Towards Sustainable Peri-urbanization through Stream Renaturation: How Farming Improves Following the Upgrading of Watercourses

Description

East Asia is undergoing a progressive degradation of agricultural land on its fringes and in between megacities. In these peri-urban areas, the expansion of unregulated, urban-oriented activities produces contamination of soil and the pollution of water resources, threatening the health of local populations and ecosystems. While these regions are central in the global process of urbanization, and their populations are expected to grow by one hundred million people over the next decade, there are still no governmental plans or comprehensive strategies to halt environmental degradation and prevent associated threats to expanding populations. After undertaking several years of research and fieldwork I have hypothesized that in peri-urban areas: (1) top-down flood control schemes employing stream channelization cause significant degradation of both sociocultural and biophysical aspects of riparian agriculture creating favorable conditions for the expansion of unregulated urban-oriented activities; (2) and that stream renaturation can generate a partial recovery of riparian degraded landscapes, fostering bottom-up farming, land care, as well as reconstructing a sense of belonging to watercourses. Multimethod research is herein adopted with a focus on two cases located in Hong Kong’s New Territories, combining spatial and social analysis of the process of degradation and recovery of agriculture, while analyzing its dynamic association with hydrologic transformations. This proposed research will employ a quantitative analysis of land use change and morphological transformation of streams over the last five decades, using historical aerial photographs. Concurrently, the research will investigate the sociocultural aspects of the alteration of the hydrologic regimes through archival research and in-depth interviews with local farmers. Sources of secondary data are the Drainage Service Department and local archives. The proposed triangulation of methods aims both at a broader understanding of the phenomenon and cross verification. The proposed research will shed new light on the sociocultural and physical impacts of hydrologic modification. This study will contribute to the establishment of a more holistic approach to the management of water resources and stream renaturation through a higher integration of socially related factors. At the regional level, the proposal stresses the importance of establishing adaptive stormwater management frameworks, which enable a balanced rural-urban coexistence by preserving existing agroecosystems. At the local level, this research project will contribute to a better understanding of the causes of landscape degradation. Moreover, it can be extremely relevant in restraining the proliferation of non-conforming land uses in rural areas and in the sustainable planning and design of Hong Kong’s New Territories.