Exploration columns
In-depth, long-form essays that take an urban-farming theme all the way from its scientific principles to the social systems built around it across the world. The latest columns are free for everyone; the archive is for Urban Farm Crew members and up, who fund this database.
Farming a dry city — Southern Europe has held its farmland without owning it→
Water is short. Land sells. And still Milan fixed some 46,300 hectares at the city's edge in 1990, and Barcelona 3,473.26 in 1998 — without buying any of it
When urban farming in Southern Europe comes up, we tend to draw one of two pictures. One is the tourist's: Mediterranean light, stone streets, pots on a terrace. The other is the story of people who lost their jobs in an economic crisis and took to tilling vacant lots. Neither is wrong, and neither explains a mechanism. This short series enters from somewhere else: what binds urban farming here most tightly is water, and what the region invented most distinctively is not the allotment plot but the agricultural park. According to the European Environment Agency, water scarcity conditions covered 28% of EU land area and 32% of its population in 2023, and in southern Europe around 30% of people live under permanent water stress with up to 70% under seasonal summer stress. Meanwhile total EU freshwater abstraction fell 14%, from an average of 224,000 million cubic metres in 2000–2009 to 192,600 million in 2020–2023 — and yet agricultural groundwater abstraction alone rose 52%, from 11,000 to 16,500 million cubic metres. As water thins, farming reaches downwards. On top of that constraint Southern Europe placed the Parco Agricolo Sud Milano (1990, about 46,300 hectares, over 1,400 farm businesses) and the Parc Agrari del Baix Llobregat (1998, 3,473.26 hectares, some 621 holdings). In neither case did the authorities buy the land. Holding it without buying it — this article unpacks that technique, and prepares the ground for visiting Italy and Spain over the next two days.
2026-08-02 · 19 min read
What is a rooftop farm good for? — between 633 hectares and 1,284→
Twenty-four years have put about 633 hectares of greenery onto Japan's roofs. On the ground, allotment gardens hold twice that, in 188,000 plots. If there is still a reason to climb, it is not the harvest
This series has handed out, one at a time, the tools for seeing a roof as farmland. We counted the area, took the physics of weight and water down to the level of design, traced the genealogy, and followed the allocation of cost. This final instalment puts to all of that the question hardest to answer: what, then, is a rooftop farm good for? Does it genuinely contribute to a city's food? Have mandates become an alibi for the greenery lost at ground level? The answers are not comfortable. According to the latest survey, published by Japan's transport ministry on 12 December 2025, green roofs accumulated to about 633 hectares between 2000 and 2024, with roughly 14.5 hectares newly built in 2024. Meanwhile the agriculture ministry counts 4,273 allotment gardens nationwide in fiscal 2024, comprising 188,713 plots over 1,284 hectares. The gardens on the ground hold about twice the area of twenty-four years of rooftop greening — and all of it is soil meant for eating from. Eight years of measurement on a university roof in Barcelona found that greenhouse gas per kilogram of tomato swung from 0.54 to 12.05 kilograms, a factor of more than twenty, in the same greenhouse. Even so, this article does not tell you to give up on roofs. On a school roof in Rome, six planted species had been joined by sixty-two that arrived on their own — there is something up there that the harvest cannot measure. Having fixed the limits in figures, we set out, in order, the first steps a citizen can actually take.
2026-08-01 · 26 min read
Who pays for the roof — mandates, subsidies, and repeal→
From two hundred Canadian dollars a square metre in lieu to forty-six euro cents a year off a sewage bill — what put greenery on roofs was always somebody's purse
In the first instalment of this series we said that what put greenery on roofs was regulation, not the market. This sixth instalment turns that regulation over and reads it from the side of cost. Who fronts the money to put soil on a roof? And where does the coolness it creates, and the rainwater it keeps out of the sewer, actually land? That these two answers do not match is what governs every institutional design in this field. The construction cost falls on the building's owner, while most of the benefit flows outside the building, to the city. Left alone, therefore, roofs stay bare, and regulation has stepped in. It has only three instruments: mandates, subsidies and prices. This article compares all three, down to their actual figures. Toronto charged two hundred Canadian dollars a square metre to buy out of greening, and used that money to grant a hundred dollars a square metre to other roofs. In Germany the saving from a reduced sewage charge comes to about forty-six euro cents per square metre a year, against a construction cost of thirty to sixty euros — it never repays. Tokyo imposes the duty while the money comes separately, from the wards and cities. We then look at how an operator's books actually balance, and finally return to Toronto in October 2025. Why did the first city in North America to mandate green roofs become the first to lose the mandate? Having gone through the money, we reread the fact that the repeal was argued in the language of cost.
2026-07-31 · 25 min read
A genealogy of the roof garden — from idea to technique, and on to the department-store roof→
From Berlin in 1867 to Nihonbashi in 1907 — the notion of putting soil on a roof began three separate times
Yesterday's second instalment, Designing for weight and water, read the rooftop farm as a problem of equipment: load, waterproofing, drainage, irrigation. Where, then, did that body of technique come from? The notion of putting soil on a roof did not branch out from a single source. It began at least three separate times, from different places and out of wholly different motives. The first was Berlin in 1867, where the master mason Carl Rabitz argued for the greened flat roof on grounds of fire safety and durability, and exhibited one at that year's Paris World Exposition. The second was Stuttgart in 1927, where Le Corbusier made the roof garden the second of his Five Points Towards a New Architecture and gave it an idea: return on the roof the ground the building has taken away. The third was Tokyo between 1903 and 1907, where Shirokiya and Mitsukoshi installed a games room and a 'garden in the air' on their roofs — inventing the rooftop not as a garden but as a sales floor. This article follows those three lineages, watches them bound together into a single technical system in postwar Germany, and traces the different fate Japan's rooftops met: a heyday as amusement parks, and an exit forced by fire. It is an article about the pedigree carried by yesterday's numbers and standards.
2026-07-28 · 24 min read
Designing for weight and water — the physics that turns a roof into farmland→
From a ceiling of 1,800 newtons to the cooling engine of transpiration — reading a rooftop farm's drawings from the bottom up
Yesterday's first instalment, The roof as farmland, recounted the roof as area. Today we take that area down to the level of design. The drawings of a rooftop farm must be read not from the top — which vegetables shall we plant — but from the bottom. First, how much weight will the slab permit? Then, how will the waterproofing be protected? Only after that do soil depth and crop choice follow. Article 85 of Japan's Building Standard Law Enforcement Order sets the imposed load for roof plazas and balconies at 1,800 newtons per square metre — roughly 180 kilogram-force — when the floor structure is calculated. That is a number for people standing, not a number for soil. Starting from this single ceiling, the article traces the stack of waterproofing, root barrier, drainage and filter layers; why a lightweight aggregate fired from clay at around 1,200°C can be light and still hold water; why wind destroys a roof at its edge rather than in its middle; and what the cooling engine of transpiration actually depends on. A roof comes into focus more clearly when it is read as a piece of equipment than as farmland.
2026-07-27 · 23 min read
The roof as farmland→
The last flat land left in the city — who is counting the area above our heads, and how
There is no vacant land left in the city, people often say. Land prices rise, farmland is whittled away, and the places where citizens can touch soil recede year by year. And yet we have forgotten to count one surface: the roof. It exists in the same number as our buildings, goes almost entirely unused, and has taken nothing but sun, wind and rain — a flat land overhead. This series, The roof as farmland, spends seven days digging into that overlooked area. Today, on the first day, we begin by sorting out the words: what exactly separates roof greening, a rooftop kitchen garden, a rooftop farm and a rooftop plant factory? Then we count the area. In Japan, green roofs have accumulated to about 615 hectares over the twenty-three years since 2000, while the annual addition sits at roughly 15.7 hectares (2023) — growth that has already levelled off. We then survey the two physics that govern any roof, weight and water, and finally establish that what built this area was not the market but regulation, and that the regulation is now meeting a backlash. Here we build the eye that sees the space overhead as farmland.
2026-07-26 · 22 min read
Green gentrification — when 'making it greener' pushes residents out→
How parks, greenways and community gardens raise land values and displace the very people they were meant to serve
Turn a vacant lot into green space, start a community garden, regenerate a derelict viaduct into a greenway — each looks unambiguously good. Yet research around the world keeps documenting how such greening drives up land values and rents and displaces the low-income residents who lived there first. This paradox — 'green' or 'environmental' gentrification — is one of the hardest failure cases for urban-agriculture advocates to face. This column lays it out without flinching: the scholarship that named it, the hard numbers from the High Line, Chicago's 606 and Barcelona, the way community gardens get caught in it, and the counter-strategy of staying 'just green enough' — not to argue against greening, but to ask who it is for, and to redesign it so it stops pushing people out.
