preserved for future generations to come.

In fact, urban pressure has contributed to a generalised rise in land prices, also for agricultural land outside cities, which then makes food production particularly challenging for farmers. Furthermore, the present food distribution market tends to delocalise production towards developing countries, in order to pursue lower labour costs, therefore taking away the market for the peri-urban food production. This is a relevant aspect because it challenges the very first reason for which agricultural landscape should be protected: ensure food in cities. Urbanisation and land abandonment, progressively degrading agriculture in peri-urban areas and the delocalisation of food production are increasingly making our society becaome dependent on external food sources.

Nevertheless, it is within this same challenged territory, that some experiments are being carried out to develop an alternative to underused agricultural land. Many farms are integrating into their traditional business model new functions, which create revenue whilst still preserving the agricultural identity of the area. This is how educational facilities, agritourism, restaurants, horse-riding schools but also alternative energy production and many other functions come into play in the multi-functional landscape. Alongside, within the periurban areas also short food distribution chains are being developed as an alternative to the mainstream market system, these being intended as chains with fewer intermediaries and a limited mileage of the products. The scale and the impact of both multi-functional land uses and short food chains vary according to the context under a series of variables that define them under different forms. Being that these are emerging practices, their potentialities in relation to the main research question are still being investigated: do multifunctionality and short food chains preserve the agricultural dimension of the periurban landscape? This research sub-question aims at exploring how emerging land use combinations and new distribution forms take place and whether they ultimately preserve agriculture in peri-urban areas. As explored in the Analytical Framework, this question offers a series of reflections on the meaning, scale and combinations of multi-functional uses in agriculture. It opens ample considerations on what a short food distribution chain means for agriculture, what is the relationship between the short mileage and the few intermediaries. Ultimately, the question looks into the relationship between the two practices and the effects on the agricultural dimension, what features this develops and what role it takes in the context of the peri-urban landscape. Such practices offer a wide range of stakeholders, from public to private, from civic to research, that require collaboration, which is the issue to be addressed in the following research layer.

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1.3.2. The Governance The second layer to be analysed within the research is the governance. These new networks of stakeholders introduce new roles and relations as well as new competences and figures altogether, like farmers developing marketing strategies or community organisations developing alternative distribution systems. Governance is composed by articulations of very different actors from public, private and civic realms that engage in common issues, whether in agreement or conflict. If, on the one hand, such governance opens up perspectives of improved democracy and participation, on the other, it raises issues of legitimacy, as there is as yet no established reference framework for its functioning. Within the context of the peri-urban landscape, the challenges of these networks are staged on the metropolitan scale. Being part of the metropolitan area, the peri-urban landscape is often arching over different administrative boundaries, governed by institutions that frequently have difficulty in collaborating with each other. The management of this territory is particularly challenging for institutions because of a series of factors: the sheer rapidity of change, unlike consolidated urban tissue; the variety of departments involved, from environmental to transport; the variety of administrative bodies and levels involved, from regional to local and often even in cross-border conditions.

Furthermore, especially when looking at the cases of multi-functionality and short food chains, it must be taken into account that key stakeholders are coming from very different contexts. In this there are not only farmers and civic groups involved in sustainable food chains, but also research institutions dealing with sustainability, large private land owners and, obviously, the public administration.

Belonging to the same governance network does not imply full harmony, engagement and collaboration between the stakeholders. In fact, small enterprises like family-run farms are fundamental actors in the peri-urban agricultural production but these are not always involved in the decision-making processes. Even though there appears to be very little coordination amongst the different stakeholders in the peri-urban landscape, it is here that agricultural experimentations, like short food chains and multi-functionality, are being carried out thanks to the cooperation of different stakeholders. In doing so, these inevitably develop local ties and skills that formulate a structure of self-governance, they arrange their own rules and procedures in pursuing their shared activities. At the same time, the official decision-making processes are managed by the public administration, that runs on a different set of rules and procedures but cannot pursue many of its projects without the involvement of the aforementioned stakeholders. It is within this context that new ways of cooperation between stakeholders are shaped, in the forms of collaborative planning processes. These entail the participation of all relevant stakeholders over a period of time in order to develop a shared strategy. Once again, in the peri-urban landscape, even though there is a strong governance fragmentation, there are also experiences of collaboration carried out by stakeholders running agricultural activities. In this same context, the role of the administration has changed, from the one previously responsible for deciding to the one either moderating common decisions or obstructing stakeholders’ involvement. Either way, the administration plays a different role with the other stakeholders, so the question is: does the administration foster self-governance of stakeholders and collaborative planning processes in the peri-urban landscape? This research sub-question investigates the emergence of new organisational models of 11

