CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Jónász, Gerda |
|---|---|
| Title | Keeping the Huerta alive: social landscape creation through an alternative economic space established by agro-entrepreneurs |
| Summary | This dissertation explores how just a few dozen small-scale agro-entrepreneurial initiatives managed to revive the contemporary representation of the rapidly disappearing, degrading and abandoned periurban fields of the Metropolitan Area of Valencia. These initiatives became widely recognized for being able to provide viable alternatives to the classic cultivation models that used to characterize these fields, the Huerta de Valencia. The Huerta has always been a “site, medium and outcome of historically specific relations of social power” (Brenner 2009: 198). It has always played an important role in the self-definition of the Valencian regional identity. However, since the 1960’s the growth of the metropolitan area accelerated and devoured over half of the historical territory of the Huerta. Meanwhile the socio-economic viability of the remaining fields also got compromised as with such a highly fragmented land-structure they were unable to compete on an increasingly globalized food market. At the same time a strong civil movement developed for the protection of these fields. It developed a massive amount of mostly defensive discourses and most typically organized around fighting specific territorial aggressions. These agro-entrepreneurial initiatives developed cultivation and distribution models that could adapt well to the contemporary challenges present in the Huerta. They were able to address well the concerns that derived from their embeddedness, which were originally voiced by the movement for the protection of the Huerta. They also proved to have the ability to mobilize the social capital that derived from it. As the movement apparently embraced these initiatives, they are recognized as the most recent milestone in the evolution of the movement. Their proactive efforts created a strong sense of place around the Huerta. The alternative economic space developed around these initiatives assumed the challenge to keep these ‘fields alive’. Despite their marginality, soon they took over the lead both in the material and the dialectical (re)construction of these fields (Rose, 2002; Wylie, 2007). A qualitative, exploratory case study research was conducted under a constructivist grounded theory methodology. It aimed to identify the main discourse themes, patterns and categories of meaning in the discourses that characterized the alternative economic space that developed around these initiatives. |
| Supervisor | Steger, Tamara |
| Department | Environment Sciences and Policy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/jonasz_gerda.pdf |
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