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.