Urban and rural are not symmetrical categories. The challenges of the hybridization processes

The role of urban agriculture in defining new opportunities for sustainable development in the Milan Urban Region imposes a reflection on what rurality is today in metropolitan areas, what the boundaries between “rural” and “urban” are, not only because the borders are often fractal and practices have a cross-scaling dimension, but also because new co-habitation spaces between different “urban” and “rural” ways of life are emerging, redefining, in the end, the concept of rurality and its relation with the urban conditions. To address these issues the paper takes into account two views, based on two different corpus of the literature: an “urban-centric” point of view, fosusses on the transformation processes of the contemporary cities, in term of “urban regionalization processes” (Soja, 2011) and an alternative approach, consolidated in multi-year reflections (Whitehand, 1988; Gant et al., 2011) about the forms of hybridization between urban and rural, and the features of the urban agriculture and food planning in rethinking the settlement patterns and the functional specialization in metropolitan areas.