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Current environmental crises call for an integrated knowledge of landscapes and their ecosystems in a broader sense. This article presents a pedagogical framework for cross-disciplinary landscape research at postgraduate level. The framework is grounded in the use of geospatial epistemic discomfort as a creative force to develop and enhance inquiry skills able to cross and merge disciplinary boundaries. Developed within the Erasmus+ KA2 project “CROSSLAND”, the pedagogical framework is based on the scaffolding of epistemic discomfort through four key didactic elements: 1) cross-disciplinary group work and open-ended assignment, 2) in-field inquiry as pre-training on space-time, 3) replacement of traditional lectures by student-led seminars, 4) GIS labs centred on the exploration of cross-disciplinary portfolios of geospatial approaches and methods given as worked-out examples. Main results from the evaluation of the framework implementation in a Summer School show how learning cross-disciplinarity happened thanks to a scaffolding that allowed, first and foremost, the socialisation of different conceptualisations of space. While students felt at ease with geospatial epistemic discomfort, we can conclude that spatial cognitive processes are powerful in improving abilities beyond the spatial domain.

The livelihoods approach has become dominant for understanding poverty issues and advising on development policies. Spatial perspectives have been increasingly recognised to be important for understanding the increasing complexity and dynamics of livelihoods with regional development, urbanisation and close rural-urban interactions. This study further develops this perspective by highlighting the concepts of geographical context, location and urban hierarchy and adopts a multi-scalar analytical approach. The study examines the rural poor's livelihood strategies in Jilin Province of China based on two surveys conducted with about 3000 households in total and multiple logistic regression analysis. Our results demonstrate that half of the rural poor depend on incomes and livelihood strategies without labour input. From a macro-spatial view, the rural poor living in the Western and Eastern Areas, which have more challenging geographical contexts, are more dependent on subsidy income. From a micro-spatial view, rural livelihoods change, with spatial patterns depending on distance to urban areas and the type of these areas; small and medium-sized urban areas are more important for the rural poor's livelihoods. Geographical context makes these urban effects on rural livelihoods spatially more heterogeneous. Spatial understandings of livelihoods research help to better target and tailor poverty alleviation policies.

Farmers' poverty has long been of global concern, mainly in poor rather than affluent areas. The goal of this paper is to better understand the range of poverty in the context of regional differentiation and to enrich knowledge on farmers' poverty in affluent areas and areas with good natural conditions. A questionnaire survey of poor farmers in the major grain-producing area of Changchun, Northeast China was conducted. Farmers' poverty was studied from income poverty and multidimensional poverty by intertwining qualitative and quantitative methods. The results indicate that low education levels and poor physical health were most prevalent in poor farmers, followed by income poverty and low living standards. Governmental policies and the macroeconomic situation in the agricultural sector, non-agricultural employment, aging, cultivated land, and family size correlated closely with farmers' poverty. The macro changes in policies and global trade liberalization in the agricultural sector impacted farmers' income through the prices of agricultural products and subsidies and influenced the effect of cultivated land. For poor farmers, the effect of employment opportunities in villages was more significant than in urban areas. Aging remains a challenge for farmers' poverty now and in the future.

This paper investigates the drivers and mechanisms behind the zero lease phenomenon in Sweden, which is characterised by no monetary transfer between landowners and land users, and has been captured in agricultural statistics since the late 1990s. The phenomenon is examined through a theoretical framework which combines rent theory with geographical and historically contextualised views of farming and farmland tenure. We use rent statistics but focus on exploring the geographical dimensions of zero lease farmland in Sweden, mapping spatial variations of rents, the scale of free-leased fields and the geographical location of these fields both at the farm and regional level. Our results show how the zero lease is related to geographical space and ongoing transformation processes in agriculture and rural spaces over time. The paper concludes that the zero lease creates a temporal flexibility for landowners, preserves non-monetary landscape values, and creates opportunities for future farming by preserving landesque capital. This Swedish example illustrates well how, when globally integrated markets force farmers to either restructure, intensify or extensify, and old farming models do not fit the global agri-food systems, farmers find ways to adjust through spatial and temporal means. Seeing the zero lease through farm geographies may suggest opportunities and solutions for making an alternative food and farming future.

