| "Lifestyle" residential development in urban fringes often projects urban images of rurality onto landscapes in limbo between productive uses and suburbanization. This exurbanization is targeted by landscape protection schemes as the bow wave of "urban sprawl." In such a vision of regional geographies, consequently, exurban lifestyle development assumes a paradoxical status: it is at the same time the image of rurality aspired to from within the city, and the image of the encroaching city to defend against from the fringe. In this ambivalent role, large lot rural urbanization simultaneously encourages an aestheticized view of rurality and an anti-urbanism reified in the celebration of rural living and the valorization of nature. The interactions with environmental processes afforded to residents in the fringe can be considered both in terms of the potential for blending urban and rural land use in alternative forms of agricultural and natural resource production, and also in terms of the commodification of countryside and nature, and the co-opting of environmental aspirations associated with rural aspirations.;Keywords. urban-rural fringe, peri-urban, urban agriculture, exurbia, planning, Christchurch New Zealand.;This project addresses such tensions in the negotiation of productive fringe landscapes in Canterbury, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Using ethnographic methods of interviews, participant observation, and landscape interpretation along urban---rural transects around Christchurch, I explore small-scale residential land uses with both amenity and productive values. Collecting strong narratives of improvement about and aspiration for environmental interactivity from both residents and land managers, I found that amenity-productive land uses provided a forum for resistance against and critique of issues of human agency in the environment important in my sample, and also a sanctuary within which to withdraw from such issues. As new forms of community and environmental governance are negotiated under rubrics of "sustainability" and in the context of current struggles over neoliberalization, biculturalism, and global trade and governance, the mediation of negotiations takes on an increasingly central role. The results of this study suggest that material engagement in complex and dynamic landscape processes---especially in explicit relation to their social contexts---may provide participants increased rhetorical flexibility and ability to balance abstract overviews with material landscapes in the negotiation of fringe urbanization. |
