Tag Archives: macetas de 10 litros

The far side is occupied by community and government facilities

Most of the search results involved tourist agencies in Nanjing and Shanghai who were advertising the theme park by means of a detailed tourist itinerary. Second, I found a limited number of advertisements for the sale of resettlement houses in the Jinhu New Village. Third, I found accounts from urbanites who had traveled to Jinhu and were commenting on their experiences at the theme park. Most of them seem to have enjoyed themselves and left only very short comments. Last but not least, I encountered one informed and detailed online report by a local resident—entitled “Jinhu New Countryside is a Gambling Game and a Fraud”. Although I have used the internet as an extra source to understand what is going on at the Jinhu site, it is worth noting that the internet has also served as an important arena used by actors involved with Jinhu to gain legitimacy, to voice complaints, to vent anger, and to advertise for economic profit. Jinhu New Village is located in southern Anhui Province about 30 kilometers south of Wuhu City. Altogether it occupies an area of 189 hectares , on a stretch of land running along the east side of the national road G205. G205 is a two-lane paved road built before China’s highway construction boom of the last ten years. The site is situated on a broad plain traversed by numerous canals and lakes. These lakes are the reason why this area would also be chosen as the site for a theme park. Given the relatively high average temperatures and annual precipitation, two harvests are possible each year . The rich agricultural fields in the Jinhu new countryside construction zone once supported twelve traditional villages . Residents of these villages have now all been relocated to Jinhu New Village on the southwest corner of the development zone. Both the Jinhu New Village and the associated theme park are separated from the national G205 road by a stretch of landscaping composed of a long canal, green lawns, and willow trees. As with many New Countryside projects now under construction in China—projects often readily visible to drivers rushing along the gleaming new freeways crisscrossing the country—the Jinhu site is a veritable monument to a particular notion of rural modernization and development.

When driving north along the national highway,maceta 5 litros one encounters first a large billboard explaining that one is approaching China’s “first low-carbon national tourist site.” Behind the billboard, one sees the new houses arranged in a perfect grid, quite distinct from the more haphazard arrangement of farmhouses and fields in the traditional villages . Less than a kilometer beyond the New Village, one reaches the entrance to Jinhu Rural World theme park, situated on the east side of the highway. Here two large billboards announce: “National AAAA tourist site—National modern technology agricultural experimental site—National agricultural tourist demonstration site—Welcome to Jinhu experimental site!” According to the master plan—which appears on one of the billboards— the rural world theme park will eventually have 41 attractions. However, as of June 2012, only 16 projects were finished and open to tourists. Below I analyze the built environment of Jinhu New Village and Jinhu Rural World theme park, paying particular attention to how rural space is undergoing transformation and to how the “New Countryside” contrasts with the old countryside and traditional rural society.One’s first impression of Jinhu New Village is of a modern suburb imported from somewhere in the United States. It is a large housing complex, with houses that are remarkably uniform in structure and physical appearance laid out on a grid consisting of alleyways running either perpendicular or parallel to the national highway. The residences nearest to the highway are two- or three-story townhouses; further from the highway are several rows of new apartment buildings. The aesthetics of the new residences stand in stark contrast to the vernacular architectural style of the old red brick peasant houses, a few of which still stood undemolished just southeast of the New Village. This aesthetic of the New Village is a curious mimicry of American “streetcar” and “sitcom” suburbs, those suburbs that Dolores Hayden describes as refilecting the American “idealized life in single-family houses with generous yards”. More specifically, the dwellings in the New Village, with their white stucco walls, their grey-tile roofs, and their uniformity of appearance, resemble in remarkable ways tract housing in American suburbia—such as in the Los Angeles Basin . As in any American suburb, each house also has a garage, with additional parking available in clearly marked parking spaces along the alleyways. Many aspects of this new Chinese suburbia seem out of place in the Chinese context.

