Changing Andean hinterlands: recent evidence from Huancayo, Peru

Over the last decades, medium-sized Peruvian mountain cities and their hinterlands are undergoing major restructuring due to population growth and—especially since the introduction of more neoliberal policies in the early 1990s—globalized economic development. Thereby, the resulting changes in land use especially affect the mountain valleys of the quechua altitudinal zone (2500–3500 m), where the different agents of urban and agricultural land change compete for the relatively scarce resources on the fertile valley floors.

Urban growth, land speculation and intensifying farmscapes

Results of a recent open-access paper on rural–urban land change in Huancayo, published in Applied Geography, show that expansion of urban settlements has mainly occurred on formerly bare soils; a fact that may indicate both land speculation and social changes, for example due to tertiarization among land owners.

Massive and unplanned urbanization between 1988 and 1998, as well as the more recent construction of planned gated residential condominiums, were accompanied by land cover changes from exclusively rain-fed cereal cropland to areas of seasonally irrigated pasture and vegetable production during 1998–2008. On the one hand, this intensification is probably a response to the decreasing amount of arable land at the quechua level. On the other hand, these tendencies may be due to the growing consumption of dairy products by an increasingly urban society (especially at the local and national level) and the global demand for specific vegetables, such as artichokes, which are locally processed and exported by the urban-based food industry.

Despite urbanization: high altitude land use expansion

Surprisingly, the results further demonstrate that rural–urban land changes on the valley floor go along with the expansion of agricultural land use at the adjoining suni region (3500–3800 m) and the subsequent puna grasslands: while the steeper slopes are increasingly reforested with high demand wood crops (Eucalyptus spp. and Pinus spp.), the high-Andean grassland ecosystem’s carpet meadows—products of range burning and livestock grazing—are clearly expanding on areas previously covered by tussock-forming ichu grasses. This is especially interesting given that experiences outside the Andes (e.g. in the Alps) report that urbanization mostly leads to the abandonment of, and shrub encroachment on, high mountain pastures in the cities’ hinterlands.

In summary, the findings underline the need to investigate the processes of urbanization in, and its impacts on, mountain regions—both in social and environmental terms. Moreover, future land change studies need to be linked with fieldwork-based research that focuses on the interactions between the agents of Andean landscape change: peasants and banks, migrants and real estate developers, or agrarian communities and governmental development initiatives—toward the hinterlands’ sustainable rural–urban development in times of global change.

Reference and further reading
Haller, A. (2012): Hypsometric variations and rural–urban land change in the Central Peruvian Andes. In: Applied Geography vol. 35, 1–2, pp. 439–447. DOI: 10.1016/j.apgeog.2012.09.009

Haller, A. & A. Borsdorf (in press): Huancayo Metropolitano. In: Cities. DOI: 10.1016/j.cities.2012.04.004

More information here on the project "Rapid urban growth in the Andes", funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [Project No. P24692] and based at the University of Innsbruck (Institute of Geography).

Guest blog by Andreas Haller
Institute of Geography
University of Innsbruck
Innrain 52f, room 60707
6020 Innsbruck, Austria