2026-07-24 · 17 min read
The vertical-farm bubble — why a multi-billion-dollar dream collapsed one by one→
From AeroFarms to Infarm, Bowery and Plenty: the hype of controlled-environment agriculture and the reality of the electricity bill
'Grow vegetables inside a city building, without pesticides or soil, unaffected by weather' — in the 2010s, vertical farming attracted enormous investment as the future of urban agriculture. Then, from 2022, its standard-bearers went bankrupt one after another: AeroFarms, AppHarvest, Kalera, Fifth Season, Infarm, Bowery, and even Plenty, once hailed as the next unicorn. This column examines the hype and collapse of the vertical-farm bubble from two sides — a roll-call of the failures, and the research explaining why the economics never worked. The aim is not to mock vertical farming but to separate what genuinely works from what was overhyped, and to rebuild the value of soil-based urban and community farming on reality rather than illusion.
2026-07-24 · 15 min read
The fragility of urban farmland — why beloved gardens end up as bulldozed lots→
Eviction, defunding and policy failure — the cases where the land was lost, and the mechanisms that let gardens last
A community garden where hundreds grew vegetables, where children touched soil, that was the pride of its neighbourhood — bulldozed to bare ground one day. This has recurred around the world: South Central Farm, once among the largest in the US; Manor Garden Allotments, evicted for the London Olympics; city farms shut across the map by municipal budget cuts. This column sorts real cases of lost urban farmland into three types — forced eviction, slow erosion, and the withdrawal of public support — and reveals the shared weakness beneath them all: insecure land tenure. It then surveys the mechanisms the world has devised to keep gardens from being one-offs: community land trusts, permanent preservation, and Japan's productive green-land system.
2026-07-24 · 16 min read
Urban farming in Cuba — 'farming from necessity,' raised by crisis→
The organopónico born of scarcity after the Soviet collapse, and a city's choice to grow its own vegetables
Few countries have lived out the proverb 'necessity is the mother of invention' quite so literally. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 rendered Cuban agriculture — propped up by imported oil, chemical fertiliser and pesticides — unworkable almost overnight. Food and energy alike shrank sharply, and people went hungry. Out of the scarcity of this 'Special Period' (Período especial) came the organopónico — a raised bed of concrete walls packed with compost — and the practice by which Havana and other cities grew their own vegetables with their own hands. This report reads Cuban urban agriculture as a single arc: 'invention out of crisis.' How did an island from which oil had vanished steer toward farming without agrochemicals, and support its tables on the vacant lots, compost and labour of the city? And how did a farming that began in necessity come, in time, to be spoken of as a philosophy — agroecology? We trace that, carefully, within the bounds of what can be verified. Set beside a Germany that guarded its fields with law, a Japan that grew toward experience, and a Netherlands that solved smallness by design, Cuba offers another answer: that scarcity itself can call farming back into the city.
2026-07-24 · 23 min read
Walking the Edible Forest: Urban Food Forests and the Culture of "Picking Allowed"→
From Seattle to Atlanta, Todmorden to Andernach — visiting the food forests as they are actually run
A food forest is, at bottom, a garden you are allowed to eat — a designed, layered, edible ecosystem of mostly perennial plants that mimics a young woodland, and whose most radical feature is social. This column walks the ground first. It follows how a handful of real places — the Beacon Food Forest in Seattle, the Urban Food Forest at Browns Mill in Atlanta, Incredible Edible in Todmorden, and Andernach's "edible city" — actually run: who owns the land, who volunteers, what the harvest rules are, and how "food for free" survives past its first season. A compact section explains the science of seven layers and guilds, and the whole idea is traced back to the centuries-old tropical homegardens from which it was borrowed. The numbers are kept cautious; the attention stays on the people tending the beds.
