Connecting city and countryside

We tend to picture city and countryside as two opposing worlds: concrete and soil, those who consume and those who produce, the places where people gather and the places they drain away from. But trace, item by item, where the vegetables on this morning's table actually came from, and that tidy dichotomy collapses fast. The tomatoes from a peri-urban grower, the rice from a rural production area, the seasonings from a factory farther still. Your plate is already a map that stitches city and countryside together.

Scholarship has grown a vocabulary for this connectedness too: urban-rural linkage, the urban-rural continuum, peri-urban. Each reframes city and countryside not as separate things but as a medium through which flows pass. UN-Habitat, the FAO and the World Bank have all issued guidance on the theme in quick succession — because the world's problems of food, environment and poverty play out precisely along this borderline.

In 2021, Cattaneo and colleagues published in PNAS a framework that sorts all the world's land into thirty types, combining the size of the nearest urban agglomeration with travel time to reach it. Called URCA (Urban-Rural Catchment Areas), it maps the countless intermediate steps that lie between city and countryside: from a metropolis's core, through its commuter belt, the peri-urban farmland, the small towns, and out to the distant village — the colours shift without ever breaking.

This view delivered a quiet shock to policy. By the World Bank's analysis, roughly a quarter of the world's population lives in the peri-urban fringe of intermediate and smaller cities. A development mindset fixated on big cities overlooks this vast middle. And there is a paradox: while living near a large city tends to reduce poverty, on the edges of mid-sized cities poverty risk actually rises. 'Where you live' means something very different depending on your position along the continuum.

Seen through an urban-farming lens, the continuum brings the role of the urban farm into relief. Rooftop gardens and allotments are devices that nudge city dwellers — until now purely consumers — just slightly toward 'making.' They may not transform a nation's food self-sufficiency, but they can be the first knot: the point where city people recover the rhythm of cultivation in their own bodies and reconnect, psychologically, with rural producers and the land.

The thickest thread between city and countryside is, of course, food — and lately the length of that thread has come under scrutiny. The food-miles metric (distance travelled times weight) makes visible how far-flung the lands are that support our tables. A global estimate published in Nature Food in 2022 put the emissions from food transport at about a fifth of the entire food system's greenhouse gases (around 3.0 gigatonnes of CO₂-equivalent). Shortening the flow of food is also a lever on the climate.

Yet 'closer is always better' is too simple. Coley and colleagues' classic 2009 study showed that if a shopper drives more than 6.7 km round trip to buy local vegetables, the emissions from that trip can exceed those of large-scale distribution. The value of local food cannot be measured in carbon alone; it must be understood as a bundle of benefits hard to quantify — freshness, trust, the local economy, the reassurance of a producer with a face.

Kansai is a valuable field where this 'food thread' has been measured. Yuji Hara and colleagues showed in Sustainability Science (2013) that for vegetables in the Osaka city region, the production-to-consumption ratio within an 80 km radius reaches roughly 70%, and could rise to about 75% if abandoned farmland were restored. The same team then compared Osaka and New York (2018), estimating how large a population locally grown vegetables could feed if a city's vacant and underused land were put to work. Beneath the metropolis lies a thicker layer of agriculture than we assume.

The attempt to reweave the food thread into something short and face-to-face actually has its origin in Japan. Around 1971, on the outskirts of Kobe, a few farmers delivered pumpkins grown without chemical fertiliser directly to a group of local housewives — the beginning of the system known as teikei. In this model producers and consumers share both price and harvest, bound by a face-to-face relationship; within a few years the Kobe group had grown to some 1,300 members.

It is this teikei that is regarded as the headwater of CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), so widely known in the West. A 2024 study in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems on 'fifty years of teikei' traced how its ten principles have shifted, drawing on Kansai cases in Iga-Nabari, Osaka and Kobe. The thread between city and countryside began not with subsidies or vast infrastructure, but with a promise between people.

A promise, though, frays unless it is handed across generations. A study of two Kansai teikei groups (in JAFSCD) depicted how, even while facing the ageing of their volunteers, they re-energise as 'diverse economies' by passing leadership to younger members. Urban-rural connection is not built once and finished; it is a living thing that demands constant reweaving.

