Farming a dry city — Southern Europe has held its farmland without owning it

When we lump the cities of the Mediterranean together as 'Southern Europe', what we usually have in mind is scenery: dry light, stone streets, pots on a terrace. But if the frame is to be used for a subject like urban farming, it is more accurate to enter through constraint rather than scenery. What these cities share is less the Mediterranean climate type itself than the two severities it produces — that it does not rain in summer, and that demand for water from tourism and from agriculture peaks in the same season. Between them, those two settle what kind of farming can exist at a city's edge, and they settle it before any institution gets a say.

Entering through constraint brings a second thing into view: the peculiar way Southern European cities have handled farmland. Accounts of urban farming in northern and central Europe often centre on the plot — the small garden allotted to one person. What the cities of the south have staked most on is not the plot but the farmland itself on the city's outer edge, and a means of holding all of it still at once. That is the subject of this article: the agricultural park. Areas running from thousands to tens of thousands of hectares are kept as farmland not by the authorities buying them, but by planning and designation. This is the substance behind the phrase 'circulating land by use rather than ownership'.

This article opens a short three-day series. Tomorrow we visit Italy and the day after Spain, but before that it is worth drawing the two lines that run under both. The first is water: where the threshold of stress actually lies, and which figures let you see the thirst at all. The second is ownership: what 'holding land without buying it' means as a procedure, and what it does and does not resolve. One disclosure first. This series was planned as seven days across six countries. It has been compressed to three in order to correct how the publishing week is set, and the instalments on Portugal, Greece, Croatia and Slovenia have been moved to a later slot. There are countries we will not reach, and it is better to say so at the start.

Discussions of urban farming usually begin with land: is there a vacant lot, can the rent be paid, how long is the lease. In Southern Europe the question of water comes first. According to the European Environment Agency's water scarcity indicator, water scarcity conditions — lasting at least one quarter of the year — covered 28% of EU land area and 32% of its population in 2023. The agency further reports that scarcity is prevalent all year round in southern Europe, with around 30% of the population in areas of permanent water stress and up to 70% in areas of seasonal summer stress. Farmland secured at a city's edge exists only on paper if the irrigation water does not arrive in July and August.

A caution is needed here. Read through national averages, the claim that 'Southern Europe is dry' can come out backwards. The standard measure, the water exploitation index plus (WEI+), expresses consumption as a share of renewable freshwater resources, computed by river basin and by quarter; above 20% is taken as stress and 40% or more as severe. Yet the country-level values Eurostat reports for 2022 are 13.8% for Greece, 10.1% for Portugal and 8.8% for Spain — all under 20%. The EU as a whole stands at 5.8%. What stands out instead is Cyprus at 71.0% and Malta at 34.1%, which are the particular case of small islands. A national average smooths away a thirst that lives in basins and in seasons.

The design of the WEI+ indicator itself tells you the shape of Southern Europe's problem. It is computed by river basin rather than by country, and by quarter rather than by year, because scarcity is uneven in space and in time alike. A basin that has enough when averaged across the year runs dry in July. A country with room to spare overall has one delta or one island above 40%. It is for the same reason that the EEA counts area and population under the condition 'during at least one quarter of the year'. Stress appears as a season rather than as a standing state, and counting only the standing state misses it.

That said, the indicator has a gap worth stating plainly. When Eurostat published country-level WEI+ values for 2022, the figure for Italy was 'not available'. One of Southern Europe's central agricultural countries is missing from the picture the numbers draw. That is why this series will not describe Italy's water stress, when we come to it tomorrow, through a single national figure. An absent number does not mean an absent problem. Given the arguments of recent years over irrigation in the Po valley the truth is likely the reverse — but here we will not write past what could be checked.

There are figures from another angle. In the EEA's 2025 stocktake of Europe's environment, water stress in 2022 is put at about 30% of land and about 34% of the population, with the impacts concentrated particularly in southern Europe and in densely populated areas. Set beside the 28% and 32% recorded for 2023, this gives a sense of the year-to-year swing. The same stocktake states that the agriculture, water supply and energy sectors could each save 10 to 40% of their water through better governance, technology and public awareness. The width of that range says something: thirst is a natural phenomenon and a question of allocation at the same time.

