Agricultural Landscape Sustainability under Pressure: Policy Developments and Landscape Change

Agricultural landscape sustainability is affected by combinations of agricultural developments and various forms of urbanisation. This paper analyses how public policy, including spatial planning, has responded over time and affected these two drivers which intersect in various ways depending on the regional context and local conditions. Using data from recent Danish studies, the paper shows how a large proportion of farmers perceive their farm more as a living place than as a production place. Most of these farmers are hobby farmers with an urban income who have moved from an urban setting to the rural landscape. As such, these hobby farmers represent a form of urbanisation, usually termed ‘counter-urbanisation’, and they manage the landscape differently to full-time farmers, while they also affect demand for land and thus price levels. Furthermore, long-term and recent developments in public policy as responses to changing agricultural landscapes are analysed and discussed. With a focus on counter-urbanisation, the paper discusses how agricultural policies, environmental policies and spatial planning policies are poorly integrated and—when viewed together—fail to respond to the intersecting dynamics of agricultural developments and urbanisation. The paper proposes a collaborative landscape planning approach to ensure policy integration and to promote agricultural landscape sustainability.