Grass lawns may have particular symbolic significance in American urban and suburban environments , but from a Chinese peasant’s perspective, grass is a weed that infects one’s fields, the last thing one would think of deliberately planting beside one’s home. The garages and parking lots are also curiosities given that very few peasant households in Jinhu own a car. Many peasants currently use their garages to store their agricultural tools. The New Village does not merely emulate American suburbia; it also contains elements of a China-specific vision of the urban modern, as represented by an orderly but dense arrangement of tall buildings. In American suburbia, the ideal consists of single detached family houses placed in a landscaping that tries to imitate the natural environment. However, in Jinhu New Village, one experiences a much greater feeling of density, highlighted by the concentration of residences, including both rows of two- to three-story stucco houses—called bieshu in Chinese—and blocks of six- to seven-story apartment buildings. The term bieshu ordinarily refers to detached houses. At Jinhu, however, they are not free-standing; they are much more like townhouses or row houses than detached single-family houses. One way to explain this preference for a densely built environment is to consider the perceived ecological limitations of Chinese agricultural land. The central government has in recent years expressed concern for China’s “national food security,” leading to various strategies to maximize available arable land, a point I will address later in detail. However, there is another equally plausible explanation. For the Chinese urban elites, tall buildings and uniform orderliness symbolize modern life. For example, many Chinese government officials and nouveaux riches traveling to the U.S. are quite disappointed by their experience—if the U.S. is so modern, why do the vast dense expanses of awe-inspiring skyscrapers exist only in New York City and Chicago, and not in other American cities and towns?10 The orderliness and density of Jinhu New Village, then, is a public advertisement of how fortunate the displaced peasants are to be living in a new modern environment. Besides the modern architectural styles and the orderly arrangement of buildings,cultivo de la frambuesa the modern environment of Jinhu New Village is also refilected inside the homes. Here, one finds a variety of conveniences unavailable in the old villages, including flush toilets, solar powered water heaters, running water, reliable plumbing, built-in gas stoves, garbage collection, and even high-speed internet.

Although my host Mrs. Tang had only a second grade education, she was adamant about the importance of using computers and accessing the internet, by means of which she learned a great deal chatting with other netizens. Indeed, computers and the internet seem generally to be welcome by most peasants in rural China. Other particularly appreciated modern conveniences are showers and hot water, made possible by the solar-powered water heaters installed on the roofs of the houses. I have observed these new water heaters in New Countryside housing projects . Much like the entire Jinhu development site, the space of the New Village is clearly compartmentalized with well-delineated commercial, communal, governmental, and private residential zones. The core of the New Village is organized around a T-shaped axis . Immediately after entering the New Village by the main gate, one faces a two-lane street with commercial shops on both sides . At the far end of this street is a perpendicular street that forms the top of the T. One side of this second street is also occupied by commercial space. A multi-story building houses the police station, the community administrative office , and a “petition office” that handles grievances.Beside the government building is a three-story pre-school and kindergarten, a basketball court, and an indoor market place . Further from the T-shaped axis and on all sides are the private residences. The two- or three-story townhouses stand closer to the national highway; the apartment blocks lie just beyond the community and administration buildings. Throughout the New Village, iron fences separate public spaces from private residential yards, and curbs demarcate the boundaries between pedestrian and vehicular zones of circulation. None of these various ways of compartmentalizing space—derived from Western urban models—were present in the old natural villages. Despite the orderliness and the conveniences of the modern built environment, all is not as it seems, since the new houses come with a variety of extra costs that peasants were not burdened with in their old villages.