2026-07-23 · 22 min read
Closing the ring of nutrients — the science and society of nitrogen, phosphorus and the organic cycle→
The nutrients carried from field to city in the shape of food — where do they vanish to? The science, and the world's systems, trying to close a ring that has been cut
A single harvest is also an act of carrying nutrients out of the soil. As they grow, crops draw up the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium in the earth to set their fruit, and that fruit is carried to the city as food. Once, the excreta and residues of people and livestock returned to the fields, and nutrients circulated in a ring between field and table. Modern cities, however, re-routed that return path into sewers that run to rivers and the sea. This column unpacks this 'organic cycle' first from the science of two elements — nitrogen and phosphorus: the nitrogen fixation that made bread from air, phosphorus as a finite resource with no substitute, and the idea of a 'metabolic rift' where nutrients hit a dead end in the city. It then traces, at a considered pace, from Edo's night soil that once closed the ring so beautifully, to today's attempts to win phosphorus back from sewage, to the urban farms and compost that close the ring at our feet. A keep-it-forever survey of the science and society of not wasting — and of returning.
2026-07-22 · 19 min read
Urban farming in the Netherlands — farming as design, born of a small country→
From volkstuin plots to rooftop farms — how the Netherlands turns scarce land into ingenuity
The Netherlands is a small, flat country that won much of its land from the sea, and yet it is known as one of the world's leading exporters of agricultural produce by value. Scarce land, water close at hand, a densely packed population — these conditions bred a culture that solves farming through ingenuity rather than sheer space. This report reads Dutch urban agriculture through concrete cases on the ground, while setting it on the long foundation of the volkstuin, the citizens' allotment born in the nineteenth century: school gardens (schooltuinen), children's farms (kinderboerderij), and the recent movement of 'city farming' (stadslandbouw), right up to rooftop farms. Placed beside a Germany that protected its fields with the weight of law, and a Japan that grew toward selling experience, the Netherlands offers a third answer: how to redesign a limited place. We trace how a country that refuses to treat smallness as an excuse gets city and farm to live together.
2026-07-21 · 21 min read
Urban farming and DIY — how making it yourself reclaims sovereignty over growing→
From hydroponic windows to home-built farm tools — tracing how open-source and do-it-yourself culture have reshaped farming in the city
When people set out to grow vegetables in the city, the first wall many of them hit is the problem of tools. Planters, watering systems, stakes, compost bins — buying them costs a fair amount, and something that fits your own space and conditions exactly is hard to find. So people began to build planters from scrap wood, to rig self-watering systems from plastic bottles, and to share their drawings over the internet. This report reads that activity of 'DIY' — doing it yourself — not as a mere thrift technique but as a movement to take the tools and knowledge of farming back into one's own hands. Windowfarms, which began at a New York window; Farm Hack, which turns tool designs into a commons; FarmBot, which holds up the world's first open-source farming robot; and L'Atelier Paysan, where French farmers build their own machines — through these four cases we consider why 'making' can become a central theme of urban agriculture. Behind it lies a lineage of thought stretching back more than half a century: appropriate technology and technical sovereignty.
2026-07-17 · 34 min read
Urban farming in France — how the City of Paris turned land it does not farm into farmland→
From a 1952 law to the 2016 Parisculteurs. Reading the urban farming that public institutions built, through the lens of policy
Urban farmland is usually created by farmers who till it. In France, and in Paris above all, one of the leading actors that rooted farming in the city was, curiously, not a farmer at all — it was the municipal authority. The city does not till plots; it does not sow seed. And yet, through the power of institutions — by-laws and charters, calls for projects and agreements — it has turned roofs, walls and vacant ground into 'farmland.' This report reads France's urban farms not as a scene of individual gardens but as a timeline of policy, in which public institutions have rearranged the use of land: the history by which the worker gardens born in 1896 were institutionalised as 'family gardens' by a law of 1952; the 'Main Verte' governance model for citizen gardens that the City of Paris began in 2003; and the 2016 call-for-projects programme 'Parisculteurs' with its 'Objective 100 hectares' charter. One question runs through it. How does a city that does not farm govern land into becoming farmland? We trace the design.