Total freshwater abstraction across the EU has genuinely fallen over the past quarter century. On the EEA's abstraction indicator, the average for 2000–2009 was 224,000 million cubic metres against 192,600 million for 2020–2023 — a fall of 14%. The main cause of that fall, however, was not agriculture but the decline in cooling water for power generation. Broken down by sector, agriculture accounts for 31% of abstraction in 2020–2023, and that share is heavily weighted towards irrigation. Read only the line saying the total went down and it looks as though the pressure has eased. It has not.

Over the same period, groundwater abstraction by agriculture rose from 11,000 to 16,500 million cubic metres — an increase of 52%. The EEA attributes the rise to growing demand in southern, western and eastern Europe, and notes that surface water abstraction moved the other way, falling 13%. Read plainly, this says that as surface water became seasonally unreliable, farming reached downwards instead. It is not that greater thirst produced less use; it is that greater thirst pushed the source deeper. Groundwater, being less sensitive to a given year's rainfall, is also the resource where overuse is noticed late.

This makes it hard to file urban farming under 'good for the environment' without qualification. To hold farmland at a city's edge is also to hold irrigation demand there. The water used by a single allotment plot is negligible; several thousand hectares of agricultural park is another matter. Both of the parks examined below sit on a river delta or a plain — precisely the places where irrigation and municipal water demand compete. When we appraise an institution for holding land, the water account cannot be kept on a separate page. That is the first reservation this article wants to put down.

An agricultural park — parco agricolo, parc agrari — is a rather different thing from what the word 'park' suggests. It is not green space for strolling. It is a planning framework for fixing land as farmland, on the premise that commercial farming continues there. What sits at its centre is not a transfer of ownership. Instead of the authorities buying the land, a boundary is drawn around an area, a special plan restricts its use to agriculture, and development inside the boundary is limited. The land stays in the farmers' hands and the farmers go on farming it. What changes is that the route by which that land becomes housing or a logistics shed is closed administratively.

Why did this form develop in the south? No single decisive reason can be isolated, but the conditions line up. First, the edges of Mediterranean cities abut plains and deltas that irrigation has kept highly productive for a very long time. Second, the urban expansion and demand for logistics land of the later twentieth century aimed at exactly those plains. Third, municipalities have no fiscal capacity to buy several thousand hectares. Under the condition of not being able to buy and not wanting to lose, what remains is planning rather than ownership. Designating a use costs nothing in land price. What it costs is the agreement that draws the boundary, and the administrative stamina to keep it there.

The weakness of the technique arises in the same place. Since the authority does not own the land, it can protect the farmland only for as long as it can hold the line. Lines are drawn by law and ordinance, and laws and ordinances are amended. And from the farmer's side, one is left holding land that cannot be developed while having to make a living from farming alone. Whether an agricultural park lasts is settled not at the moment the boundary is drawn but by how much support for farming and access to markets is stacked on afterwards. The two cases in the next section also show the difference in that stacking.

The Parco Agricolo Sud Milano was created by Lombardy's Regional Law No. 24 of 23 April 1990. Its area is about 46,300 hectares — some sources give 47,000 — sweeping in an arc from south to south-east of the city and crossing the territory of roughly sixty municipalities. More than 1,400 farm businesses operate inside it. It was long administered by Milan's provincial and then metropolitan authority, and on 23 September 2025 that administration passed to a newly established public body. It is an instance of a city holding tens of thousands of hectares of farmland for thirty-five years without buying any of it.

The Parc Agrari del Baix Llobregat began in 1998 as a consortium of fourteen municipalities. A distinctive feature is that its area is counted twice over: the total is 3,473.26 hectares, while the area actually delimited by its special plan, the Pla especial, is 2,938 hectares. Of that, some 1,969 hectares are utilised agricultural area. There are around 621 holdings, small at an average of 2.7 hectares, supplying vegetables to the Barcelona metropolitan area. The special plan was approved in 2004 and revised in 2015.

Set side by side, the two show the same idea implemented differently. Milan enclosed a vast area at a stroke through a higher instrument, a regional law, which gave the area its character as a park by statute. Barcelona built an organisation from below, a consortium of municipalities, and then used the tool of a special plan to delimit the area, revising it a decade or so later. The scale differs by nearly a factor of fifteen, and so does the average size of a holding. What they share is that neither authority bought the land, and that neither institution survives unless the plan is kept up to date after the boundary is drawn. Baix Llobregat's twin figures — 3,473.26 hectares and 2,938 — are themselves a trace of that updating.

