Changing land management regimes and countryside’s functions. Results of a
study in a Tuscan area
Stefano Orsini
Department of Agronomy and Management of the Agro-ecosystem, University of Pisa
The changes of the use of many land areas from traditional agriculture to different uses reflect the
increasing urbanisation of the countryside, which involves many aspects, such as the increase of
recreational and residential uses of rural land.
In some areas, the replacement of farming by economic activities and uses of land different from
the farming ones, the diversification of farmers’ activities into other business have reached so an
extent that they may affect the countryside’s functions.
This work – whose aims and scope are to contribute to the current debates regarding the intersecting
dynamics of land management, agricultural changes and urbanisation – asks the following main
questions: 1) How and why do landowners differ in their attitudes towards the countryside, land
management system and farming strategies and adjustments? 2) What challenges their attitudes will
produce for institutional policies – such as the physical planning, the agricultural policy – and for a
more comprehensive policy integration at all levels?
As explanatory framework, landowners’ individual motives and socioeconomic and political
contexts are considered the key factors of changes of the rural place. The interactive relationship
among the wide socioeconomic and political forces (i.e. food market, the role of State in land use
regulation), the specific local responses (i.e. the role of local institutions) and the individual motives
(i.e. availability of diverse source of income) may have significant consequences on the changes of
rural space and place.
Specifically, this research aims at explaining the agricultural changes in relation to the different
activities taking place by landowners in two Tuscan municipalities in the province of Pisa, one
located in an urban fringe area and one in the rural hinterland.
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The information for this case study research have been gathered using different source of evidence,
including in-depth interviews with landowners, several fieldtrips for direct observation, various
public documents, maps and statistical data.
Agriculturally, the two municipalities are mainly characterised by the production of cereals,
sunflowers and other oleaginous crops, with few intensive winegrowing areas.
Of particular relevance to the issue of the intersecting dynamics between change in agriculture and
different forms of urbanisation, an increasing aptitude of the landowners and the farmers themselves
for changing the original uses of rural land and buildings emerges: they use to diversify into home
tourism in the rural area, into recreational or more purely residential business in the fringe area.
Other results come out, such as the emergence of large tracts of countryside managed by a single
operator because of several landowners considering the countryside mainly as a place to live in and
agriculture as a low profitable activity.
In terms of policy implications, these trends arise challenges for the government’s control over
agricultural land use. The reduction of agricultural support, the liberalisation of agricultural
policies, the presence of planning decision systems led by the only municipal level discretion, all
these factors claim some sort of ‘landscape policies’, based on policy integration at local level and
aimed at keeping the link between farming and land management.
KEY WORDS: land management; urbanisation; agricultural changes; individual motives; contexts
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