Research & reports

Ranka Junge, Andreas Graber · Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften digital collection (Zurich University of Applied Sciences) · Global

This paper discusses the need for practical tools and a stronger scientific base for sustainable urban farming, noting that visionary schemes often lack current practical application with available technologies. It identifies requirements for urban food production, including high quality, safety, and cost-effectiveness, and suggests innovations in planting, pest control, irrigation, and integration with existing building infrastructures. Aquaponics is presented as having the potential to contribute to all these aspects.

Evan Weissman · Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems · United States (New York City)

This case study in Brooklyn, New York, used mixed qualitative research methods to investigate the political possibilities of urban agriculture for fostering food justice. Findings indicate that problematic contradictions rooted in the neoliberalization of urban agriculture limit the transformative possibilities of farming the city as currently practiced in Brooklyn. The study suggests that longstanding agrarian questions are informative for critically interrogating urban agriculture as a politicization of food.

Salwa Tohmé Tawk, Mounir Abi Said, S.K. Hamadeh · Oxford University Press eBooks · Global

This study in the Middle East and North Africa region investigated the relationship between urban agriculture and food security in two peri-urban locations: Bebnine, Lebanon, and Wadi el Seer, Jordan. High food insecurity was prevalent in both locations, demonstrating that producers were more food insecure than non-producers. Food security was found to be strongly associated with poverty and the number of household members.

Nicole C. List · EchoGéo · Senegal (Pikine)

Based on fieldwork in Pikine, a rapidly urbanized city in Senegal's Dakar region, two interconnected conflict cases concerning the development of urban agricultural land for middle-class and elite housing were analyzed. The analysis indicates that public and private actors, including producers, traditional authorities, real estate developers, and local/central government officials, are abandoning old forms of governance in favor of "territorial alliances" to promote their own urban development projects. These alliances lead to new relationships between local/central government members and civil society, impacting urban Senegal's land registry, property rights, and public infrastructure.

Pascale Joassart‐Marcelli, Fernando J. Bosco · Métropoles · United States (California)

This article explores the growth of local food practices in urban southern California, focusing on farmers' markets. While alternative food initiatives like farmers' markets are often seen as resistance to capitalist pressures, this research provides evidence that they have become increasingly popular among affluent and white urban residents. This finding challenges the claim that local food fosters democracy and justice, indicating that these initiatives can reproduce neoliberal urban agendas and reshape cities along lines of race and class.

Nobuhle Sebata, Clifford Mabhena, Mkhokheli Sithole · IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science · Zimbabwe

A qualitative study in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, using data from 30 women, 5 key informant interviews, and 2 focus groups, examined urban agriculture's role in women's poverty resilience. While urban agriculture significantly improved food availability and access, its nutritional contribution was low due to a focus on maize, and income generation remained very low due to subsistence production.

Kizito K. Mwajombe · · Tanzania

This study investigated urban agriculture (UA) produce marketing in three Tanzanian municipalities. Findings showed UA farmers lacked pre-arranged contracts with buyers, limiting their marketing, and faced problems including poor packaging, bylaws, taxes, and difficulty meeting consumer preferences. Farmers also lacked direct links to retail and consumer units like supermarkets.

· Hart Publishing eBooks · United Kingdom (England and Wales)

This paper explores the phenomenon of people in England and Wales returning to the land for various food-growing projects, including over 1,000 community gardens and 82 school farms. It examines the legal frameworks regulating these diverse projects and finds that the legal framework is fragmented, poorly signposted, and often absent, with projects sometimes depending entirely on landowner goodwill. The study concludes that there is little coherency in the law regarding these initiatives.

Jonathan Crush · · Global

Cities in the global South face a deepening crisis of food inaccessibility, characterized by food poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. This urban crisis is largely invisible to policy and research communities, with less attention given to urban food security than in the 1990s. Urban agriculture is the only aspect of urban food security receiving significant attention, though it is improbably seen as the key to achieving food security in these cities.

Benjamin Drury, Renee Laliberte, Jared Watson, Connor Wilgress · Digital WPI · United States (Worcester)

The city of Worcester, MA, faces health issues due to economic instability and low access to affordable healthy food. While urban farming has the potential to address these problems, the city lacks an effective policy.

Katherine Luke · D-Scholarship@Pitt (University of Pittsburgh) · United States (Pittsburgh)

This study used a door-to-door survey in six Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania neighborhoods to measure the impact of community gardens on residents' perceptions of food access. It found that many gardeners do not consider gardening to improve their personal food security, and despite geographic proximity and expressed interest, community garden participation rates were low. Social and emotional barriers, including lack of gardening knowledge and racial prejudice, appeared to prevent residents from becoming active participants.

Chiara Tornaghi, Barbara Van Dyck · Local Environment · United Kingdom

This paper explores the "spheres of influence" and contradictions that shaped the trajectory of the Edible Public Space project in Leeds, UK, drawing on the authors' personal experience. It analyzes the dynamics and contradictions at play in the formation of an urban gardening group stemming from scholarly and committed action ambitions. The study focuses on the role of spatial interventions in fostering social innovation in the public food and land agenda, aiming to capture learning elements for scholarly activism, political gardening, and radical urbanism.

Jonathan Crush · · Global

This article argues that cities of the Global South are experiencing a deepening crisis of food inaccessibility, marked by growing food poverty, hunger and malnutrition, lack of dietary diversity, child wasting and stunting, increased vulnerability to infectious and chronic disease, and a growing obesity epidemic. It states that this urban crisis remains largely invisible to the policy and research communities concerned with global food security, noting that there was more research and policy debate on urban food insecurity in the 1990s, when the Global South was less urbanized than today, and that concern with urban food security has since been displaced by the new international food security agenda and its pervasive anti-urban bias. It observes that the only aspect of urban food security currently commanding significant attention is urban agriculture, which it describes as widely, but improbably, seen as the key to achieving food security in cities of the Global South.

Joann Lo · Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis · United States

A first-hand essay by the executive director of the Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA) in the United States argues that despite growing interest in sustainable food production and systems — including community gardens, urban agriculture and "slow" food — the broader food movement has not fully integrated the voices and leadership of the workers who bring food from farm to table. It states that food workers, numbering almost 20 million in the U.S. alone, face multiple injustices including low wages, lack of benefits and dangerous working conditions that intersect with the sustainable-food movement's own concerns about food insecurity and access to healthy, affordable food, and recounts the FCWA's history and work from the author's own position.

Michela Felicetti · Advanced engineering forum · Italy

A paper examining whether the food hub concept can be applied to the Piana di Sibari area of Calabria, Italy, designated a Quality Agrifood District (DAQ) under regional law. After identifying features of the food hub concept within the area's largest cooperative, the paper argues that this arrangement represents an opportunity for small farmers to access conventional food supply chains from which they would otherwise be excluded. It frames food hubs as a hybrid of alternative and conventional food networks and, notably, as a way to address the economic viability problem faced by local food initiatives such as community-supported agriculture (CSA)—that is, the paper's premise is that CSA-type local food initiatives struggle to be economically viable on their own.

Ryan E. Galt · Economic Geography · United States (California)

A study of 54 Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms in California's Central Valley used qualitative and quantitative data to explain farmers' earnings. An ordinary least squares regression analysis revealed that farmers' age, number of employees, and CSA type strongly influence earnings. The study found that the moral economy of CSA often results in self-exploitation due to farmers' strong sense of obligation to members, despite allowing for economic rents.

Sarah James · