Agricultural heritage and socio-ecological resilience in urban–rural interface areas: territorial heterogeneity and planning challenges in Mendoza’s green belt (Argentina)

Urban sprawl into agricultural territories poses one of the main challenges to their sustainability and socio-ecological resilience. In Mendoza’s green belt (Argentina), this process involves the conversion of productive land to urban and commercial uses, territorial fragmentation, and the loss of productive diversity. These pressures are compounded by critical ecological constraints, as Mendoza is located in a dryland region where water and fertile soils are limited and largely concentrated within irrigated oases. This study aims to analyze how the green belt’s historical trajectories and responses to different disturbances and constraints are expressed in its landscape and agricultural heritage and to assess the extent to which these dimensions are recognized in municipal territorial planning instruments. The study adopts a qualitative, historical-territorial, and multiscalar approach that combines the reinterpretation of primary and secondary data from previous research on the area’s historical development and agricultural heritage with a comparative analysis of the Municipal Land-Use Plans of Maipú and Guaymallén. The historical reconstruction identified three major stages of transformation and six landscape configurations associated with distinct productive, environmental, and heritage trajectories within the green belt. The results show that the green belt’s current heterogeneity stems from distinct historical processes of continuity, adaptation, and reorganization, associated with different capacities and vulnerabilities. Agricultural heritage, expressed through irrigation infrastructure, field patterns, productive buildings, techniques, and forms of spatial organization, provides material and territorial evidence of knowledge, decisions, and responses developed over time. Although the Municipal Land-Use Plans recognize the strategic value of agricultural areas and their main vulnerabilities, history and heritage remain only weakly integrated into the territorial characterization and planning of these areas. The study concludes that a historical-heritage perspective can complement the contemporary biophysical, productive, and socioeconomic variables used in territorial planning by adding temporal depth to the identification of capacities, vulnerabilities, and territorial heterogeneity associated with socio-ecological resilience.