Peri-urban agriculture as quiet sustainability: Challenging the urban development discourse in Sogamoso, Colombia

This article advances academic and policy debates on peri-urban agriculture (PUA) by examining the phenomenon in the city of Sogamoso, Colombia. Planners, developers, and local authorities in Sogamoso have explicitly framed PUA as a barrier to development: a backwards, localized, low-tech and economically poorly performing activity that needs to make space for a more ‘productive’ ‘modern’ economy. Based on a survey of 160 peri-urban farming and gardening households, this study identifies PUA forms of food self-provisioning and exchange (FSPE) and further characterizes the practice’s social embeddedness, barriers, and opportunities as perceived by peri-urban farmers. The article combines scholarship on PUA and ‘quiet sustainability’ (Smith and Jehlička, 2013) to propose a novel perspective that could help transform the terms of discourse on the role and future of PUA in urban sustainable development from arguments founded in productivity metrics to the appreciation of FSPE as an environmentally sustainable practice that strengthens the social fabric of local communities, thus contributing to their sense of purpose, meaning, and resilience. This study has implications not only for Sogamoso, but also for many other cities in Latin America and the Global South, where the role of PUA in relation to sustainable urban development is being actively contested. •This study expands both the literature on peri-urban agriculture and that on quiet sustainability.•Peri-urban agriculture occurs as market-oriented production, but also as ‘normal’ food self-provisioning and exchange.•Urban development policies need to consider a diversity of peri-urban agriculture forms.•Food self-provisioning and exchange strengthen local communities’ social fabric, sense of purpose, meaning and resilience.•Quiet sustainability helps to advocate for the positive role of peri-urban agriculture in urban sustainable development.