Not only food but people themselves move between city and countryside. In Japan, the premise was long a one-way drain from village to city. The geographer Hiroshi Morikawa, writing in Human Geography (2020), sharply criticised the limits of regional-revitalisation policy that proceeds without correcting the over-concentration in Tokyo, arguing that rural decline cannot be halted unless Tokyo's functions are dispersed.

Lately, though, the flow is no longer one-way. The concept of the 'connected population' (kankei jinko) — people who are neither migrants nor mere tourists but who engage continuously with a particular place — has spread, and new forms of connection have appeared: dual-base living, workations, the Regional Revitalisation Cooperation Corps. Hyogo Prefecture actively recruits Corps members, building channels for city-born people to put down roots in the countryside.

Does such migration truly make people happier? A 2025 study in Sustainability Science, combining a nationwide survey with geospatial data, showed that 'natural capital' — farmland, green space — contributes in a statistically significant way to the quality of life of those who move from city to countryside. Initiatives that support a dual life — working in the city while living on an island, as enabled by the 2019 partnership among Kobe and three Awaji-island cities — put that finding into practice.

City and countryside clash most fiercely at the boundary itself — the peri-urban. Here farmland turns to housing and farmers are pressed to adapt to urbanisation. Zasada and colleagues' study around Copenhagen (2011) used regression analysis to show how differences in the urbanisation process shape the distribution of 'multifunctional' strategies such as leisure gardening and environmentally oriented farming. Fringe agriculture does not simply vanish; it changes shape in response to urban demand.

This fringe struggle is even more acute in the Global South. Follmann and colleagues' meta-analysis of 83 cities and 92 papers across Africa, Asia and Latin America (2021) depicted the double force at the edge of fast-growing cities: even as farmland is converted and pushed to the margins, rising food demand makes peri-urban agriculture expand and intensify. The fringe is at once a place being lost and a place rising up.

Yet the fringe's troubles also show up as the 'failure to arrive' of technology and policy. A study of smallholders in South Africa's Tshwane metropolitan area (Chitakira & Ngcobo, 2021) revealed a gap between awareness and practice: farmers feel the impacts of climate change in their bones, yet barely know the very framework — climate-smart agriculture (CSA) — designed to address them. Connecting city and countryside means delivering not only goods and people but knowledge and institutions all the way to the fringe.

Efforts are under way to bundle the individual threads into social institutions. In 2019 UN-Habitat issued the Urban-Rural Linkages: Guiding Principles (URL-GP), setting out ten principles including rights, participation and balanced partnership. The idea is that city and countryside should not be shoved into separate administrative boxes but handled in an integrated, multi-sector, multi-level way.

A food-focused framework is the City Region Food Systems (CRFS) approach promoted by the FAO and RUAF. It treats a city and its rural hinterland as a single food region, designing the flows of production, processing, distribution, consumption and waste alongside the links to livelihoods, food security, equity and sustainability. In crises such as COVID-19, a short, thick urban-rural food thread was confirmed across countries to underpin local resilience.

In Europe, frameworks such as the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and LEADER have supported rural employment and regional development within the relationship to cities. What they share is that they write the interdependence into policy as a premise: the countryside supplies the city with food, and the city supplies the countryside with markets and demand. Japan's regional revitalisation stands before the same question — how to translate that interdependence into institutional design.

Let us retie these threads in one place — Kansai. Atop Osaka Station, on the 14th-floor roof of the North Gate Building, the 'Sky Farm' grows aubergines and grapes. In Hirano Observatory Park in Kobe's Hyogo Ward, an experiment converts an under-used city park into the citizens' 'Hirano Coop Farm,' carried out through collaboration between the city and residents (Shimpo, 2022). The case quietly shows how, within a shrinking city, agriculture can become the knot that reweaves local community.

Lift your eyes from the city-side knot and you see the rural-side knot beyond. Branded produce such as Tamba-Sasayama's black soybeans and yam draws the tables and farm experiences of Osaka and Kobe residents; Awaji Island ties to the city through the food of the 'imperial larder' (miketsukuni), migration and tourism. These may look like separate initiatives, but they are in fact points arrayed along one continuous gradient.

What we who are involved with urban farms can do, first, is to notice that this continuum exists. A single rooftop bed, a balcony planter, a weekend allotment — these are not self-contained hobbies but the nearest city-side knot of a long thread reaching all the way to the countryside. When we draw on that thread consciously, a single plate becomes a small political space for reconnecting city and countryside.