Abstract
Under the influence of concentrated and extended urbanization, Andean cities and the different altitudinal zones of their “hinterlands” are experiencing profound changes in land cover — from the central plazas up to the highest peaks. The complex regional-geographic characteristics of these socioecological systems, such as the vertical complementarity of land use, require a montological perspective on verticality and urbanization: it transcends disciplinary approaches and can be crucial to properly interpret the trajectories of land cover change and formulate hypotheses for future practice-oriented research. Which trajectories of land cover change characterized altitudinal zones of Andean cities and their surroundings over the last three decades? Are there similarities that allow for the formulation of more general hypotheses? Using the Peruvian cases of Cusco and Huaraz, and combining a traditional altitudinal zonation model of land use in Peru with direct field observations and GIS-based analyses of remotely sensed data from 1991, 2001, 2011, and 2021, this study identifies the main trajectories of land cover change in the Quechua (>2300–3500 m), Suni (>3500–4000 m), and Puna (>4000–4800 m) regions — and finds insightful similarities between Cusco and Huaraz: (1) an impressive area of built-up land substitutes grassland in the Quechua, which, following regional altitudinal zonation models, is characterized by irrigated and rain-fed cropland; (2) an unexpected expansion of irrigated cropland takes place in the Suni, which, in theory, often lacks irrigation infrastructure and is mostly used for rain-fed tuber cultivation; and (3) a clear change from “other land” to grassland occurs in the Puna — where grassland is thought to predominate, anyway, since pre-Hispanic times. Hypothesizing that these changes reflect the interplay between speculative fallow, agricultural intensification, and ecological restoration, the results can be read as vertically complementary, local manifestations of concentrated and extended urbanization in a formerly peripheral mountain region of the Global South — and they underscore the need to overcome mental city-mountain dichotomies for a socially inclusive and ecologically balanced Andean development between plaza and peak.
Article PDF
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
Data availability statement: Data will be provided by the corresponding author upon request.
References
Alcántara Ayala I, Cui P, Pasuto A (2022) Disaster risk reduction in mountain areas: a research overview. J Mt Sci 19: 1487–1494. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-022-7487-2
Amini S, Saber M, Rabiei-Dastjerdi H, Homayouni S (2022) Urban land use and land cover change analysis using random forest classification of Landsat time series. Remote Sens 14(11): 2654. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14112654
Angelo H, Wachsmuth D (2015) Urbanizing urban political ecology: A critique of methodological cityism. Int J Urban Reg Res 39(1): 16–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12105
Bart, F (2016) Moshi (Kilimanjaro, Tanzania): The urban dynamics of a rural region. In: Bart F, Nakileza BR, Racaud S, Charlery de la Masselière B (eds.), Rural-Urban Dynamics in the East African Mountains. Nairobi: Africae. pp 47–65. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.africae.1048
Birx HJ (ed.) (2006) Encyclopedia of Anthropology 1. Thousand Oaks: Sage. p 2373. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412952453
Borsdorf A (2018) Regional geography abolished? The importance of regional geography in the German-language speaking region before and 50 years after Kiel, with particular reference to geographical Latin American studie. Lecture on the occasion of the 80th birthday of Christoph Stadel. Mitt Osterr Geogr Ges 160: 351–359. (In German). https://doi.org/10.1553/moegg160s351
Borsdorf A, Haller A (2020) Urban montology: mountain cities as transdisciplinary research focus. In: Sarmiento FO, Frolich L (eds.), The Elgar Companion to Geography, Transdisciplinarity and Sustainability. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. pp 140–154. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781786430106.00016
Borsdorf A, Stadel C (2015) The Andes: A Geographical Portrait. Berlin: Springer. p 368. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03530-7
Branca D, Haller A (2021a) Cusco: Profile of an Andean city. Cities 113: 103169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2021.103169
