Agriculture Reference
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ecological composition of patios are critical in creating more liveable homes.
The benefits of patios are not limited to food production; the everyday
human-environment relations encompassed not only food and economics, but
equally the need of comfort and aesthetics. Indeed, the comfort and aesthetics
of patio ecologies extends beyond the household to the neighbourhood. As
virtually all participants commented, San Augusto's 'cool' environment is
unique in Managua, which speaks to the indirect ecological benefits derived
from the 'urban forests' of the fruit-tree dominated landscape of the
neighbourhood. This is especially true of Managua, where the majority of
urban houses have unusually large yards, and where human relations within the
environment of these patios are as diverse as the range of urban ecosystems.
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to acknowledge the support of all the staff at FUNDECI in
Nicaragua for assisting with this research. Also, I want to thank all the
participants in San Augusto. This research was carried out with financial
support from Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC)
through an AGROPOLIS award for urban agricultural research and a Social
Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral fellowship. The
research fulfilled part of the requirements of a Ph.D. degree from the
Department of Geography, York University, Toronto, Canada.
N OTES
1
Laura J. Shillington, Ph.D., Department of Geography, York University, Calif., USA,
email: lshillin@yorku.ca
2
According to the 2005 census, approximately 97 per cent of Managua's population live in
houses, 0.12 per cent in apartments, 0.6 per cent in collective housing (e.g. in boarding
houses), while 2.68 per cent have no shelter or are living in improvised shelters (INEC,
2006).
3
The community name and the participant names have been changed to ensure
anonymity.
4
Development theory has sometimes referred to this as social capital. However, social
capital connotes something different from the networks to which I refer. For a
discussion on social capital see Das (2004).
5
According to the most recent 2006 national census (carried out by the Instituto Nacional
de Estadı´ sticos y Censos), 30.2 per cent of women engage exclusively in productive labour
(classified in the census as ama de casas or home caretakers) compared with 1.72 per cent
of men. The percentage of women and men engaged in productive labour is respectively
38.4 and 58.7 per cent (INEC, 2006). Note that these statistics include all males and
females older than the age of ten years. Espinosa (2004) points out that while many
women engage in productive work, they also still tend to be responsible for the
majority of domestic tasks in the household.
6
Each focus group was partially tape-recorded and detailed field notes were taken.
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