Urban Agriculture: Fostering the Urban-Rural Continuum

Urban Farm DB summary

This essay-style article surveys urban agriculture projects that have proliferated worldwide since the late twentieth century, reshaping urban landscapes and urban fabric, offering alternatives to traditional urban life, creating new commons, and bringing people together. It cites examples from Singapore (self-reliant in meat), Bamako (self-sufficient in vegetables), and Berlin (80,000 community gardens on communal land with 16,000 more people on a waiting list). It states that vacant and derelict land arising from deindustrialization, population aging and decline (as in Japan and Germany), and emigration (in some African mid-sized cities) creates new opportunities for urban agriculture — citing Detroit, where thousands of hectares of urban land have been given to unemployed workers for food growing, and Britain, where councils in 20 cities have promoted urban agriculture on wasteland. It notes urban agriculture is gradually becoming a planning-policy option, integrated into land-use planning documents in Delft and protected within an inclusive local land development plan in Paris.