Urbanites, smallholders, and the quest for empathy: Prospects for collaborative planning in the periurban Shullcas Valley, Peru

The results show that urbanites are mostly empathetic toward smallholders: they clearly perceive advantages and disadvantages, especially the irretrievable loss of agricultural land on the valley floor. However, they show little awareness of the smallholders' land tenure situation and their dependency on the lease of additional farmland. Consequently they largely overestimate the advantages of rising land prices driven by an increasing demand for lots. The results point to the need for including periurban smallholder farmers into urban planning and call for the creation and/or valorization of cognitive empathy in a preparatory process to collaborative planning-especially in the new urban peripheries of the Central Andes.