The cost of high-speed internet access is roughly USD $25 per month, a fee that also includes unlimited local phone calls. Peasants accept this fee more readily than some of the other charges they face, as it provides a service they did not formerly enjoy. By contrast, from the peasant’s perspective, the cost of water and natural gas are more difficult to accept. In the old villages, water was freely drawn from wells; and they used gathered firewood rather than gas for cooking. Most significant of all, however, their cost of living is now much higher because food has to be purchased instead of being produced on their land, a concept utterly alien to the peasants. While staying in the village, the most common complaint I heard was that residents no longer had land for cultivating vegetables and raising domestic animals. Now they had to buy food from supermarkets. Inevitably, village residents have found ways to cut living expenditures by a variety of means. To avoid using running water, women wash vegetables and laundry in the canal built next to the main road. For drinking water, many households invest in a well, which they dig in their small backyards. Not only is well water free, peasants also consider it to be cleaner than tap water. In a similar fashion, to minimize natural gas usage, many households have purchased portable pre-made cylinder-shaped aluminum stoves. Around 5 am every morning, in order to boil water, Mrs. Tang’s father-in-law got up to start a fire in the aluminum stove, using wood collected from demolished houses. This was a common practice: with the stove set right outside the garage door, he would chat—sometimes standing and sometimes sitting on a stool—with two other neighbors who were also doing the same thing. Another way to save on cooking expense is to build an old-style firewood stove in one’s backyard. One couple running a majiang parlor out of their home did just this, despite warnings from the New Village management, who has ordered them to demolish it, on the grounds that it was ugly and damaged the orderly and neat image of the New Village. There are other ways in which, in order to save money, residents resist the management’s efforts to maintain a neat appearance. To mitigate the daily cost of food, residents in Jinhu New Village utilize all sorts of marginal land around the edge of the complex. In some cases, they have gotten rid of the lawn near their houses by spreading herbicides left over from their farming days. Another less destructive way is to dig a hole just large enough to plant pumpkins or other vegetables that grow vertically, plants that can more discretely blend into the lawn and tree landscaping. Chickens are also allowed to roam freely on and around the landscaping . All of these various survival strategies constitute continuities with common practices in the old villages; all are very much part of the peasants’ familiar habitus.But the “landless” peasants residing in the New Village have also turned to other more novel strategies to help them make ends meet. Numerous residents have converted their townhouses for commercial purposes, something they would not have done in their old villages. One common small business is a restaurant.

The California version of the CAFO problem largely involves the development of larger dairy farms

California agriculture during this period also became a more regulated industry, particularly in the use of pesticides and other chemicals and in its impacts on water quality, as a result of the expanded public interest in environmental and health protection. By now it is a truism in California that the agricultural-urban edge problem is a serious consequence of our continuing urbanization and land use patterns. Along with decrying the urban “paving over” of rich farmland, newspaper accounts frequently document specific examples of edge conflicts between farmers and residential neighbors. In some respects edge conflicts are a more serious California problem than the direct loss of farmland to urban uses. While the farmland conversion rate currently averages about 50,000 acres statewide annually, edge tensions continually affect many times as many agricultural acres. This discussion, however, is largely informed by anecdotes and impressions. It lacks a body of solid and research-derived evidence about problem causes, circumstances, and solutions. We recognize the widespread existence of the edge problem in California, but we don’t understand in a systematic way how it varies in intensity and impacts different communities, farm commodities, urban configurations, and other circumstances. Clearly conflicts and negative impacts are not found in all the places where farming and urban residences are in close proximity; some edges are characterized by a peaceful coexistence between farmers and urban neighbors. This paper is an exploratory examination of the edge problem in California agriculture that is drawn from a variety of sources. Considering the lack of systematic research in California,cultivo de la frambuesa some of these sources are studies carried out in other states.

