Research & reports

Fatmir Haskaj · Environment and Planning A Economy and Space · United States (New York City)

This article explores the historical context of community gardens in New York and Oakland, California, to understand and contest hegemonic forces in the urban environment. It posits that the work of gardeners is co-opted into a value regime through a process called "conspicuous labor." This process reconfigures the urban poor as productive, passive, and pastoral, contributing to gentrification.

Alison Hope Alkon, Yahya Josh Cadji, Frances C. Moore · New York University Press eBooks · United States (California)

In North Oakland, California, USA, collaborations between food justice organizations and residents, spurred by gentrification, were explored. The partnership and merger of Phat Beets Produce and the Self-Help Hunger Program were analyzed, initiated after a community garden was used in a gentrification advertisement in 2014. While this collaboration created a strong alliance, it was found to be insufficient to resist the structural forces driving gentrification.

Ana Carla Alves Gomes, Maria Lúcia Brito da Cruz · Revista Campo-Território · Brazil

This study investigated the spatial distribution of Urban Agriculture (UA) in Fortaleza, Brazil, particularly in the Lagoa Redonda neighborhood, and the permanence of these gardens amidst territorial disputes over urban space. Using bibliographic and secondary data surveys, site visits, and geoprocessing techniques, it analyzed the feasibility of UA reproduction and the implementation of specific policies for the activity. The study points to governance challenges, specifically territorial disputes concerning the permanence of urban agriculture in urban spaces.

C. K. Cartagena · Southeastern geographer · United States

This paper reviews "Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farms Practical Guide To Liberation on the Land" by Leah Penniman and Karen Washington. The book serves as a step-by-step guide for Black farmers, detailing historical struggles and solutions against oppression and racial discrimination in the farming sector, including cases like Pigford v. Glickman and the over-policing of Ron Finley's property. It offers instruction on obtaining land and resources, farm business plans, land restoration, crop planning, preserving harvests, raising animals, urban farming, and movement building. The book acknowledges obstacles faced by Black farmers and aims to provide a reference for sustaining productive farmland and activism to achieve land autonomy.

Bruce G. Ferguson, Helda Morales · · Mexico (Chiapas)

The Laboratorios para la Vida action research team in Chiapas, Mexico, trains educators to use school gardens and local food systems as venues for experiential learning. However, teachers face a host of hurdles to successful garden programs, including high teacher turnover, lack of space, and the difficulty of matching garden growth with the national curriculum calendar.

Anna Shortly, Thembela Kepe · Forests Trees and Livelihoods · Canada (Toronto)

This paper explores the opportunities and challenges of incorporating foraging practices into parks planning and management in Toronto, Canada, where foraging is often not permitted in urban parks. The study, based on a scan of practices and interviews, concludes that urban parkland managers should establish dedicated spaces like community orchards to safely and sustainably accommodate foraging, acknowledging current restrictions.

Moisés Savian, Mari Inês Caríssimi Boff, Pedro Boff · Cadernos de Agroecologia · Brazil

This study evaluated Brazilian scientific production from 2009 to 2018 on urban agriculture's contribution to food and nutritional security, analyzing 34 selected articles out of 612. It found that while agrobiodiversity is present in urban agriculture areas, pesticide use is a reality in some crop plots. The research suggests urban agriculture must be based on agroecology to avoid environmental contamination and produce healthy food.

Olivia Lee · Johns Hopkins University eBooks · United States (Chicago)

This study, drawing on affect theory, examines community gardens in Chicago's low-income, primarily Black South Side neighborhoods. It argues that while these gardens offer a spatial break from violence, they appear unable to fully counteract the ongoing marginalization by race and socioeconomic status. The gardens represent a quiet, nascent resistance against neoliberal injustices through intimate human-nature interaction.

Ted White · Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · United States

Non-market sales, barter, trade, donations, and other creative transactions have been integral to Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) since its inception, promoting creativity and new economic thinking due to its advance payment system for unknown harvests. Based on qualitative field research, primarily in the Northeastern United States, this chapter examines the innovative transactions that have enabled CSA and other Community Supported Enterprises (CSEs) to grow. While acknowledging that the 'Community Supported' model has not solved the challenge of providing adequate incomes for producers or attracting diverse participants, the chapter presents evidence of CSA as a vibrant system connecting producers and consumers through creative transactions.

