Today we had a lecture about suburbanization. This lecture was presented by Anne Gravsholt Busck and covered the stakeholder process, the push-pull factors of agriculture, and changed in rural investment. The main goal of the lecture was to present the concept of peri-urban agriculture and why it was necessary to have near cities, but too much time was spent on the introduction and we didn’t really get to talk about it very much.
Other than that, we went to the farm of a full-time farmer, who apparently is among the last of his kind (there are now very few full-time farmers in Denmark, especially so near Copenhagen). His place was great in terms of size and appearance, but apparently it was also under severe pressures. His farm currently contains a fair amount of empty farm fields, pigs, hay, and a lot of stored grain. However, he specified that there was only enough money generated to support maybe two or three people in terms of marketing the goods he had. The environmental agency of the area would stop any new projects he has in mind, including: fattening the pigs (supposedly because of chemicals, but most likely because of the smell) or even creating a windmill (because of their potential negative appearance on the landscape- which I thought was ironic for a place so close to Copenhagen). Restrictions upon farmers seem quite excessive and although appearance and high tax rates from people who want summer houses in the area are important, functionality and preserving the culture should be equally important. It’s just unfortunate that the policies don’t reflect this.
During this day, we also had a fair amount of group work. In this groupwork, we made a few posters on what we thought “urban” and “rural” were, and generated a better problem statement. I think overall the subject still seems too big for my group to tackle, but hopefully we will be able to manage. The main idea of the topic, as mentioned before, is “how to combine desired rural aspects into an urban setting,” and we have decided that we will do an analysis on this using existing models rather than trying to create a new model or plan, upon the location.
After that we had our first free night ^^ Silas had a “Ave Caesar” game and a “Buying and Selling Beans” game that were quite fun.
(pigs at the farm)
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