The Inclusion of “Unequals:” Hotspot Network Strategy for a Metropolitan Agricultural Revolution Eluding Informality

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the effects of metropolization on territorial divisions, the dynamics of development, the ways of life at the intersection of space and society, and how territories produce resistance or explosive growth through metropolitan expansion and opportunities. We are concerned with medium-sized cities within a metropolitan context: peri-urban, interstitial metro-agro-land, widespread uncontrolled land occupation and urbanization, and the informal inhabited countryside where many people live as invisible people. The urban–rural issue is strongly related to the problem of migration. We must make agriculture attractive through agribusiness for social/political stability and agro-farming for the private sector development. This research outlines an approach capable of activating and formalizing new production processes for collaborative metropolitan development, taking advantage of the heritage and culture of local inhabitants and migrants. It proposes regenerating and accumulating local values to connect them to the socio-economic sphere in production value chains through participation and innovative value-added processes. A methodological indication for the formal and uncontrolled settlements of the city—like the shadow of Peter Pan—must work together; we understand the informal economy, and its attractors can foster the reversal of spontaneous settlements into legality, providing them with services to improve the sustainability of the city. This chapter reports a methodological approach to describe and interpret the territorial matrix, reaching the rules of the formal and informal conceptual/physical integration patterns for different contexts. Outcomes of this project seek to transition and integrate rural and urban cultures. We consequently propose a hotspot network as a pattern of urban–rural linkage settlements, including the new integration migrant communities. It works as a structurally integrated archipelago of functions and infrastructures, a unit that contributes to sustainable development. It creates and maintains multifunctional landscapes whose connection guarantees a dynamic equilibrium, capitalizing multipolar city-center proximities, advanced services, and governance structures.