The rapid expansion of urban areas profoundly affects agriculture, impacting its productivity and sustainability. This urban growth presents several challenges:
Reduced Land for Farming: As cities expand, they encroach on surrounding farmland. This not only reduces the amount of land available for agriculture but also pushes farmers to the margins, often to less fertile and more difficult-to-cultivate areas.
Soil Degradation: Urban expansion and the associated construction work often lead to soil erosion and loss of topsoil, which is crucial for crop growth. Additionally, pollution from urban areas can contaminate soil, further reducing its fertility.
Diminished Water Resources: The competition for water between urban areas and agriculture intensifies with urbanization. Cities require vast amounts of water for domestic and industrial use, reducing the availability of water for irrigation and leading to overexploitation of water resources, including groundwater.
Shifts in Market Dynamics: Urbanization changes the demand patterns for agricultural products, often favoring processed and convenience foods over traditional crops. This shift can disrupt local agricultural economies and may require farmers to adapt to new market demands, which can be challenging without the necessary resources or knowledge.
However, urbanization also offers significant opportunities:
Improved Infrastructure: The development of roads and transportation networks can lower transportation costs and time for agricultural products, enhancing market access for farmers.
Technological Advancements: Urban centers often lead in technological innovation, providing farmers with access to new farming techniques and tools that can boost productivity.
Diverse Market Demand: Growing urban populations increase demand for a variety of food products, offering farmers opportunities to cultivate high-value and niche crops
Therefore, it is necessary to have a comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted consequences of Urbanization on agriculture for devising sustainable strategies that ensure food security while mitigating adverse effects on rural livelihoods and environmental sustainability.
We aim to investigate the impacts of Urbanization on agricultural productivity and sustainability and the strategies that can be implemented to mitigate adverse effects and harness potential benefits.
Environment, ecology, and societies make a perfect example of what complex systems are. their intertwined relationships, interdependence, mutual effects, and life cycles; are all characteristics of such systems. In addressing our selected issue we will be relying on and adopting a system thinking mindset, investigating the different phenomenons of these connections, their correlations and causalities, and their feedback loops in action through time. As our research question involves human factors when addressing urbanization, it's also imperative to center humans in the middle of the process, therefore we are adaption concepts from the design thinking framework to relate and empathize with the communities we are analyzing, and include them throughout defining the issues and drivers related to urbanization and agriculture, also to ideate and prototype our study until we get to test our hypothesis with real data from the field.
Our problem lies in the intersection between two domains, agriculture and urbanization; we decided to model it by finding a correlation between two main factors: agricultural land change over the course of the past years and population change over the same period.
While agricultural land and population increase are important factors in understanding the impact of urbanization on agriculture, Urbanization and its effects on agriculture involve complex interactions between various socioeconomic, environmental, and political factors. It's challenging to capture all these interactions accurately in a model that relies solely on data about agricultural land and population increase. Without considering these interdependencies, our model may oversimplify the issue and provide misleading conclusions.
Additionally, the availability and quality of data on agricultural land and population increase may vary across regions and time periods. Biases, inaccuracies, or gaps in the data could skew our analysis and lead to flawed conclusions.