Branca D, Haller A (2021b) Urbanization, touristification and verticality in the Andes: A profile of Huaraz, Peru. Sustainability 13(11): 6438. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13116438
Brenner N, Schmid C (2014) The ‘Urban Age’ in question. Int J Urban Reg Res 38(3): 731–755. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12115
Brenner N, Schmid C (2015) Towards a new epistemology of the urban? City 19(2–3): 151–182. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2015.1014712
Brush SB (1976) Man’s use of an Andean ecosystem. Hum Ecol 4: 147–166. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01531218
Buytaert W, De Bièvre B (2012) Water for cities: The impact of climate change and demographic growth in the tropical Andes. Water Resour Res 48(8). https://doi.org/10.1029/2011WR011755
Castriota R, Tonucci J (2018) Extended urbanization in and from Brazil. Environ Plan D 36(3): 512–528. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818775426
Chakrabarty, D (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Christmann T, Oliveras Menor I (2021) A synthesis and future research directions for tropical mountain ecosystem restoration. Sci Rep 11: 23948. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-03205-y
Congalton RG (1991) A review of assessing the accuracy of classifications of remotely sensed data. Remote Sens Environ 37(1): 35–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/0034-4257(91)90048-B
Congedo L (2021) Semi-Automatic Classification Plugin: A Python tool for the download and processing of remote sensing images in QGIS. J Open Source Softw 6(64): 3172. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.03172
Dematteis G (2012) On repositioning geography as knowledge of the possible. Riv Geogr Ital 119: 85–100. (In Italian).
Donoso ME, Sarmiento FO (2021) Changing mountain farmscapes: Vulnerability and migration drivers in the Paute River watershed, Southern Ecuador. J Mt Sci 18: 1902–1919. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-020-6127-y
Fioravanti-Molinié A (1981) Current variations on an old Andean theme: The vertical ideal. Études Rurales 81–82: 89–107. (In French). https://doi.org/10.3406/rural.1981.2654
Forman SH (1978) The future of value of the verticality concept: Implications and possible applications in the Andes. In: Société des américanistes (eds.), Actes du XLIIe Congrès International des Américanistes. Paris: Fondation Singer-Polignac. pp 234–256.
Gade DW (2011) Curiosity, Inquiry, and the Geographical Imagination. New York: Peter Lang. p 307. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-1-4539-0789-4
Ghosh S, Meer G (2021) Extended urbanisation and the agrarian question: Convergences, divergences and openings. Urban Stud 58(6): 1097–1119. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098020943758
Gondwe JF, Lin S, Munthali RM (2021) Analysis of land use and land cover changes in urban areas using remote sensing: Case of Blantyre City. Discrete Dyn Nat Soc 25: 8011565. https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/8011565
Grět-Regamey A, Brunner SH, Kienast F (2012) Mountain ecosystem services: Who cares? Mt Res Dev 32: S23–S34. https://doi.org/10.1659/MRD-JOURNAL-D-10-00115.S1
Guillet D (1986) Toward a cultural ecology of mountains: The Central Andes and the Himalaya compared. Mt Res Dev 6(3): 206–214. https://doi.org/10.2307/3673389
Haller A (2012) Vivid valleys, pallid peaks? Hypsometric variations and rural-urban land change in the Central Peruvian Andes. Appl Geogr 35(1–2): 439–447. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2012.09.009
Haller A, Branca D (2020) Montology: A mountain perspective on transdisciplinary research and sustainable development. Rev Investig Altoandin 22(4): 313–322. (In Spanish). https://doi.org/10.18271/ria.2020.193
Haller A, Branca D (2022a) Urbanization and the verticality of rural-urban linkages in mountains. In: Sarmiento FO (ed.), Montology Palimpsest. A Primer of Mountain Geographies. Berlin: Springer. pp 133–148. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13298-8_8
Haller A, Branca D (2022b) More than landscape: Toward cosmophanic diversity in environmental planning and governance. Soc Nat Resour 35(10): 1123–1133. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2022.2105461
Hartke W (1956) The “Social Fallow” as an index of the geographical differentiation of the landscape. Erdkunde 10(4): 257–269. (In German). https://doi.org/10.3112/erdkunde.1956.04.01
Harvey D (2003) The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p 253.