We review here available information about the extent of urban-farm borders in the state, the nature of impacts on both sides of the edge, variations in the extent of the problem, farm operator adaptations in urban-influenced areas, and policy and private-sector mechanisms for dealing with the problem.Agricultural-urban edges are pervasive throughout California. By one linear measure, in 1998 urban areas throughout the state were bordered by 17,301 kilometers of all kinds of agricultural uses—or 10,726 miles. About two-thirds of this total represented cropland and one-third grazing land. The calculations are based on the digitized maps generated by the Farmland Mapping and Monitoring Program of the California Department of Conservation. Combining soil survey information with the results of aerial photographs, the FMMP every two years maps the agricultural and urban land uses of most of the non public lands territory of the state with an emphasis on tracking farmland conversions to urban use. The estimate of 10,726 miles is probably an under count of true extent of the total edge distance, since the FMMP does not map a few agricultural areas of the state where modern soil information is lacking, and the mapping does not capture isolated urban pockets of less than 10 acres . This thin, linear measure does not give us a sense of how many farms or how much agricultural land is actually located adjacent to urban uses in California. It is difficult to translate kilometers and miles into a more meaningful area measure, such as acres, without knowing more about farm sizes in relation to linear borders. A conservative estimate is that about 2.2 million agricultural acres statewide are located adjacent to urban edges, based on the assumption that urbanization affects farm operations up to a third of a mile on the average from urban borders. This represents about 8 percent of California’s 28 million total agricultural acres.The same assumption produces an estimate of 1.5 million cropland acres in edge areas, about 13 percent of all cropland in the state.Cropland edges in California are concentrated in the leading agricultural counties—the counties with the highest farm market values and most of the best cropland defined as prime farmland. Table 1 makes this point in examining the edge circumstances of cropland in the 12 top counties in farm market value, including seven Central Valley and three coastal counties.

All but the bottom two on the list had market values in 2000 of at least $1 billion each. Most of the state’s urban-cropland borders are found in these high value counties—6,465 kilometers in 1998, or about 90 percent of the state’s total. Moreover, they are among the leading counties in prime farmland, 2.6 million acres in 1998, most of the state’s total of about 4.3 million prime acres. Table 1 also notes the large increase in cropland-urban edge borders in the ten years between 1988 and 1998—an average of a 22.9 percent increase in edge kilometers for the 12 counties. This reflects of course the comparable increases in population and urban areas during the approximate or same ten-year periods. However, for several counties—Fresno, Tulare, Monterey, Kern, and San Diego—percentage increases in cropland edge kilometers vastly exceeded the increases in population and acres devoted to urban use.Identifying the extent and location of geographical edges tells us little about the incidence and intensity of the conflicts and the specific issues that arise from the close proximity of farms and urban neighbors. We can speculate that such conflicts are concentrated in a relatively few places throughout the state, while farm-urban relations are generally peaceful in most edge areas. The reasons are that urbanization proceeds at varying rates in different communities, farmers generally adjust their operations to edge realities, and most residential neighbors learn to tolerate some discomfort from nearby agricultural operations as the price to pay for living in the countryside. Still there is substantial anecdotal information about the types of impacts that qualify as edge problems. The common understanding in California’s agricultural areas is that farm operators and residential neighbors are affected in particular ways by their respective behaviors. As duplicated in Table 2, a short list of such issues was included in the summary report of the 1996 conference, California’s Future: Maintaining Viable Agriculture at the Urban Edge, organized by the UC Agricultural Issues Center. Longer lists of edge issues are found in other reports, including those issued in other states.

