A Plea to Advance Insight into Periurban Agrifood Systems as High-Priority Planetary Sustainability Challenges

Periurban agri-food systems have expanded to become a major planetary sustainability challenge. Worldwide, extensive urban growth during the past twenty-five years has occurred as periurban expansion. Original research contributions are urgently needed to address the wide-ranging sustainability challenges of the agrifood systems of periurban areas across the countries of the Global South and Global North. This Research Topic is motivated by the rapid global expansion and overall extent, shared dynamics and distinct diversity, and complex changes and trajectories of periurban agri-food systems. These new and changing food and farming assemblages urge the development and sharing of original research, scholarly insights, and policy and program approaches.

Recent research is highlighting a major gap in the current knowledge and practices of periurban agriculture and high-priority global sustainability changes, specifically, how do we understand and support sustainably in-of-for periurban agrifood systems amid the distinct processes of peri-urbanisation that are taking place currently as well as during the past and into the future?

The first goal is to advance diverse in-of-for understandings of periurban agrifood systems and sustainability. “In” refers to wide-ranging interactions of periurban agrifood systems with food and community needs, urbanization and migration, climate change, rural restructuring/globalized countryside, and biodiversity conservation in humanized landscapes. “Of” refers to case studies characterizing periurban agrifood systems across places and countries globally. “For” represents a focus on the usefulness to sustainability-wellness policies and practical applicability of periurban agri-food research.

The second goal is to improve understanding of the extensive, often emergent variation and overarching relatedness of periurban agri-food systems. This variation encompasses differentiated processes and patterns of agroecosystems, landscapes, land use, food and value chains, planning and territorial analyses and approaches, sociocultural identities and networks, and community and collective approaches to justice and well-being. This diversity includes suburbanization, extended urbanization, urban-fringe and peripheral-zone development, and urban agrarianism that co-occur with new relatedness, commonalities, and interdependencies (e.g., the fused framework of Urban and Periurban Agriculture, UPA).

Additional goals are focused on advancing knowledge on periurban agrifood relations to periurban spaces (built environments, infrastructure), landscapes (greenways), agroecosystems (soil, water, biotic interactions), and periurban territories (community, social movement, planning, zonation, network approaches).

This Research Topic welcomes articles addressing, but not limited to, the following:

• How do we understand and model features of the built environment (housing, transportation, property development) that interact with the functions and characteristics of periurban food and farming systems?

• How can periurban agriculture and features, such as greenways and areas of nature, be understood as dynamic spaces and systems of land and land use?

• How do social-ecological patterns and processes (sizes/layouts of periurban farms and gardens) interact with agroecological dynamics? (agrobiodiversity, pollinators, soils, biotic types/traits of food sources)

• How do flows and networks of resources (seeds, soil amendments, water, labor), people (labor, immigrant communities), and knowledge systems (local and formal knowledge systems, hybrid knowledge) function in periurban agriculture/food systems and, also, among the triad of urban-periurban-rural spaces?

• How could periurban agriculture help to adapt to climate change?

• How do the dynamics of climate change impact and interact with periurban agrifood systems and vulnerability, risk, and adaptative strategies?

• How are periurban agrifood systems influenced through different labor processes including gendering and groups of immigrants and farmworkers?

• How are periurban food and farming systems influenced by their political-ecological and civil-society dynamics and histories?

• How do social and/or ecological characteristics and processes, such as soil, water, seed, and animal management, influence periurban food and farming systems?

• How do the characteristics and dynamics of governance and planning in periurban territories---including neighborhood and informal forms of governance—influence periurban food and farming systems?

• What evidence can be evaluated to ascertain how sustainable periurban agriculture can scale up to foster city-region sustainability and resilience, and how does it potentially indicate that pathways of upscaling differ within and among periurban places and countries globally?

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: periurban sustainability, urban and periurban agriculture (UPA), sustainable food systems, urban and periurban farming, urban fringe farming, extended urbanisation and agrifood systems, sustainable city-regions, periurban agroecology, global agrifood sustainability, climate change and periurbanisation, periurban agrobiodiversity, sustainable development

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.