2026-07-13 · 29 min read
Urban farming in Singapore — '30 by 30', a city-state that made farming national policy→
A country that imports about 90% of its food is trying to reclaim it on rooftops and in towers — read through its institutions and policy
Singapore is a city-state no larger than the core of a big metropolis, and it has long depended on imports for about 90% of its food; less than 1% of its land is said to be given over to farming. Yet in 2019 this country set a bold goal — '30 by 30', to produce 30% of its nutritional needs at home by 2030 — and placed agriculture squarely at the centre of national policy. This report reads Singapore's urban farms not merely as a scene of rooftop plots and high-tech farms, but along a timeline of institutions and policy: from the Garden City vision, through the founding of the Singapore Food Agency (SFA), the public tenders that turn the rooftops of HDB (public-housing) car parks into farms, the Sky Greens vertical farm, and on to the citizens' 'Community in Bloom'. Why has a small nation, short of both land and water, now turned toward food self-sufficiency? We trace the thinking behind the design.
2026-07-11 · 23 min read
Urban Farming and Community: The Social Capital that Soil Grows→
How strangers become neighbours — read through social science and the world's gardens
The largest harvest an urban farm yields may not be vegetables at all. As people work the same soil, neighbours who never knew each other's faces become acquaintances, and acquaintances become companions who lend a hand — an invisible harvest that social science calls 'social capital.' This column unpacks, from first principles, why a garden binds people together, drawing on ideas like trust, reciprocity and weak ties, and then surveys the real community gardens that citizens have built in Seattle, New York, Britain and Japan. It also faces honestly not only the light but the shadows: exclusion and green gentrification.
2026-07-11 · 21 min read
Food loss: the science and the societies — prevent, share, return→
Where and why food is lost — from the science of the food chain to the world's systems for not throwing it away
We are said to lose roughly a third of the food we grow before it ever reaches our mouths. It happens a little at a time, all along a long chain: spoilage in the field, shrinkage in transport and processing, and outright disposal at the shop and the table. This column unpacks food loss from the biology of why food spoils in the first place, then turns to the hierarchy the world has built up — prevent, share, return — to survey France's law against destroying unsold food, South Korea's separated collection, and Japan's Act on the Promotion of Food Loss and Waste Reduction. Urban farming sits at the end of this chain, both as a loop that returns scraps to the soil and as a way of growing close to home that cuts loss. A keep-it-forever exploration of the science and society of not wasting.
2026-07-04 · 18 min read
Disaster and the urban farm — in every crisis, cities have turned to the soil→
From Japan's disaster-cooperation farmland to the pandemic gardening boom: the history and science of growing in emergencies
Depression-era potato patches, wartime victory gardens, post-Soviet Cuba, and the worldwide gardening boom of the pandemic — trace the history of urban farming and you find a crisis at every turning point. This column surveys the lineage of urban agriculture born of emergency, Japan's distinctive 'disaster-cooperation farmland' system built up since the 1995 Kobe earthquake, what the pandemic left behind in the world's gardens, and the research on why community gardens strengthen resilience. Reframing urban farmland as infrastructure for 'what if' gives operators, municipalities and property owners a powerful language for the value of urban farming to come.
2026-07-01 · 18 min read
Urban farming in Germany — 150 years from Schreber's garden→
From the poor man's plot to leisure, and on to a civic ecology — reading Germany's urban agriculture through its history and culture
Walk through a German city and you will find them along the railway lines and at the edges of residential districts: clusters of small gardens divided by hedges. These plots — called Kleingarten, or Schrebergarten — trace their origin to the 'gardens for the poor' that the industrial cities of the nineteenth century produced, and they have survived for more than 150 years as one of the world's rarest institutions of urban agriculture. This report reads Germany's urban farms not as a single present-day scene but along a timeline that runs from the Schreber movement of 1860s Leipzig through two world wars and hunger, the East–West division, the 1983 Federal Allotment Gardens Act, reunification, and on to the mobile gardens and 'edible cities' of recent years. Why did so many fields remain in German cities, protected by law? Why did self-supply, leisure and the association (the Verein) become inseparable? Using history and culture as our guide, we trace the background.
2026-06-30 · 16 min read
Connecting city and countryside→
From food miles to migration: the science of the urban-rural continuum and how the world builds it
On a map, 'city' and 'countryside' are painted in different colours. In reality, food, people, money, water and information cross that boundary every day, and the two are linked as a single continuous gradient. Starting from this idea of the urban-rural continuum, this column reads the four threads that tie them together — the flow of food, the movement of people, the peri-urban frontier, and the institutions that connect them — through both the science and how the world (and Japan's Kansai region) puts it into practice. The urban farm is the city-side knot in this long loop.