A New York State guidebook on reducing edge conflicts, for example, identifies 26 different kinds of rural residents’ complaints against farmers, including unsightly farmsteads, trash, inconsiderate behavior by farmers, and wandering livestock . What is clear from Table 2 is that farmers and residents at the edge differ in their interests and views of how they are negatively affected by their interactions. For farmers, the issues largely concern the costs and efficiencies of producing their commodities—largely economic considerations. For residential neighbors, the impacts deal with questions of health and quality of life. This difference in how edge issues are defined bythe respective parties suggests how difficult it may be to resolve such issues when conflicting positions are strongly held.Obviously edge issues are not equal in their distribution and how they are perceived by the parties to these conflicts. We expect the extent and intensity of edge problems to vary from location to location, depending on the characteristics of both the agricultural and urban sides of the boundary. Critical agricultural variables are the types of commodities grown and the farm practices used to produce them. In California,macetas de 10 litros conflicts over the agricultural use of pesticides and herbicides seem to be more visible and widespread than in most other farm states. Our state specializes in tree, vine, and vegetable crops that require extensive cultivation and protection from pests. Much of the production of such crops occurs in edge areas, where high costs for purchasing or renting agricultural land impels operators to grow high value and high yield commodities. What may limit in many localities the extent of neighborhood opposition to farm use of pesticides and other chemicals is the tight regulation of such applications by state and local governments in California. Human health risks and potential water contamination are controversial issues. Regulation takes place primarily through the permitting actions of county agricultural commissioners, the licensing of applicators, and the work of county health departments. Despite these controls, excessive drift from aerial and ground spraying is an ever-present concern. Residents in some agricultural communities, either attributing specific health problems to spray drift or fearing the risk, have organized to protest chemical use and to question the adequacy of the regulatory system . In many other states the most conflictual farm-urban issues increasingly revolve around the location and effects of concentrated animal feeding operations, a type of agricultural activity that now has its own acronym—CAFOs. Reflected here is the growing industrialization of animal agriculture in the nation, marked especially by the trend in southern, eastern, and mid-western states to larger and more specialized hog and poultry raising operations . Local operators typically are integrated via contractual arrangements into the feed, processing, and marketing processes of national firms. From a community and environmental perspective, the most critical feature of these factory farms is the concentration of so much animal waste in such small areas—the “piling up of too much stuff in one place” according to one observer . The threat to surface waters and aquifers is the central issue.

Public agencies are not always aggressive in controlling the citing of such farms and in overseeing their waste disposal processes. CAFOs also generate other negative impacts in their neighborhoods, primarily odor and air pollution.As noted above, this is a major public policy issue in the southern San Joaquin Valley, now the most productive milk shed in the nation. County governments through their planning and land use powers are largely responsible for controlling the location of new or enlarged dairies, while the water quality aspects of dairy operations are in the hands of environmental regulators in state and federal governments.The key variables on the urban side of edge areas are the characteristics of residents and the configurations of their urban neighborhoods. Certainly the negative impacts of living next to certain kinds of intensive farming operations have a clear and objective reality. Nobody likes dust on their backyard laundry, to be awakened at 5 a.m. by the sound of heavy machinery, or to be subject to possible exposure to the drift from chemical applications. Yet, perceptions also determine how people personally regard and react—or don’t—to such conditions. Levels of tolerance to farm operations vary quite a bit, with some urban neighbors more disposed than others to identify specific incidents as more than minor annoyances and more inclined to complain to farmers and government offices. What seem to generate such perceptual differences, according to anecdotal information, are lifestyle backgrounds. The generalization is that newcomers who move to agricultural locations directly from urban areas are less tolerant of the discomforts of living close to farms than longtime residents who have farm or other rural backgrounds . Particularly contributing to the unhappiness of urban newcomers with their new neighborhoods is how the realities of intensive agricultural practices clash with their expectations of pleasant living in the country. Notes the major of Patterson, an expanding small city in western Stanislaus County: “Most of us have grown up with crop-dusters at dawn, but not the new constituents” . Lacking so far systematic research on the topic, this generalization about levels of tolerance is merely a reasonable hypothesis. The configuration of residential neighborhoods in edge areas also likely affects the extent of conflict. The larger the exposure or interface between farm activities and non-farm residences, the more opportunity for problems. By implication, this is an argument for planning and residential design that confines urban development in relatively small blocks, as compared to a pattern of scattered home sites throughout an agricultural area. The difference is between sharp, solid edges separating farms and residences and ill-defined and fragmented edges that blur the distinction. A separate kind of problem is posed by the location in the middle of agricultural areas of schools, churches, and other facilities that concentrate large numbers of people at certain times.As well as immediate impacts, there are also long-term consequences for agricultural operations located in areas of ongoing urbanization. Some writers refer to the “impermanence syndrome,” a term which takes in a variety of meanings, but generally suggests a high degree of uncertainty among farmers about their ability to continue productive operations in areas beset by rapid population increase and land use change.