stakeholders through self-governance and which rules and which procedures should they apply to themselves in terms of agricultural activities. The question also looks into how broader stakeholder groups interact with the public sector through a collaborative planning process, which stakeholders take part, with which role and with what outcome. Ultimately, the question asks what is the role of the public administration in relation to these emerging organisational models, whether it fosters them or hinders them, whether these are seen as a potential for ensuring the public interest or whether they are regarded upon as irrelevant in their scale and modalities to address the metropolitan scale. Such issues are embedded in a policy context that greatly affects the actions and the outcomes of stakeholders’ practice.

1.3.3. The Policy The third layer moulding the peri-urban territories, is the policy framework. Policies addressing these areas are multi-level, because they range from European to local, and interdisciplinary, because they interfere with various themes. Whilst local policies are recognised as being relevant to the peri-urban landscape, although often fragmented, there is overall less awareness regarding the importance of European policies over the spatial development of these areas. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that the EU has no official jurisdiction over spatial planning. Nevertheless, EU Directives steer spatial decisions that greatly affect the peri-urban landscape: these being amongst others the position of waste plants, water management facilities or energy production, which ultimately have important consequences on nearby agricultural production. Amongst the most relevant conflicts in the peri-urban territories are the Common Agriculture Policy and the Cohesion Policy (or European Regional Policy). In fact, these define development goals and allocate resources for their implementation in the territory, such as urban development projects, agricultural activities or social functions. Yet, local spatial policies like zoning plans are not aligned with them and intervene on the territory by carrying out activities, which follow a whole different set of criteria, connected to local political agenda. Such complexity further contributes to the peri-urban landscape’s fragmentation and the difficulty its stakeholders have in developing agricultural activities. An alignment of such policies it highly necessary to the benefit of the whole territory, especially the peri-urban landscape, but currently hard to reach. Yet, in this same fragmented peri-urban landscape, there are examples in which local stakeholders have carried out projects that have, at least partly, bridged the discrepancies between policies, from European to local ones. This is the example of territorial networks, composed by famers and food-related civic groups, that have elaborated local development strategies that with foresight saw agriculture as a main motor of local development. Once again, the identity of these experiences greatly varies according to the local conditions, yet the question of their impact on policy remains: does community-led planning in peri-urban areas support policy integration? This research sub-question addresses a series of issues: what community-led planning and policy integration are in the peri-urban context, what is their relationship and ultimately what then are their effects on the agricultural activities. The question investigates how communities operating in peri-urban contexts function, if and how they intervene in planning processes and to what extent do they steer decisions. Closely related to collaborative planning processes, the question focuses on the policy dimension in which these communities are legally, or not, entitled to act. The question then looks into the 12

integration of policies: what triggers the integration process; which policies are aligned and how; whether this affects other policies. To conclude, investigating the relationship between the local and European policies offers an understanding on the role that local communities, pursuing agriculture in peri-urban landscape, may have in steering policy contexts.