In many landscapes today, biological diversity is the ecological and cultural legacy of millennial interactions between land use practices and always changing environmental conditions. Thus, landscapes must be seen as heterogeneous, shaped through interacting different temporal and spatial scales. In our contribution we conceptualise biocultural heritage as space-time heterarchies, the endless results of repeated feedback between land use as human ecological process and the response of the ecosystems themselves. We provide the example of the olive intercropping landscape from a rural area of inner Sicily (Cozzo del Lampo hill, Villarosa), and we explore the potential of our conceptualisation for landscape heritage management. The discussion is centred on the acknowledgement of the “ecological function” played by place-based communities, as a key grounding step for the re-appropriation of our ecological engagement with landscape and place.

This paper presents a new geographical analytical model for studies on agricultural landscape change. The model builds on the idea presented by Torsten Hägerstrand that neighbourhood configurations act as filters in change processes. The proposed approach operationalizes this idea of filtering into a geographical interpretation model that combines three different strands of research: ontologies of land use in geographical information science; local spatial contextual analysis of remote sensing data; and agency- and actor-sensitive functional time-space analysis of farming. This approach includes the use of satellite images and makes it possible to infer land-use changes as reactions to long-term policy changes, thus demonstrating how landscape configuration and land use are changing. The model is assessed by applying it to a case study in western Östergötland in central Sweden.

Unlike modern maps, geometric maps lack a coordinate system and contain unsystematic geometric inaccuracies. This paper illuminates four aspects concerning the problem of uniting geographical information technology with old geometric maps. These are as follows: first, the origin of and geometric qualities in the representation of objects in geometric maps; second, the distortions originating from measurement techniques; third, the assumption that it is possible to find points that are the same over time for rectification in Geographic Information System (GIS); and, fourth, the extrapolation of unsystematic geometric distortions when using GIS techniques without any knowledge of the present unsystematic distortions in a map. The article presents the background of Swedish geometric maps and a hypothetical example is used to present the principle problems of using GIS techniques to rectify geometric maps. The conclusion of the paper is that systematic and unsystematic geometric distortions need to be identified and handled separately.

Sustaining food production close to cities is not easy, as farming is often much less profitable compared to other activities in such locations, and it is at the frontier of resisting the pressures from urbanization and globalization. This study looks into an underexplored issue in peri-urban agriculture research – the role that land lease can play for preserving peri-urban agriculture. Leasing has increasingly become a common praxis in the Western industrialized world and it is a very necessary means for accessing limited farmland especially in peri-urban areas. Focusing on farms near Gothenburg, this study explores how the spatial structure of leasing brings opportunities as well as constraints to the change and continuation of farming in this peri-urban area. The investigation is guided by social, spatial and functional conceptualizations of land tenure, which 1) consider land tenure as a social relation, 2) are centered on functional constraints for agricultural production, and 3) highlight the spatial effects. Based on a combination of map interpretations, statistical analysis and interview analysis, the results show a strong and spatially structured pattern of production, farm and land use changes. Agriculture shows mainly to be driven by the landowner’s leasing strategies but is also shaped by the interplays between the landowner and the leasehold farmers. Existing food production farms have been able to rely on adding land from side lease for development even though the increase of small horse farms, holding whole-farm leases, makes it hard for new food production farms to start up. Policymakers are recommended to strategically use long-term leases as a policy instrument on municipal land at the peri-urban location, to incentivize food production farmers as well as to reduce land management costs.

The contribution of small farms to local food supply, food security and food sovereignty is widely acknowledged at a global level. In the particular case of Europe, they often are seen as an alternative to large and specialised farms. Assessing the real role of small farms has been limited by a lack of information, as small farms are frequently omitted from agricultural censuses and national statistics. It is also well acknowledged that small farms differ widely, and are distributed according to different spatial patterns across Europe, fulfilling different roles according to the agriculture and territorial characteristics of each region. This paper presents the result of a novel classification of small farms at NUTS-3 level in Europe, according to the relevance of small farms in the agricultural and territorial context of each region, and based on a typology of small farms considering different dimensions of farm size. The maps presented result from an extensive data collection and variables selected according to European wide expert judgement, analysed with advanced cluster procedures. The results provide a fine grained picture of the role of small farms at the regional level in Europe today, and are expected to support further data analysis and targeted policy intervention.

