Periurban form in the Peruvian Andes

During the last three decades of globalization, the conversion of fertile arable land into built-up areas has been one of the dominating land use changes in the hinterland of cities. These are processes with positive and negative impacts on periurban farmers. In mountain valleys in the Peruvian Andes, where productive zones on the limited space of the periurban valley floors have increasingly been urbanized since the end of the 1980s, this is particularly evident. First, because valley floors are irrigated while the slopes and high plains of the hinterland are mostly not irrigated; smallholders depend on irrigated land to produce cropsand to generate monetary incomeduring the dry season. Second, because land cultivated on the valley floor is often leased by smallholders and owned by nonagrarian land owners, who expect rising land prices and prefer to sell land for real-estate projects. Different forms of city growth in Andean valleys have different degrees of impact on periurban smallholders, who not always prefer compact urban growth on the valley floor. Instead, dispersed urban growth on the valley floor is often considered a better form, for it allows profiting from urban advantages, while continuing the cultivation of the remaining arable land. This fact has largely been ignored in research. The project aims to describe and explain changes in urban form and land cover in the Andean cities of Cajamarca, Cusco, and Huancayo (including their hinterland) for the last three decades. Then it identifies perceptions of periurban farmers toward these changes and assesses the consequences of these perceptions for the farmers land use. Finally, the project finds future periurban forms that are preferred by smallholder farmers, jointly defines potential quality criteria of future periurban development, and collaboratively maps potential performance zones for the zone between city and countrysidewhich enable the assessment of (possible) flexible approaches to land use planning. In sum, this project is an important contribution to understanding the problems of Andean farmers on the edges of expanding cities, and an attempt to making periurban areas in developing mountain regions more just und future-proof.

During the globalization of the last four decades, dispersed settlement growth and the associated loss of agricultural land were significant processes in the hinterland of many mountain cities in the tropical Andes. The negative effects of these processes on periurban farmers were diverse. This was particularly true in the mountain valleys of the Quechua elevational zone in the Peruvian Andes, where the most productive areas of many valley floors were increasingly urbanized: First, because the valley floors were irrigated more than the adjacent steep slopes of the Suni highlands and the plains of the Puna highlands, and were therefore more important for agricultural production and income generation during the dry season, and second, because the land on the valley floor was often only leased by farmers. The actual landowners increasingly refused to continue leasing land because they speculated in land sales to real-estate developers. Using the urban regions of Cusco in the Huatanay Valley and Huaraz in the Santa Valley as examples, urban development and land cover changes since 1990 were recorded, described, and explained, with a particular focus on the mountainous hinterland. Based on the findings, the two predominantly agricultural communities of Oropesa in the Huatanay Valley and Taric in the Santa Valley were selected to investigate the environmental perceptions of periurban villagers regarding these changes. In addition to the question of whether the negative effects known from the previous project in Huancayo in the Mantaro Valley are also reflected in the results from Cusco and Huaraz, the focus was also on the preferred future settlement growth in both valleys. The city profiles of Cusco and Huaraz revealed the importance of the Andean natural environment and indigenous cultural heritage in recent urban development-a process driven by private actors and increasingly influenced by globalized tourism. The integration of urban development into the mountains is also reflected in land cover changes in the Quechua, Suni, and Puna elevational zones of the hinterland, which could indicate an interplay of speculative fallow, agricultural intensification, and ecological restoration. To understand the negative impacts of this on periurban farmers, structured interviews with closed questions-supplemented by informal conversations-were conducted in Oropesa and Taric. The responses of 420 respondents, selected using nonprobability quota sampling, confirmed the negative effects known from the previous project. As in Huancayo, these environmental perceptions in the areas surrounding Cusco and Huaraz did not lead to an overall negative assessment of dispersed settlement growth. This apparent contradiction becomes more understandable when one considers the developments preferred by the villagers for the future. These indicate in particular a desire to preserve cropland and woodland in the valley while making greater use of the grasslands of the high plateaus for urban development.