Submitted by laborate on Fri, 22/02/2013 - 19:13 GMT.
Last Friday 15th of February at 19:00 h civil servants of
the Provincial Council and members of local NGOs, the Rural
Development Group of Lugo, students and researchers of the
University of Santiago de Compostela and other organizations
and individuals who were interested, attended a seminar at
the Interpretation Centre of the Biosphere Reserve Terras do Miño
which was organized by students of the Master in Sustainable Land Planning
(MTT) of the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC).
The event was aimed at disseminating the results which were
obtained in an international workshop on local food systems
that took place from the 22nd to the 27th of October, where
the students of the MTT participated with students of the
Dutch university of Van Hall Larenstein.
During the event, the students made two presentations:
the first one
was oriented to introduce local food systems and their importance
by the time of facing the challenges related to food safety
and sovereignty that nowadays socioeconomic situation imposes.
In the second one
the students showed the results of their works with the
Dutch students in the international workshop. These results
were based on four scenarios for the city of Lugo.
Both presentations were accompanied by a series of group
dynamics, oriented to encourage the audience to reflect
on the concepts and ideas which were exposed and on how
these concepts could be used increase the sustainability
of Lugo city and its surroundings.
The dynamics started with a formulation of wishes from the
attendants on how they would like the future of Lugo to be.
These wishes were grouped around 5 main ideas:
- A greener Lugo
- A Lugo with a higher life quality
- A Lugo where agriculture and land uses are more integrated
- A Lugo with a higher food sovereignty
- A more sustainable Lugo
Later, some strategies were proposed to obtain theses five
objectives, taking a s a basis local food systems. The attendants
assessed these strategies upon their feasibility on the
short (1) medium (2) and long (3) term. The strategies which
received most of the votes where:
- (1) Foster Praza de Abastos market
- (1) Use organic waste to make compost
- (2) Create new vegetable gardens inside the urban core (including the area inside the wall), create selling points next to the vegetable gardens with flexible timetables
- (2) Make awareness rising campaigns in schools
- (3) Increase institutional support to urban agriculture by making planning modifications which allow locating new vegetable gardens in unused land
- (3) Recover local ecologic traditional agriculture and make training campaings so that everybody will be able to grow their own food
Finally, these strategies were used so that attendants could
produce a vision for the future of Lugo. To this end, four
groups were made which plotted their ideas on a map of the city.
The four plans foresaw to increase the greenbelt of Lugo
and to create green areas with vegetable gardens inside
the city. The vegetable gardens would be accompanied by
areas to trade and exchange the food that was produced in
them, as well as by a composting network with a series of
processing points located in areas with a higher production
of organic waste (near shopping centres and large green areas).
Furthermore, it was proposed to modify the public transport
network to better connect urban and rural areas. In addition,
it was proposed to create a bicycle lane network which would
integrate and communicate the vegetable gardens and green
areas with the rest of the city. It was also proposed in
one of the groups to plant fruit trees in parks and gardens
so that people could take advantage of their yields.
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