The last few centuries have seen dramatic changes in how agriculture is practised in large parts of the world. Non-mechanised, mostly self-providing farms have been replaced by high-technology, high-input, high-yielding, and global-market-integrated farming. To be a farmer has changed from being a family farmer with many types of produce, where the family was involved in the work on the farm. Now farms are capital-intensive enterprises producing for the international markets. Farms have often become amalgamated into larger units and specialise in a single type of produce. This has been possible through technique development and use of labour-efficient farming methods and because of the reduction in relative costs for long distance transportation. Even though global market integration decreases societal dependence on local farming, agriculture is still dependent on fixed locations in the production processes and is highly dependent on markets and a common subsidy system. This chapter gives examples of farm praxis changes in Sweden and policy changes in Europe.

Food production on the urban-rural fringe is under pressure due to competing land uses. We discuss the potential to improve resilience for urban-rural regions by enhancing food production as part of multifunctional land use. Through studies of peri-urban land in the regions of Gothenburg (Sweden), Copenhagen (Denmark) and Gent (Belgium), recent developments are analysed. Arable farming has been declining since 2000 in all three areas due to urban expansion and recreational land use changes. In city plans, networks of protected areas and green spaces and their importance for human wellbeing have been acknowledged. Policies for farmland preservation in peri-urban settings exist, but strategies for local food production are not expressed in present planning documents. Among the diversity of peri-urban agricultural activities, peri-urban food production is a developing issue. However, the competing forms of land use and the continuing high dependence of urban food on global food systems and related resource flows reduces peri-urban food production and improvements in urban food security. The positive effects of local food production need to be supported by governance aiming to improve the urban-rural relationship. The paper discusses the resilience potential of connecting urban-rural regions and re-coupling agriculture to regional food production.

Situated in the global discussion on large-scale land acquisitions, this paper examines the poor performance of Nordic owned, publicly traded, very large-scale farms (agroholdings) in Russia and Ukraine. In depth study of concrete examples of this emerging farm organization is still rare. This paper investigates the impact of the financialization of agriculture on the performance, agricultural and otherwise, of such farm companies, which is also an emerging field of inquiry. In other words, this paper seeks to go beyond discussion of land-grabbing and return to an older question concerning large-scale farming in developing country settings: is it even successful? In unique, exploratory research, the authors have gone inside these companies through interviews and attending shareholder meetings. Also, the authors have examined the discourse found in press accounts and corporate documents, the latter an underutilized source in research on corporate mega-farms. We find that finance, usually asserted as an advantage for such large-scale farms, proved in important respects to be incompatible with farming in the investigated companies, as it led to the initial prioritization of short-term speculative strategies over longer-term production-oriented strategies. We further find that investors initially failed to appreciate the unique climatic and other local challenges presented by agriculture, compared to other economic endeavors. Finally we note that these corporations are struggling to demonstrate economies of scale. Our results suggest that, unless conditions change, stock market financed large-scale farming companies are unlikely to play an important role in future direct food production in the region.

Agriculture near urban landscapes has recently been re-appreciated with the recognition of its economic, social and environmental contributions. However, rapid urbanisation and global agricultural restructuring constituting complex processes across multiple scales tend to threaten the survival of peri-urban agriculture. Focusing on family farms near Gothenburg in Sweden, this paper intends to explore the. relations between location and agriculture and how family farms have been able to continue farming in peri-urban areas. Unlike previous studies of peri-urban agriculture, mostly carried out by planners from an urban-centric perspective, this paper deploys a rural and place-based perspective by drawing on theories of agricultural location. Based on statistical and spatial analyses of land use change, and interviews with farmers and authorities, the processes and drivers of local agricultural change are analysed. The results identify four simultaneous processes that produce the diversity in forms of agriculture between farms: structural changes, loss of farmland to urban expansion, specialisation of on-farm activities and a niching trend of on-farm activities. The new findings which shed light on the theory of agricultural localisation are: 1) niche production greatly takes advantage of the pea-urban location; 2) a reverse von Thunen's transportation pattern is enabled by the proximity to urban consumers; 3) enhancing competitive advantage through saving labour costs is enabled by the direct relation to consumers at the peri-urban location; 4) multifunctional agriculture has potential but also raises conflicts between different types of land use in ped-urban areas; 5) a secured access to land for farmers enabled by the local governance which separates the increasing land value from land rent is fundamental for supporting continued peri-urban agriculture. Our recommendation is that policy makers need to shift to a location-sensitive governing praxis of agriculture in