Hassan Z, Shabbir R, Ahmad SS, et al. (2016) Dynamics of land use and land cover change (LULCC) using geospatial techniques: a case study of Islamabad Pakistan. SpringerPlus 5: 812. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40064-016-2414-z
Huang G (2021) Theory of Mountainurbanology. Berlin: Springer. p 269. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0819-3
Instituto Geofisico del Peru (2009a) The Climate in Peru: Cuzco. (In Spanish). http://web.archive.org/web/20200128175804/http://www.met.igp.gob.pe/clima/HTML/cuzco.html (Accessed on 27 September 2023)
Instituto Geofisico del Peru (2009b) The Cimate in Peru: Anta. (In Spanish). https://web.archive.org/web/20200619202811/http://met.igp.gob.pe/clima/HTML/anta.html (Accessed on 27 September 2023)
Instituto Nacional de Estadistica e Informática (1994) III National Agricultural Census 1994. Lima: INEI. (In Spanish).
Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática (2012) III National Agricultural Census 2012. Lima: INEI. (In Spanish).
Kapos V, Rhind J, Edwards M, et al. (2000) Developing a map of the world’s mountain forests. In: Price MF, Butt N (eds.), Forests in Sustainable Mountain Development. IUFRO Research Series 5. Wallingford: CABI Publishing. pp 4–9. https://doi.org/10.1079/9780851994468.0000
Keys E, McConnell WJ (2005) Global change and the intensification of agriculture in the tropics. Glob Environ Change 15(4): 320–337. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2005.04.004
Kingman E, Bretón V (2017) The arbitrary and diffuse borders between the urban-modern and the rural-traditional in the Andes. J Lat Am Caribb Anthropol 22(2): 235–253. (In Spanish). https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12216
Krause M (2013) The ruralization of the world. Public Cult 25(2): 233–248. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2020575
Larkham P (2018) The importance of observation: Urban morphology in the field. In: Oliveira V (ed.), Teaching Urban Morphology. Cham: Springer. pp 265–279. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76126-8_15
Lautensach H (1952) The variation of geographic forms. Studies on landscape systematics. Bonn: Ferdinand Dümmlers Verlag. p 191. (In German).
Li P, Shi C, Li Z, et al. (2013) Evaluation of ASTER GDEM using GPS benchmarks and SRTM in China. Int J Remote Sens 34(5): 1744–1771. https://doi.org/10.1080/01431161.2012.726752
Li S, Li X (2017) Global understanding of farmland abandonment: A review and prospects. J Geogr Sci 27: 1123–1150. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11442-017-1426-0
Maharjan A, Kochhar I, Chitale VS, et al. (2020) Understanding rural outmigration and agricultural land use change in the Gandaki Basin, Nepal. Appl Geogr 124: 102278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2020.102278
Mell IC, Sturzaker J (2014) Sustainable urban development in tightly constrained areas: A case study of Darjeeling, India. Int J Urban Sust Dev 6(1):65–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/19463138.2014.883994
Ministerio de Comercio Exterior y Turismo (2021) Ancash: Visitor arrivals to Huascarán National Park, January 2015–December 2021. Lima: MINCETUR. (In Spanish). https://web.archive.org/web/20230412094026/https://cdn.www.gob.pe/uploads/document/file/2863485/Compendio_Cifras_Turismo_ENERO-2022.pdf
Monte-Mór R (1994) Extensive urbanization and logics of settlement: An environmental perspective. In: Santos M, Souza M, Silveira M (eds.), Territory, Globalization, and Fragmentation. Sâo Paulo: Hucitec Editora. pp 169–181. (In Portuguese).
Monte-Mór R, Castriota R (2018) Extended urbanization: Implications for urban and regional theory. In: Paasi P, Harrison J, Jones M (eds.), Handbook on the Geographies of Regions and Territories. Cheltenham: Edward Edgar. pp 332–345. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781785365805.00038
Murra JV (1975) Economic and Political Formations of the Andean World. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. p 339. (In Spanish).