Jennifer Engels, Sheree J. Watson, Henrietta Dulai, Kimberly Burnett, Christopher A. Wada, ‘Ano‘ilani Aga, Nathan DeMaagd, J. J. McHugh, Barbara Sumida, Leah L. Bremer · PLoS ONE · United States (O‘ahu)

A researcher-farmer collaboration on O‘ahu's Sumida watercress farm conducted a 25-year trend analysis and a year of intensive spring water sampling. Negative correlations were found between historical crop yields and increases in the Oceanic Niño Index, temperature thresholds, and pest outbreaks. Despite urbanization, on-farm water quality was very high, and microbial analyses suggested the farm provides nutrient retention services to downstream systems. The study demonstrates that challenges facing urban agricultural systems shift over time.

Lisa Berglund · · United States (Detroit)

This paper analyzes media coverage of informal practices like street vending, murals, and urban agriculture in Detroit's redeveloping neighborhoods. It reveals that while these practices are appropriated by developers and new, affluent arrivals as entrepreneurial and necessary for redevelopment, they are treated fundamentally differently from the informal practices of long-standing, marginalized residents, which are often condemned as illegal. This inconsistency highlights how legal frameworks are manipulated to exclude long-standing residents from the city's "renaissance."

Justine Lindemann · New York University Press eBooks · United States (Cleveland)

This chapter explores how gentrification in Cleveland, Ohio, impacts Black urban farmers' and gardeners' access to land in disinvested neighborhoods. It examines the ancillary effects of development on alternative land reuse efforts. The study highlights that despite a seemingly endless supply of vacant lots, gentrification negatively affects land access for these communities.

Guillermo Olivera, Kenia Zavaleta · Repositorio Digital Institucional de la Universidad de Buenos Aires (Universidad de Buenos Aires) · Mexico

This study argues that urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA), along with intra-urban open spaces, constitutes a "second best" land use for 21st-century cities pursuing sustainable growth aligned with the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals — whether through FAO's Greener Cities Strategy, which promotes garden-based UPA against poverty and food insecurity, or through UPA absorbed by city expansion, much of it commercial in nature. Based on analysis of official statistics and fieldwork in the Ejido Tejalpa in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico, the study finds that UPA persists there due to its historical trajectory and access to water and land, existing in commercial form rather than as urban gardens, but not without problems. Its main threat is identified as excessive urbanization and generational change among producers, and its main challenge as achieving greater involvement of urban governments through land management and urban planning, following the experience of other countries where agriculture is given more weight in metropolitan planning.

Charlotte Glennie · New York University Press eBooks · United States

This chapter traces the history of Seattle's P-Patch community garden program, which resident-activists have kept insulated from development pressure by advocating for it at critical moments. Advocates pursued a pro-growth strategy, framing the gardens as good for a growing city, which fed Seattle's image as green and livable and helped attract high-income residents and raise property values; while the gardens themselves remain secure, low-income and other vulnerable residents are being displaced by this green gentrification.

Pamela Arnette Broom, Yuki Kato · New York University Press eBooks · United States

This chapter examines the gentrification of foodways in post-Katrina New Orleans, combining the author's own experience as a long-term urban gardener with grower interviews. It argues that the emerging narrative presenting urban agriculture as a new idea obscures the city's long-standing tradition of local food production and procurement, and that the new geographic notion of local tends to dissociate from the social and cultural dimensions of preexisting folk foodways; it concludes that the popularity of urban agriculture among newcomers, though well-intended, had the adverse effect of discouraging many long-term residents from engaging with urban agriculture and from opportunities such as entrepreneurship, community health and urban sustainability.

Zach Mortice · Landscape architecture · Canada

This article covers landscape architect Alexander Cassini's (ASLA) involvement with the Carré Casgrain community garden in the Little Italy neighborhood of Montreal, Canada. The city and Le Carré et sa Ruelle began a process of establishing the site as a real estate reserve, transferring ownership to the city with management handed to the community members who had rehabilitated the land, but the piece reports that the battle over the vacant lot left the community garden in ruins.

Caren Freitas de Lima, Silvia Regina Nunes Baptista, Susana Arruda, Cristhiane Oliveira da Graça Amâncio · Revista Campo-Território · Brazil

This article analyzes Henri Lefebvre's concept of the "right to the city" in the context of Rio de Janeiro, a Latin American city, combining Lefebvre's framework with a historical bibliographical review of urban requalification and removals in Rio, analysis of official institutional data, and field research. In the 2000s, neighborhoods with a history of agricultural activity in Rio's West Zone — mainly Planning Area 4 (AP4), covering the Vargens region (Vargem Grande, Vargem Pequena, Camorim, and parts of Recreio dos Bandeirantes, Barra da Tijuca, and Jacarepaguá) — became targets of real estate expansion. The State enabled this expansion through urbanistic instruments such as the Vargens Urban Structuring Plan (PEU das Vargens) and the Land Use and Occupation Law (LUOS), which reduce agricultural areas. Although generally neglected in debates over urban struggles, the agroecology-based Carioca Urban Agriculture Network (Rede CAU), acting through the Articulação Plano Popular (APP Vargens), takes up the struggle for the right to the city and for urban planning, asserting that the right to the city is also the right to plant.

