House-lot gardens in Santarém, Pará, Brazil: Linking rural with urban

By Antoinette M.G.A. WinklerPrins (Assistant Professor)
In Urban Ecosystems Volume 6, Numbers 1-2 / March, 2002

Abstract: “The division between rural and urban sectors of the landscape in many parts of the world is increasingly blurred. House-lot or homegardens offer a perspective on understanding rural-urban linkages since they are frequently a landscape feature in both settings and the exchanges of their products link the two. House-lot gardens are an under-researched component of the agricultural repertoires of smallholders in many parts of the world. Urban house-lot gardens in particular, have until recently not received much attention despite their critical importance to urban livelihoods.

“This paper presents findings from research on house-lot gardens in rural and urban zones of Santarém, Pará, Brazil, one of Amazonia’s largest municipalities. The research demonstrates that garden products are important for household subsistence, but even more importantly product exchanges between rural and urban kin households help sustain critical social networks that subsidize urban life. Gardens are a link between urban and rural settings as products, germplasm, and household members move between the two. People are urban and rural at the same time which demonstrates that households can be multi-local.”

“The second point is that gardens represent a source of food (especially fruit) for direct and indirect consumption, thereby offering food security. Urban gardening has often been considered a vestige of past rural habits, and as such officials have wanted to remove them from the urban landscape. Instead planners should take advantage of gardens and urban agriculture in general in regions with rapid urbanization. Gardens enable people to continue having access to a food supply, and therefore offer a measure of food security. As Slinger found elsewhere in the Amazon, institutionalized gardening in the form of a planned agroforestry projects yield numerous bene?ts including surplus crop production that permits commercialization (Slinger, 2000). The trend of thinking about gardens as part of the urbanization process should continue and should also embrace the ‘extended’ de?nition of the household instead of the usual single-site households targeted for intervention by development agencies and governments (Ellis, 1998).”

The full paper can be found here.