Observatorio Turístico del Perú (2020) Entrances to Machu Picchu: nationals and foreigners 1980–2019. Lima: USMP. (In Spanish). http://web.archive.org/web/20200303181358/http://www.observatorioturisticodelperu.com/mapas/impne.pdf
Oficina Nacional de Evaluación de Recursos Naturales (1981) Map of major land use capacity in Peru. Lima: ONERN. (In Spanish).
Ottosen TB, Petch G, Hanson M, Skjøth CA (2020) Tree cover mapping based on Sentinel-2 images demonstrate high thematic accuracy in Europe. Int J Appl Earth Obs Geoinf 84: 101947. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jag.2019.101947
Perlik M (2019) The Spatial and Economic Transformation of Mountain Regions. Landscapes as Commodities. London: Routledge. p 278. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315768366
Pontius RG, Millones M (2011) Death to Kappa: birth of quantity disagreement and allocation disagreement for accuracy assessment. Int J Remote Sens 32(15): 4407–4429. https://doi.org/10.1080/01431161.2011.552923
Potere D (2008) Horizontal positional accuracy of Google Earth’s high-resolution imagery archive. Sensors 8(12): 7973–7981. https://doi.org/10.3390/s8127973
Price MF, Arnesen T, Gløersen E, Metzger MJ (2019) Mapping mountain areas: Learning from global, European and Norwegian perspectives. J Mt Sci 16: 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-018-4916-3
Pulgar Vidal J (1996) Geography of Peru. The Eight Natural Regions, Transversal Regionalization, Traditional Ecological Wisdom. Lima: Peisa. p 302. (In Spanish).
Reinhard J, Ceruti MC (2010) Inca Rituals and Sacred Mountains: A Study of the World’s Highest Archaeological Sites. Berkeley: University of California Press. p 264.
Ruddick S, Peake L, Tanyildiz GS, Patrick D (2018) Planetary urbanization: An urban theory for our time? Environ Plan D 36(3): 387–404. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775817721489
Rolando JL, Turin C, Ramirez DA, et al. (2017) Key ecosystem services and ecological intensification of agriculture in the tropical high-Andean Puna as affected by land-use and climate changes. Agric Ecosyst Environ 236: 221–236. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2016.12.010
Sarmiento FO (2008) Andes mountains and human dimensions of global change, an overview. Pirineos 163: 7–13. https://doi.org/10.3989/pirineos.2008.v163.18
Sarmiento FO (2020) Montology manifesto: Echoes towards a transdisciplinary science of mountains. J Mt Sci 17: 2512–2527. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-019-5536-2
Sarmiento FO, Sarmiento EV (eds.) (2021) Andean Flanks: Paleoecology, Critical Biogeography and Political Ecology of the Changing Climates of Neotropical Mountain Forests. Chachapoyas: UNTRM. p 202. (In Spanish). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4961560
Sarmiento FO (ed.) (2022) Montology Palimpsest: A Primer of Mountain Geographies. Cham: Springer. p 506. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13298-8
Sarmiento FO, Haller A, Branca D, et al. (2023) Socioecological gradients: Contesting traditional ecoclines to explain the high biocultural diversity of the Andean verdant. In: Myster RW (ed.), Neotropical Gradients and Their Analysis. Berlin: Springer. pp 454–459. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22848-3_16
Sarmiento FO, Haller A, Marchant C, et al. (2023) 4D global montology: Toward convergent and transdisciplinary mountain sciences across time and space. Pirineos 178: e075. https://doi.org/10.3989/pirineos.2023.178001
Servicio Nacional de Meteorología e Hidrología (2020) Hydrometeorological data at national level. (In Spanish). https://web.archive.org/web/20200520085500/https://www.senamhi.gob.pe/?p=estaciones (Accessed on 27 September 2023)
Sinclair R Von Thünen and urban sprawl. Ann Assoc Am Geogr 57(1): 72–87. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1967.tb00591.x
Stadel C (1991) Altitudinal belts in the tropical Andes: Their ecology and human utilization. Yearb Conf Lat Am Geogr 17/18: 45–60.