2026-06-27 · 19 min read
Hitler and Migge: subsistence gardens in the age of 'Blood and Soil'→
Two dreams loaded onto the garden — from Weimar idealism to the agrarian ideology of National Socialism
In early-twentieth-century Germany the garden was a political front line. Amid the hunger and housing crisis after the First World War, the landscape architect Leberecht Migge declared 'Everyone self-sufficient!' and—together with Bauhaus modernists and architects such as Bruno Taut and Ernst May—built 'productive Siedlungen' that designed housing and food gardens as one. Yet the same vocabulary of 'soil' and 'self-sufficiency' was also appropriated by the Nazis' 'Blood and Soil' (Blut und Boden) ideology. Drawing on a range of historical scholarship, this column traces how a tool of emancipation was bent toward agrarian nationalism, pivoting on Migge's life (1881–1935) and the closure of the Bauhaus (1933). Hitler and Migge—two names that should never meet—mark the opposite poles of a twentieth-century question about city and land.
2026-06-24 · 24 min read
Pollinators and Urban Biodiversity — Building a City for Pollinators, Starting from the Ground→
Beyond the rooftop hive: the hands-on practices that actually support wild bees
Oslo's "bee highway," rooftop hives in Ginza, the UK's "No Mow May." Cities can be surprising refuges for pollinators. This column leads not with theory but with practice: concrete things an urban farm or community garden can do, each grounded in just enough science to explain why it works. The quiet thread running through it is a careful distinction — keeping honeybees is not the same as conserving pollinators.
2026-06-24 · 20 min read
Urban farming in Japan — the country where fields stayed in the city→
From Edo's circular city to productive green zones, experience farms and rooftop beekeeping — reading Japan's urban agriculture through its history and culture
Japanese cities still contain a surprising number of fields. Farmland sprawling in the middle of residential districts, honeybees humming on the roofs of office towers, rental allotments attached to apartment blocks beside the station — these are not accidents of scenery but the accumulated result of centuries of history and a distinctive relationship to land and food. This report reads Japan's urban farms not as a single 'present-day' snapshot but along a timeline that runs from the circular city of Edo through the postwar land reform, the suburbanisation of the high-growth era, and the recent revisions to the Productive Green Land Act. Why did fields remain in Japan's cities? Why did farms that sell 'experience' rather than 'ownership' take root? Using history and culture as our guide, we trace the background. This database holds roughly 133 Japanese cases; the specific examples discussed here are a selection from them.
2026-06-23 · 21 min read
Urban Farming in the United States: Reading the Memory in the Soil, from Wartime Gardens to Reclaimed Lots→
A history-and-culture reading of why American urban agriculture grew up as a movement
American urban farming is often narrated through its newest faces — rooftop farms, data-driven vertical operations. Yet its roots run deeper than that. Relief gardens of the depressions, the victory gardens of two world wars, community gardens born alongside the civil-rights era, and the reclamation of vacant lots in declining industrial cities: growing food in the city has surfaced again and again as a response to the social crisis of the moment. This report reads the United States along a timeline rather than a trend line. By peeling back the layers of history and culture one at a time, we hope to show why today's varied actors and institutions took the shape they did.
2026-06-23 · 18 min read
Canada — Reading the City's Farms from the Ground Up→
From rooftop hives to portable farms on vacant lots and gardens on former hospital land — a country report walking through real sites
Urban farming in Canada looks less like a system designed from above than a practice built up from individual sites on the street. A hotel employee tending bees on a rooftop, a formerly homeless resident working a vacant lot, neighbours marking out plots on the grounds of a former hospital — follow their handiwork in turn, and the shape of the country's urban agriculture rises from the bottom up. Using the roughly nine Canadian cases in our database as guideposts, this report reads Canada's urban-farm scene through the stories of the sites and the people who gather at them.
2026-06-23 · 14 min read
Urban Farming in South Korea: From Rooftop Boxes to an Island on the Han→
A decade of city farming, read from the ground up through the people who built it
South Korea's urban agriculture is best told not from a grand master plan but from a single growing box set on a rooftop. After Seoul issued its policy call in 2012, the number of gardens jumped from roughly one hundred to more than 1,600, yet the substance of the movement lives in individual sites. Keeping law and figures as a spine, this report reads Korean city farming through eight real places and the people who put their hands in the soil there, from the reclamation of an island on the Han River to a returned U.S. military base, a Seoul National University estate, and provincial school gardens, told as a bottom-up story.
