Horizontal and Vertical Agriculture in Rural and Urban Areas: Scenarios, Contradictions and Impacts. The aim of this
work is to describe the current crisis facing the globalized conventional agriculture tightened in the grip of the so-called
agricultural squeeze, which compresses farmer income. This paper, after studying problems of globalized agriculture in rural
areas, called horizontal agriculture, attempts to highlight the role of the same type of agriculture in urban areas. Urban
agriculture, which works also in peri-urban areas, in the towns is a real alternative to conventional agriculture at least for
horticultural, small fruits and animals breeding such as poultry. The paper aims also to identify the challenges and opportunities
of both urban horizontal and vertical agriculture in order to outline three future scenarios: Scenario I - conventional horizontal
agriculture of commodities in rural area and urban vertical agriculture in urban areas (agro-technocratic model); Scenario II
- Organic horizontal farming and urban horizontal agriculture (traditional agriculture model); Scenario III - coexistence of
scenarios I and II in the landscape and cultural mosaic(predominance of one model or merge between the two models). The aim
is to verify the alternative hypotheses of the dominance of one of the two basic scenarios against the convergence towards the third
scenario, characterized by larger attention to population welfare and environmental protection.