1.4. Case Study Cities The main research question and the auxiliary sub-questions are investigated in a theoretical dimension and also through the use of case studies that allow one to investigate the proposed research question. To develop such approach, the dissertation focuses on Rome and Vienna where a series of case study areas have been selected in order to analyse on the ground the research question. Rome and Vienna, two European capitals with a strong rural tradition within their boundaries that over the last decades have developed new relationships with the agricultural dimension also at a metropolitan scale. Although urban pressure strongly effects both cities, these have very different densities, with Rome being very low and Vienna much higher. In both these sites, food access has increasingly been taken over by large distribution chains market products, which are not cultivated locally. In Rome and Vienna multi-functional land uses and short food chains are being developed by local stakeholders in very different manners, that consequently offer interesting insights into this dissertation. With Community Purchase Groups being a very wide spread model in Rome and Self-Harvesting initiatives increasing in Vienna, consumers are accessing locally produced food. With multi-service farms in both cities, new functional relations are being developed on a territorial scale. At the same time, although the initiatives in the two capitals are part of a same movement to regain contact with agricultural practices in urban areas, their activities are embedded in very different contexts. Not only do stakeholders have different roles and powers, but the way in which they relate to one another are very different. For example in Rome, corruption scandals have undermined the trust towards the public administration but somehow strengthened civil society, whilst Vienna’s strong welfare policy ensures a central role for the administration and makes independent stakeholder relations somewhat unnecessary. Yet, such scenarios vary on the metropolitan scale, where neighbouring municipalities play very different roles also because of the policy context, that gives widely differing powers to the central cities and their belt municipalities both in the Italian and Austrian capitals.

To explore these different contexts, the dissertation sets out three case study areas in each city, selected through a series of criteria, which are connected to their position, their functions, the stakeholders active on their territory and the policies intervening upon them. The variety of cases in the peri-urban landscapes of Vienna and Rome, identified within the metropolitan area, allow to develop site specific considerations as well as cross-comparisons. Each case study on its own allows to investigate about whether and how stakeholders and policies shape agriculture in peri-urban areas. This is done by looking into multi-functionality and short food chains, whether the administration fosters self-governance and collaborative planning and whether these support policy integration. Furthermore, the various case studies allow for a comparative analysis both within the same city and between the two. This offers the possibility of understanding which variables might be site specific to a given city and which might occur in both. It might be that certain situations take place in both Vienna and Rome but only under certain circumstances, not in all the six case studies but only in some of them. Interrogating these findings allows to develop considerations and suggestions that may not only be valid for the two cities but also for other ones.

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1.5. Research Structure To address the main research question and the sub-questions, this dissertation is divided into three main parts: a theoretical part, which is for the first part made up of the Methodology and the second part the Analytical Framework; the Case Studies of Rome and Vienna; and the final part which are the Conclusions.

As part of the initial section of the research, the first chapter is the Methodology, which focuses on defining the manner in which the research was carried out. This chapter therefore comprises an overview of the main methods for collecting evidence in the research: literature review, interviews, field observations, cartographic analysis, etc.

Additionally, the chapter outlines the main challenges confronted while carrying out the dissertation, especially the case studies, and how these were solved.

The following chapter is the Analytical Framework. This addresses existing research, focusing on the definitions, the challenges and ultimately the argumentation around the three research layers (landscape, governance and policy). By defining the peri-urban landscape as a common good for society, its challenges are defined as urban pressure and delocalised food systems, whose cost may be overcome through multi-functionality and short food chains. The metropolitan governance active on the peri-urban landscape is investigated along with its fragmentation, to then outline the concepts related to collaborative planning and self-governance. Finally, this chapter defines the importance of European policies for spatial planning and investigates its integration challenges within the local scale, to then outline the current concepts related to community planning and policy integration. These definitions, concepts and theories are the basis for addressing the following case study research.

The second part of the research addresses the case studies of Vienna and Rome, investigating three parts of the peri-urban landscape of each city, that were selected through a series of criteria, outlined in the methodology chapter. The aim of the case study areas is to test the research questions under different conditions within the peri-urban landscape. The chapters addressing the analysis of Rome and Vienna are structured into two sections: one of which the metropolitan context is analysed in terms of landscape, governance and policy; a second one in which the three case study areas of each city are described, according to the analysis of the research layers, and finally a conclusion, covering the main considerations for each single city is provided.

The third and final part, consists of the conclusions of the dissertation and provides a comparative analysis, deriving from the investigation carried out on the case study areas in Vienna and Rome. The chapter provides a comparison between the two contexts of Rome and Vienna and between the six case studies, allowing to identify similarities and differences, suggesting possible reasons and gathering the main learnings. Basing on the outcome of the case studies, this dissertation goes on to outline recommendations on whether and how agriculture in peri-urban areas can be shaped by multi-stakeholder networks and European policies. 

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