2026-06-23 · 14 min read
China — Resident-Made City Gardens, Spreading from a Narrow Vacant Lot→
From Shanghai's community gardens to Shenzhen's We Garden and the rooftops of Chengdu and Chongqing — a country report walking through real sites
Try to talk about urban agriculture in China and the eye is drawn to national food self-sufficiency or large-scale protected horticulture. Yet look closely within the city and what comes into view is something smaller and more human. A narrow strip of vacant land left over a tunnel, a corner that was once a rubble dump, the roof of an apartment block — such awkward gaps have been cultivated, furrow by furrow, by residents, non-profits and university researchers. Using the roughly eight Chinese cases in our database as guideposts, and centred on Shanghai's community-garden (shequ huayuan) movement, this report reads China's urban-farm scene from the bottom up, through the stories of the sites and the people who gather at them.
2026-06-23 · 15 min read
Urban farming in India — reading a megacity nation's food self-provision through its institutions→
From state horticulture subsidies to wetland conservation law and Smart City programmes — an India report that reads urban farming as a system
The shortest route to understanding India's urban agriculture is to look first at its institutions. Behind the household growing vegetables on a rooftop, and behind the fishers who turn sewage into fish in a wetland, mechanisms work in less visible form — the subsidies of a state horticulture department, a city government's by-laws, a law for conservation. This report reads everything from Bengaluru's terrace gardens to Kolkata's wetland aquaculture not as individual goodwill or a passing boom, but along the axis of institutions, policy and municipal programmes. How does the distinctive structure of governance — in which the union and the states share authority over agriculture — work; what is the national mission for promoting horticulture; and where does urban farming sit within the Smart Cities programme? Why did India's urban agriculture grow not as a single, monolithic national policy but as a mosaic that differs from state to state and city to city? Using the system as our guide, we trace its outline. This database holds roughly eight Indian cases; the specific examples named here are a selection from them.
2026-06-23 · 22 min read
Urban Farming in Indonesia: The Soil of the Kampung and a City Tilled by Togetherness→
Reading the present through history and culture: why a heritage of homegardens and mutual aid is rising again in the city
To understand urban agriculture in Indonesia, it is best to begin with one word: kampung. Denoting the dense residential quarters that persist within cities, the term has never meant mere geography; it has meant a society of mutual aid and sharing itself. A tradition of homegardens cultivating the houseyard; the hands and seedlings carried out into the alley. This country's urban farming was not first designed by institutions — it sprouted, before anything else, from the soil of the kampung and the ties between its people. This piece follows that timeline.
2026-06-23 · 14 min read
Urban Farming in Taiwan: How Institutions Cultivate the Margins of a Dense City→
Reading the present through laws, municipal programs, and subsidies: where an island that engineered urban farming as a system now stands
The key to understanding urban agriculture in Taiwan lies not in passion or chance but in institutional design. Citizens' grassroots gardening was, over time, lifted into formal municipal programs, and then into national law. Following that trajectory reveals how this island has assembled urban farming not as a private hobby but as a public system. Anchored in Taipei's Garden City Initiative, this piece reads Taiwanese urban farming through its skeleton: laws, ordinances, subsidies, and administrative bodies.
2026-06-23 · 14 min read
United Kingdom — From the Memory of the Allotment to Today's Urban Farms→
From Victorian enclosure to wartime victory gardens, then social prescribing and meanwhile use — a country report tracing the strata of history
To understand urban farming in the United Kingdom, one must first travel back in time. Here, the act of cultivating soil within the city was institutionalised as a movement to grant land to workers during the Industrial Revolution, sustained the nation through allotment cultivation in both world wars, contracted under post-war housing policy, and is now sprouting again alongside new vocabularies such as social prescribing and meanwhile use. With the distinctive institution of the allotment as its backbone, this country's urban farming carries, in each layer of its present landscape, the clear growth rings of history. Using the roughly six UK cases held in our database as clues, this report reads, along a timeline, why the country's urban farming has 'come to be as it is now'.
