Longitudinal study of urbanisation processes in peri-urban areas of Greater Copenhagen - – trends, consequences and policy implications

Urbanisation processes increasingly influence the use of land and properties in rural areas. In peri-urban areas population composition changes as the areas offer attractive possibilities for on-farm business structure diversification (OFBSD), and residential and recreational alternatives to both urban areas and more remote locations.However, although land use changes follow changes in socio-economic composition, agriculture is often still the dominating land use. The dynamic processes leave peri-urban areas in a transition situation, as neither city nor countryside – or both.
This presentation investigates various forms of urbanization in peri-urban agricultural areas in the Greater Copenhagen region. The same 160-200 farm properties (including both hobby, part-time and full-time farms) have been surveyed in 1984, 1994, 2004, and 2014, using face-to-face structured interviews. The following themes have been studied: characteristics of land use and property owners, use of buildings, on-farm business structure diversification (OFBSD), public access and other recreational use of land.
Overall it is concluded that even though some agricultural areas have been turned into urban areas, the area devoted to agricultural land use has been largely the same during the period investigated. However, a large share of the cultivated land is concentrated on a few very large full-time farms highly dependent on land tenure and also crop and livestock production has greatly changed. Simultaneous, clear signs of extensification of land use can be detected. Most agricultural produce is distributed through traditional wholesalers, but direct sale is also found - especially from smaller farms. Further, the economic activities have diversified, as an increasing proportion of the property owners engage in OFBSD, mostly reliant on the reuse of buildings, which have become redundant because of structural changes in agriculture. As a consequence, the structural components of the areas (land cover and landscape elements) thus appear more resistant to changes than transition of the socio-economic system (declining number of full-time farmers and increasing engagement in OFBSD) could indicate.
Despite the fact that commercial farming in the study area in recent years seems to have stabilized and these farmers have been able to diversify their economy, important changes to land use, landscape features and economic activities can be identified. This raises questions of the desired future of the peri-urban area of Greater Copenhagen, and about the effectiveness of the existing planning systems and its ability and desirability to protect agriculture land, which has been a main objective since the beginning of 1970s.