Tomorrow's second instalment takes up Italy: the institutionalisation of the orti urbani, the protection of peri-urban farmland, and the municipal tradition of allotting plots to older residents. We will follow how the line this article has drawn — holding land without owning it — looks once it descends from the scale of tens of thousands of hectares to the scale of a plot of a few dozen square metres. The third instalment is Spain: the networks of huertos urbanos, the municipal schemes of Barcelona and Madrid, and irrigation and the allocation of water in a dry land. It also closes this short series, and it is there that the two lines, water and ownership, will be tied together.

It is worth recording what these days will not reach. The series was planned as seven days across six countries, including Portugal, Greece, Croatia and Slovenia. Compressing it to three in order to correct the publishing week has sent four countries' worth of design to a later slot. Lisbon's horticultural parks and the municipal gardens of Greece during its fiscal crisis are, properly speaking, indispensable to a picture of this region. In addition, the municipal websites of these countries could not be reached from the environment in which this article was written, so primary verification was confined to the European Environment Agency, Eurostat and encyclopaedic sources. The figures here are therefore restricted to EU-wide statistics and the basic data of the two agricultural parks. What could not be checked is indicated by not being written.

Let us set down again, in order, the path this article took. First we rebuilt the frame called 'Southern Europe' out of constraint rather than scenery: what these cities share is not Mediterranean light but the fact that it does not rain in summer and that tourism and agriculture want water in the same season. Then we checked that constraint against figures. The European Environment Agency's water scarcity indicator puts the extent of water scarcity conditions in 2023 at 28% of EU land area and 32% of its population, and reports that in southern Europe around 30% of people live under permanent water stress and up to 70% under seasonal summer stress. Next we showed, through Eurostat's WEI+ for 2022, that this thirst is invisible in national averages: Greece 13.8%, Portugal 10.1%, Spain 8.8% — every one below the 20% taken as the threshold of stress. We then followed where the water goes, establishing that EU freshwater abstraction fell 14% while agricultural groundwater abstraction rose 52%, and finally opened up the instrument called the agricultural park through the two cases of Milan and Barcelona.

Let us name the three most important points again. First, thirst lives in basins and seasons, not in countries. That WEI+ is computed by basin and by quarter is no accident: computed otherwise, a basin that runs dry in July vanishes inside an annual average. The distance between the EU-wide value of 5.8% and Cyprus at 71.0% or Malta at 34.1% shows plainly what the operation of averaging throws away. Second, farming's demand for water has not eased. In the same period in which total abstraction fell 14%, from 224,000 million cubic metres on average in 2000–2009 to 192,600 million in 2020–2023, agricultural groundwater abstraction rose 52%, from 11,000 to 16,500 million cubic metres, while surface water abstraction fell 13%. The source went deeper; the demand did not disappear. Third, what is distinctive about Southern Europe is the agricultural park, not the allotment: about 46,300 hectares under Lombardy's Regional Law 24 of 23 April 1990, and 3,473.26 hectares under a consortium founded in 1998. The scale and the procedure differ, but in neither case did the authorities buy the land.

What we do not know, and what should be held in reserve, also belongs here. First, Eurostat's WEI+ for 2022 has no value for Italy. That hole — drawing a picture of the region with one of its central agricultural countries missing — will not be filled by tomorrow's article either. Second, whether the agricultural parks actually went on protecting farmland: that an area was maintained and that farming there worked as a business are separate questions. This article has verified that Milan's park contains more than 1,400 farm businesses and that Baix Llobregat has some 621 holdings averaging 2.7 hectares, but not their profitability or their prospects for succession. The obvious counter-argument is equally clear: does fixing thousands or tens of thousands of hectares at a city's edge squeeze the housing supply and push land prices up? This article does not answer that. And because primary municipal sources could not be reached from where it was written, the schemes of Lisbon and Madrid could not be treated with figures attached. The regional picture is holed to that extent.

This article's place in the series comes down to drawing two lines. Water: which figures let you see the thirst at all. Ownership: what holding land without buying it means as a procedure, and what it does and does not resolve. Tomorrow's second instalment moves to Italy and descends from the scale of the Parco Agricolo Sud Milano, tens of thousands of hectares, to the scale of a single allotment of a few dozen square metres. The municipal tradition of allotting plots to older residents implements the same principle — using without owning — at an entirely different magnification. In the third instalment, on Spain, we will look at the place where those two magnifications run into the same problem: the allocation of water. Three days is a short series, but with these two lines in hand, the later instalments on Portugal or Greece, whenever they come, should be readable with the same tools.