Milan's agricultural districts: food landscape laboratories?

The standardization of metropolitan landscapes generated by mechanization and agricultural simplification in the past sixty years has broken the link between landscape and food. Reconnecting with the diversity of landscapes allows, as the Milanese example shows, to reconcile product quality, the principle of proximity and food safety. Thirteen years after the establishment of the first agricultural districts promoted by the Lombardy region, this contribution highlights the results in terms of short supply chains, collective catering, environmental services and in particular initiatives for the recovery, enhancement and communication of the landscape as an heritage. We investigated five districts: Dam (Milan agricultural district), Dinamo (3-waters district), Davo (river Olona district), Rice and Frogs rice district and Dama (Martesana channel district). How have they transformed the landscape? How has an intangible network of supply chain had visible effects? What are the visible effects? The districts, through the catalysing action of individual farmer initiatives, have offered greater visibility and recognition to the educational and cultural role of agriculture vis-à-vis the city, promoting a model of healthy and sustainable development. The coordinated and aggregating action of the districts was and is in this sense fundamental to overcome the often individualistic way in which farms work. The districts have been able to carry out various actions to ensure the management and improvement of the landscape from an environmental point of view, such as hedges and trees planting, canal banks re-naturalisation and lamination basins management, collaborating with municipalities and park authorities. They have promoted numerous cultural initiatives, committing themselves to cooperatively managing the built rural heritage, such as mills, and keeping the intangible heritage alive through the recovery of 'agricultural' traditions, such as the rice-harvesting festival, as well as promoting gastronomic events, such as the Rice and Frogs festival. In this sense, the branding of local identity linked to the landscape is the way to recognise the quality of the landscape itself, focusing not only on the uniqueness of the productions (DNA-certified rice), but on the management of a landscape with a high environmental quality and a strong social role. The Milan agrarian landscape, although apparently much altered, conserve many permanencies of historical landscape structures: some traditional agricultural practices have been recovered as they provide a high environmental quality (especially in terms of biodiversity and water management) and offer job to social categories in difficulty (re-employment, physical and mental disabilities, rehabilitation of former drug addicts and prisoners).