Stadel C (2000) Medium-sized cities and aspects of urban sustainability in the Andean region. Espac Desarro 12: 25–43. (In Spanish).
Stadel C (2019) Horizontal and vertical archipelagoes of agriculture and rural development in the Andean realm. In: Bastante-Ceca MJ, Fuentes-Bargues JL, Hufnagel L, et al. (eds.), Sustainability Assessment at the 2lst Century. London: IntechOpen. https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.86841
Stehman SV, Foody GM (2019) Key issues in rigorous accuracy assessment of land cover products. Remote Sens Environ 231: 111199. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2019.05.018
Thomlinson JR, Bolstad PV, Cohen WB (1999) Coordinating methodologies for scaling landcover classifications from site-specific to global: Steps toward validating global map products. Remote Sens Environ 79(1): 16–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0034-4257(99)00055-3
Troll C (1959) The Tropical Mountains. Their Three-Dimensional Climatic and Phytogeographical Zonation. Bonn: Ferdinand Dümmlers Verlag. p 93. (In German).
Vega Centeno P (2011) The urban effects of mining in Peru: From the Cerro de Pasco and La Oroya model to the Cajamarca model. Apuntes 38(6): 109–136. (In Spanish). https://doi.org/10.21678/apuntes.68.621
Wachsmuth D (2014) City as ideology: Reconciling the explosion of the city form with the tenacity of the city concept. Environ Plan D 32(1): 75–90. https://doi.org/10.1068/d21911
World Bank (2013) The Future of Irrigation in Peru. Challenges and Recommendations. Vol. II: Main Report. Washington: World Bank. (In Spanish). https://web.archive.org/web/20220119114535/https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/696591468265790621/pdf/795270v20WP0P10asiona10Paper0Series.pdf
Zimmerer KS (2003) Geographies of seed networks for food plants (potato, ulluco) and approaches to agrobiodiversity conservation in the Andean countries. Soc Nat Resour 16(7): 583–601, https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920309185
Zimmerer KS, Bell MG (2013) An early framework of national land use and geovisualization: Policy attributes and application of Pulgar Vidal’s state-indigenous vision of Peru (1941–present). Land Use Policy 30(1): 305–316. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2012.03.023
Zimmerer KS, Bell MG (2015) Time for change: The legacy of a Euro-Andean model of landscape versus the need for landscape connectivity. Landsc Urban Plan 139: 104–116. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2015.02.002
Zoomers A, van Noorloos F, Otsuki K, et al. (2017) The rush for land in an urbanizing world: From land grabbing toward developing safe, resilient, and sustainable cities and landscapes. World Dev 92: 242–252. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2016.11.016
Acknowledgments
This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) (P 31855-G). For the purpose of open access, the authors have applied a CC BY public copyright license to any author accepted manuscript version arising from this submission. The authors are thankful to Kati Heinrich (for preparing the figures), to the anonymous reviewers (for their valuable comments on an earlier version of the article), and to the editor-in-chief, executive editor-in-chief, and editorial staff.
Funding
Funding note: Open Access funding enabled and organized by Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
Andreas HALLER (conceptualization, methodology, investigation, resources, writing original draft, review and editing). Domenico BRANCA (methodology, investigation, writing original draft, review and editing). Deyvis CANO (methodology, review and editing).
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflicts of interest: Andreas Haller is a scientific editor of the Journal of Mountain Science. He was not involved in the peer-review or handling of the manuscript. The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Haller, A., Branca, D. & Cano, D. Between plaza and peak: a montological perspective on verticality and urbanization in highland Peru. J. Mt. Sci. 20, 2783–2803 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-023-8118-2
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-023-8118-2