Full essay at: 306090 vol.8, Autonomous Urbanism, edited by Alex Duval, and Kjersti Monson [New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005], 21-30

Rural areas in the European Union’s territory are undergoing a critical shift in their fundamental functions, where agriculture is no longer playing a decisive role as part of the primary economic sector. Their weight in national economies and job markets is drastically decreasing, while their importance in preserving the landscape and cultural heritage, and as active bodies in national metropolitan development is increasing. A major share of the EU´s rural regions is bound to become less productive entities, and gradually turn themselves into broader influential contexts, breaking up even more the already decaying binomial of town-and-country. The social and cultural profiles of numerous rural areas, especially of those nearby or within metropolitan regions, are entering a suburbanization process and starting to accommodate sprawl from surrounding cities.

These shifting conditions forced the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to undertake radical changes in its directives regarding rural development, as the viability of these areas cannot depend on agriculture alone anymore. Over recent years, the EU has been turning its criteria for financing from supports to production achievements, which was already causing a certain level of unrest in the world agricultural market, towards the producers’ income directly. In 1999, the CAP changed several of its agreements to reinforce investments in supporting multi-disciplinary approaches towards rural environments, and to equalize agricultural competition within the EU. This reform became known as the ‘Agenda 2000’, and set the goals for the EU’s rural development from 2000 to 2006, by unifying the new development measures in a single framework, and forwarding decision-making responsibilities to the Member States, providing them with an unprecedented flexibility.

Less Favoured Areas and Areas Subject to Environmental Constraints

Under the ‘Agenda 2000’, Member States were offered a sort of ‘menu’ with 22 measures they could choose from to compose their own initiatives. Through this process, on September 2000, the Netherlands approved the so-called ‘Decision C2751’, which set their priority actions, being strongly based on an ‘Agenda 2000’ measure for “less favoured areas and areas subject to environmental constraints» (LFA). Such definition could be assigned to areas affected by environmental restrictions related to the maintenance and protection of threatened landscapes. And this could not be more fortunate for the Netherlands, whose artificially built landscape is crucial for keeping the increasing water-level of the North Sea and of several rivers isolated from the lower parts of the country. The landscape’s morphology is actively present in Dutch everyday life as part of an edge-relationship of potential flooding catastrophes. Not coincidentally, agriculture is the background for this protective and dangerous mechanism, stabilizing the soil and using excessive water for irrigation. Through the LFA, the Netherlands was entitled to receive compensatory investments, then, becoming embedded with concrete potentials to change the ways its ambiguous landscape evolves and maintains itself. […]

Javier F. Contreras, Gabriel N. Duarte, and Roberto Gª Caballero