Factores de la sostenibilidad involucrados en la dinámica de la producción agropecuaria del periurbano en el sur de Santa Fe, Argentina

Abstract

In the last decades Latin America and, particularly, Argentina have shown rates of population growth which are, in fact, higher than those recorded worldwide. Another demographic phenomenon worth highlighting since the middle of the 20th century up to date is the population migration from the rural zone to the urban area. This situation causes significant pressures and effects on the environment. The natural system serves as a physical support for all human activities: from the exploitation of natural resources to satisfy food, construction and energy needs and the occupation of land to support the ever-increasing demand for housing, etc., to the use of final waste disposal sites and the allocation of water bodies to eliminate effluents. For these reasons, there is a need to consider a planned development of the territory as the main axis of work in any government action, as this will contribute to generate sustainable and resilient cities and countries. In this context, the growth of many Argentine cities is verified territorially in a space called "peri-urban" by several authors who have devoted themselves to its study and agree in defining it as a marginal strip of urban-rural transition which is only partially assimilated by the process of urban dispersion and preserves typically rural attributes. This space emerges as a result of a haphazard process of urban growth, which makes irregular advances among different points of the city, thus generating a heterogeneous pattern of land use that, in general, characterizes this strip of land. The peri-urban is characterized by situations of speculation, diversity in the use of the land and the development of the dispersed habitat, frequently lacking the necessary services and equipment. In these transitional spaces, relevant socio-environmental tensions and problems arise from the expansion and growth of the cities and the main methods of agricultural production. It shows a high dynamic and its fast transformations account for the limitations of its study as if it merely were a dichotomy between rural and urban. The complexity of the peri-urban explains that the urban-rural analysis of the expanding areas, based on the traditional model of rural-urban opposition, is not enough to understand the processes that take place in them. This complexity suggests a process that should be managed by different actors, so the concept of governance is a possibility of approach. In view of this need, the present project aims to study the actors present in the territory, to characterize them and analyze the methodologies to build governance processes involved in the process of administration and dispute of this particular territory, considering democratic processes of organization and social participation, which will contribute to achieve a growth in harmony with the environment, to reduce social inequalities and to develop the economies of cities and towns in the South of Santa Fe. The study identified a series of sustainability factors organized into six dimensions. Although these factors belong to the study of peri-urban areas, we identified some ones related to urban areas (such as sustainable forms of production and consumption, driven by urbanity), others related to rural areas (forms of industrial production with high external inputs that affect the health of populations and nature) and others specific to peri-urban areas (for example, land tenure, which jeopardizes more sustainable forms of production). It also was confirmed that the object of analysis of sustainability does not refer to economic, social and environmental sustainability separately, but to a system, where the whole is more than the sum of the parts; moreover, modelling is the tool that allows graphing the relationships where the discursive language allows integration of the different dimensions.