Urban Farming in South Africa — Reading the 'Garden for Survival' through Its Institutions

In South Africa, the practice of growing food in the city did not spread because policy encouraged it. If anything the order ran the other way. The apartheid state segregated Black residents to the edges of the city — townships such as Cape Town's Cape Flats and Johannesburg's Soweto — and structurally denied them access to land and work. That people there made gardens behind their houses and on scraps of open ground was not prompted by any programme but answered hunger and precarious income. In this country, urban farming began less as an uplifting welfare story than as a grassroots defence against dispossession.

This report centres institutions and policy not because they created these sites, but because they came afterward, trying to catch up with and support them. Since the democratic transition of 1994, large cities such as Cape Town and Johannesburg have re-framed the countless home plots and community gardens that already existed as instruments of food security and poverty alleviation, and have built mechanisms to supply land, water, and materials. To read the institutions is also to read this country's trial and error in translating the 'garden for survival' into the language of public policy.

South Africa is one of the more urbanised countries in sub-Saharan Africa, with roughly two-thirds of its population said to live in urban areas. At the same time it has one of the widest income gaps in the world, and for the urban poor, access to food remains precarious. National statistics have repeatedly shown that a substantial share of households struggle to secure enough food. Urban agriculture is practised in the very midst of this contradiction — hunger inside a city that looks prosperous.

Our database currently holds about five South African cases. Cape Town's veteran support organisation Abalimi Bezekhaya, its distribution arm Harvest of Hope, the citizen-run Oranjezicht City Farm, Johannesburg's JFF Rooftop Farm, and Soweto's Izwelethu Food Garden — each a site that has grown amid the push and pull between institutions and the grassroots. This report introduces them alongside the mechanisms working behind each one.