Research making use of satellite data for land change science has developed in the last decades. However, analysis of land use has not developed with the same speed as development of new satellite sensors and available land cover data. Improvement of land use analysis is possible, but more advanced methods are needed which make it possible to link image data to analysis of land use functions. To make this linking possible, variable which affect farmer's long term decisions must be taken into account in analysis as well as the relative importance of the landscape itself. A GIS-based tool for the measurement of local spatial context in satellite data is presented in this paper and used to explore the relationship between land covers present in satellite data and land use represented in official databases. By the use of the developed tool, a land configuration image (LCI) over the Siljan area in northern Sweden was produced and used for analysis. The results are twofold. First, the produced LCI holds new information about variables that are relevant for the interpretation of land use. Second, the comparison with statistics of agricultural production shows that production in the study area varies depending on the relative land configuration. Villages consisting of relatively large-scale arable fields and less diverse landscape are less diverse in production than villages which consist of smaller-scale and more heterogonous landscapes. The result is especially relevant for land use studies and policymakers working on environmental and agricultural policies. We conclude that local spatial context is an endogenous variable in the relation between landscape configuration and agricultural land use., AuthorCount:2

Satellite images have enormous potential for qualitative land use analysis. This paper presents empirical results that demonstrate how normally invisible dimensions produced by land use can be identified by enriching satellite data with qualitative information from field studies. Land use can be defined as the intentional use of a specific piece of land resulting in patterns of ecological responses that are visible in the land cover and landscape. Responses to land use often result in a heterogeneous combination of reflectance in satellite images. Statistical methods used in the classification of satellite imagery are limited in their capacity to handle categories consisting of heterogeneous combinations of spectral values. To overcome this limitation, a contextual post-classification method has been used to map land cover configurations as related to different agricultural practices in the district of Sodo, Ethiopia. The results show that it is possible to map socio-spatial distribution of different agricultural and socioeconomic practices on a regional level by combining field observations and spatial contextual information. The empirical findings show local agricultural activity variations in cash crop production and subsistence agriculture in the Sodo district of Ethiopia.

Notions of land cover relating to physical landscape characters are readily captured by satellite imagery. Land use on the other hand relates more to the societal aspects of a landscape. We argue that much of the spatial configuration of landscape characters is related to land use and that satellite data can be used to represent and investigate interpretations of land use. We propose and demonstrate the joint use of a novel SRPC procedure for satellite imagery together with an explicit representation of category semantics. We use these two mechanisms to identify a collection of conceptual spaces related to land use on Swedish historic summer farms. We also outline a framework for analysis of the relations between two separate ways of knowing: the machine-based knowledge and the human, mental knowledge. An evaluation demonstrates that satellite images can be used to identify land use processes as a mixture of land cover objects occurring in particular spatial contextual relationships closely tied to the land use category semantics. This opens up an unexplored possibility for research on vague spatial ontologies and questions on how to formally articulate different interpretations of space, land use, and other branches of spatial social science.

Contemporary European agriculture has a number of additional aims beside of food production, such as safeguarding environmental services and conservation values. Substantial efforts at official levels are aimed towards sustainable development but also towards maintaining values ofwhat may be termed vanishing landscapes. Selected areas and landscape features are set aside for protection or restoration. Individual efforts of this type have a long history in Sweden, and the issue has recently received increased attention, primarily due to more ambitious government goals concerning biodiversity conservation and Sweden’s ratification of the European Landscape Convention. This has resulted in an increased scientific and official interest in vanishing values in the rural landscape, where parts of Eastern Europe, such as the Maramures district in Romania, have been used as model examples of land use regimes which in the past was common in Sweden. In this context, the dilemma of romanticizing peasants’ use of land is highlighted and discussed more than has hitherto been done. This paper sheds light on some paradoxes inherent in official policies in relation to land use practices concerning the management of rural landscapes in Sweden, and relates the Swedish situation to a contrasting example of landscape practice in Romania. We discuss the concept of landscape care in relation to the construction and perception of landscape values and valuable landscapes through the lenses of rural realities and official policies. When Swedish authorities engage in the promotion of landscape care, they tend to work with slices of land, specific predefined values and individual farmers, and they often disregard the need to treat the landscape as a socio-ecological complex dynamic in space and time. We discuss how environmental policy generally could be improved through the adoption of a more inclusive and flexible approach towards aiding the different aims inherent in multifunctional rural l