Urban agriculture in walkable neighborhoods bore fruit for health and food system resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic

Urban Farm DB summary

Focusing on Tokyo, the study quantitatively verified how access to local food through urban agriculture relates to residents' subjective well-being, physical activity, and food-security concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic. It showed that walkable-distance urban agriculture supported community health and food-system resilience.

Only numbers and their conditions are stored, as structured data — never the source's own sentences. Metric and condition names stay in English, as coded.

• stronger than urban park use↑ Increase

  subjective wellbeing association(allotment farm user)

  HealthControl: use of urban parks

  region

  JP-Tokyo

  setting

  urban

  study design

  quantitative-survey

  context

  covid-19-pandemic

• stronger than food retailer use↓ Decrease

  food security concern association(allotment farm user)

  SocialControl: use of food retailers

  region

  JP-Tokyo

  setting

  urban

  study design

  quantitative-survey

  context

  covid-19-pandemic

• significant associationStatistically significant

  health and food security association(local food access diversity)

  Social

  region

  JP-Tokyo

  setting

  urban-walkable-neighbourhood

  study design

  quantitative-survey

  context

  covid-19-pandemic

Direction of conclusions

Each author conclusion is recorded only as a coded direction per topic. Read the original for the conclusion itself.

• Mental healthSupports
• Food securitySupports
• Nutrition and healthSupports

Urban agriculture is the key to creating healthy cities and developing resilient urban food systems in uncertain times. However, relevant empirical evidence is limited. This study quantitatively verified the association of access to local food through urban agriculture with subjective well-being, physical activity, and food security concerns of neighborhood communities in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The target was Tokyo, Japan, where small-scale local food systems are widespread in walkable neighborhoods. We found that diversity in local food access, ranging from self-cultivation to direct-to-consumer sales, was significantly associated with health and food security variables. In particular, the use of allotment farms was more strongly associated with subjective well-being than the use of urban parks, and it was more strongly associated with the mitigation of food security concerns than the use of food retailers. These findings provide robust evidence for the effectiveness of integrating urban agriculture into walkable neighborhoods.