Urban Agriculture in Post-Industrial Landscape: A Case for Community-Generated Urban Design

Urban Farm DB summary

A paper examining urban agriculture in United States post-industrial cities, which since the mid-20th century have experienced dramatic loss of population, community resources, and economic growth even as their wider metropolitan areas continued to grow, and which are characterised by high levels of crime, substance abuse, unemployment, poverty, food insecurity, vacant land, and urban blight. Many such communities rely on urban agriculture as a means of food security and sustainability as well as community resilience, vacant-land remediation, and neighbourhood development, yet the paper argues that urban agriculture has been treated as a temporary, informal land use, with land tenure conflict causing the untimely demise of many projects. In terms of urban design, it further argues that urban agriculture projects in many cities have developed as a "patchwork," lacking physical connectivity to other gardens, open spaces, and community infrastructure.