Kyle Richardville · Purdue e-Pubs (Purdue University System) · United States

With Purdue University's campus and much of its surrounding area classified by the USDA as a food desert, this study surveyed graduate students using a voluntary 33-question online Qualtrics survey distributed campus-wide, to identify barriers to purchasing and consuming fresh produce and to participating in local urban agriculture, and to assess how the COVID-19 pandemic affected food access and motivation for healthy eating and community garden engagement. Results show many Purdue graduate students face both individual and structural barriers to accessing fresh fruits and vegetables, with international students particularly vulnerable to structural barriers; lack of access to a personal vehicle was the primary predictor of vulnerability, especially during the pandemic. Students expressed interest in participating in local urban agriculture initiatives but most were unaware such initiatives existed. A second objective of the study tested whether leaf mold compost could improve degraded urban soils.

Samantha Senda-Cook · Argumentation and Advocacy · United States

Gifford Park, a neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska, United States, has been recreating itself through urban agriculture like many neighborhoods across the country. This case study conceptualizes urban agriculture as a "place ballet" — describing interactions between places and bodies — extending the idea that places can function as spatial arguments. The analysis found that urban agriculture reveals a complex material argument about the positive impacts places and bodies can have on communities and their members, while simultaneously overlooking the economic and racial privileges inherent in these efforts, and concludes that the place-ballet concept itself carries its own implications of economic and racial privilege.

Mysha Clarke, Melissa Davidson, Monika Egerer, Elsa C. Anderson, Nakisha Fouch · People Place and Policy Online · United States

This paper argues that community gardens should be a prioritized element of green infrastructure to improve cities' adaptation to climate change. Community gardens can reduce urban heat islands, provide ecosystem services, and increase stormwater retention. However, a qualitative analysis of 18 policy documents for Baltimore, Chicago, and New York City, U.S.A., found that green infrastructure for climate change adaptation prioritizes rain gardens, bioswales, and green roofs, but seldom acknowledges the role of community gardens.

Michael Carolan · Journal of the American Planning Association · United States

This 2019 study, based on 82 interviews in Denver, New York, and San Francisco, investigated how traditional and digital urban agriculture converge and diverge regarding land use and gentrification. It found that both digital and traditional urban farming systems are linked to gentrification and inequitable land use patterns. Digital urban farming systems also operate in a regulatory gray area, with their "digital" aspects used to gain more zoning permission than traditional urban agriculture.

Sarah E. Cramer, Anna Ball · Journal of Agricultural Education · United States

This qualitative case study in the United States examined a school garden program transitioning from non-profit to public school district control, conceptualizing this as a shift from a non-formal to a formal education paradigm. The research explored tensions between constructivist, non-formal educational philosophies and standardized, formal education within school garden settings. The findings indicate challenges in integrating non-formal learning into formal public education structures, arguing for broader legitimation of garden-based learning in curriculum.

Giszell Dymond Weather · Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) · United States

A 7-month study of the Angier Avenue Neighborhood Farm in East Durham, a predominantly Black area, found that Black residents rarely participate in farm activities. This research, based on participant observation, interviews, and food systems research, theorizes the relationship between urban farming and gentrification, arguing that equitable community food projects must incorporate local Black residents' cultures and histories to be sustainable.

Arantza Elena Sanchez Gutierrez · · Mexico

In Querétaro Municipality, Mexico, a strategy was designed and implemented to increase and incentivize the use of urban agriculture. Previous strategies implemented in Mexico had resulted in low participation and abandonment of practice due due to low interest from inhabitants and a lack of will to follow through on plans. This qualitative research analyzed the causes of these failures using User-Centered Design tools and Design Thinking. Findings showed that a "strategy of appropriation," emphasizing a sense of belonging, well-being, and commitment, resulted in an increase in this variable, which influences the abandonment of agricultural practices.

Anna Paltseva, Zhongqi Cheng · RUDN Journal of Agronomy and Animal Industries · United States (New York City)

Elevated trace metal concentrations, particularly lead (Pb), are prevalent in New York City urban soils. This study analyzed the spatial distribution of lead in NYC gardens and assessed pollution levels and ecological risks. Findings indicated that lead posed moderate to significantly high ecological risk, and the majority of NYC garden soils were characterized as polluted.