L’agricoltura orizzontale e verticale nelle aree rurali e urbane: scenari, contraddizioni e impatti

Horizontal and Vertical Agriculture in Rural and Urban Areas: Scenarios, Contradictions and Impacts. The aim of this work is to describe the current crisis facing the globalized conventional agriculture tightened in the grip of the so-called agricultural squeeze, which compresses farmer income. This paper, after studying problems of globalized agriculture in rural areas, called horizontal agriculture, attempts to highlight the role of the same type of agriculture in urban areas. Urban agriculture, which works also in peri-urban areas, in the towns is a real alternative to conventional agriculture at least for horticultural, small fruits and animals breeding such as poultry. The paper aims also to identify the challenges and opportunities of both urban horizontal and vertical agriculture in order to outline three future scenarios: Scenario I - conventional horizontal agriculture of commodities in rural area and urban vertical agriculture in urban areas (agro-technocratic model); Scenario II - Organic horizontal farming and urban horizontal agriculture (traditional agriculture model); Scenario III - coexistence of scenarios I and II in the landscape and cultural mosaic(predominance of one model or merge between the two models). The aim is to verify the alternative hypotheses of the dominance of one of the two basic scenarios against the convergence towards the third scenario, characterized by larger attention to population welfare and environmental protection.