2026-06-23 · 15 min read
Urban Farming in South Africa — Reading the 'Garden for Survival' through Its Institutions→
Urban-agriculture policy, food-resilience strategy, and municipal programmes — a country report that reads South Africa's cities and farms through the mesh of its institutions
Urban farming in South Africa is, before it is a matter of hobby or amenity, a matter of survival and dignity. Among people whom apartheid pushed to the edges of the city, the home plot and the community garden have long been a response to hunger and a foothold toward self-reliance. This report places at its centre the 'institutions' that have sustained — and at times constrained — these sites: Cape Town's urban-agriculture policy, Johannesburg's food-resilience strategy, and the national policy on food and nutrition security, reading South Africa's 'edible city' through a policy lens.
2026-06-23 · 15 min read
Heirloom, landrace and traditional vegetables: the science and the societies→
What it means to pass on a seed — from the science of genetic diversity to the systems that safeguard heirloom vegetables in Japan and worldwide
Most vegetables on supermarket shelves are F1 hybrids, whose seed must be bought anew from seed companies each year. Alongside them are open-pollinated heirlooms, landraces and traditional vegetables — kept alive by generations of farmers who saved their own seed and selected it, year after year, for their own land. These are not merely nostalgic vegetables but living genetic resources, shaped over long stretches of time by local climate, food culture and human hands. Drawing on some fifty studies, this column moves from first principles — the difference between an open-pollinated variety and an F1 hybrid — through the science of genetic erosion, the research on flavor and nutrition, the conservation machinery of genebanks and seed sovereignty, the traditional vegetables of Japan such as Kyo-yasai and Edo-Tokyo vegetables, and finally the gardens around the world where cities themselves have become places that keep heirloom seeds alive.
2026-06-23 · 26 min read
Composting: the science and the societies→
From the microbial chemistry of decay to the world's collection-and-compost systems
Composting is one of humanity's oldest forms of recycling: returning the organic matter from kitchens and gardens to the soil through the work of microbes. This column unpacks the science from first principles — why decomposition happens, why a pile heats up, why the resulting soil is fertile — and then surveys the collection-and-composting systems that Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the United States, Europe, India and the Global South have built. A keep-it-forever deep dive for anyone who handles compost on an urban farm.
2026-06-22 · 22 min read
Care farming and horticultural therapy→
Why contact with soil heals body and mind — the science, and the world's systems of care farming
Tilling soil, sowing seeds, harvesting — these seemingly ordinary acts are used as 'treatment' in the care of people living with depression, dementia, social withdrawal and disability. Care farming and horticultural therapy frame farm work and contact with plants as instruments of health and welfare. This column unpacks, from first principles, the physiology and microbiology of why touching soil calms us, and then surveys the social systems of care farming that the Netherlands, Japan, the United Kingdom and the Nordic countries have built. A deep dive for anyone who wants to extend urban farming from 'a place to grow' into 'a place that supports people.'
2026-06-22 · 20 min read
Water and soil in the city→
Where does the rain go? The science of soil and the water cycle, and the world's 'cities that drink'
In a city paved with concrete and asphalt, where does the fallen rain go? Water that ought to soak into the soil, evaporate slowly with the support of roots and microbes, and return to the rivers instead loses its way in the city, rushing all at once into the sewers and causing floods. This column first unpacks, from first principles, what soil is and how water moves through it, then examines how cities have broken water and soil, and surveys the 'cities that drink the rain' being built in Japan, the United States, Europe and Asia. A study of the invisible infrastructure beneath the feet of urban farming.
2026-06-22 · 21 min read
Food education and school gardens→
Why do children eat the vegetables they grow themselves? The science of taste and learning, and the world's school gardens
A child who supposedly hated tomatoes eats one the moment they grow it themselves — behind this 'miracle,' told again and again in school gardens, lies real science. Food education is not only teaching nutrition as knowledge but cultivating the ability to choose food through the experience of growing, cooking and tasting. This column unpacks, from first principles, the science of taste and learning that explains why we eat the vegetables we grow, and surveys the school-garden and food-education systems that the United States, Japan, Europe and the Global South have built. As the close of the series, it ties together the previous three studies — composting, care and water-and-soil — into a single cycle.
2026-06-22 · 20 min read
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