In May 2007, a major demographic milestone was passed. For the first time, the earth’s population became more urban than rural. This process of urbanization will accelerate in the decades to come: most of the growth in the world population – to 9 billion people in 2050 – will occur in urban areas. By 2050, the urban population will be approximately twice the size of the rural population.
However, this does not mean that urban areas are or will become more important than rural areas. On the contrary, they have always relied heavily on each other, and will become even more mutually reliant during an era of rapid urban population growth. Cities will continue to need resources such as food, fibre, clean water, nature, biodiversity and recreational space, as well as the people and communities that produce and provide these products and services. Hence, key questions for the coming decades are how, where and by whom these products and services for the urban area will be produced and provided, and if and how this can be done in manner that is considered to be socially, economically and ecologically sustainable and ethically sound.
In recent years, multifunctional agriculture has emerged as an important topic in debates on the future of agriculture and the rural area and its relations with the wider and predominantly urban society. This is an expression of the fact that agriculture is not only valued for its contribution to food and fibre production and the economic development of agro-industry, but that it also needs to be assessed according to a much wider range of social, environmental, economic and ethical criteria. At the farm level, multifunctional agriculture is characterized by a variety of entrepreneurial strategies and activities, such as processing and direct marketing of food products, energy production, care for the elderly and disabled, and tourism. But multifunctional agriculture is also expressed at higher scales, such as the regional level (e.g. collective nature and landscape management schemes and regional branding) and the national level (e.g. policymaking and implementation).
Research on multifunctional agriculture and changing urban-rural relations is highly fragmented, both disciplinarily and geographically, which is due to the multiplicity of activities, the multi-scalar character of multifunctionality and the geographical contextuality of expressions of multifunctional agriculture. Hence, this conference aims to advance the scientific state of the art in research on multifunctional agriculture and urban-rural relations by bringing together scholars from a wide range of disciplines (sociology, economics, spatial planning, land-use planning, regional planning, urban planning, crop sciences, animal sciences, soil sciences, architecture, etc.) from many parts of the world.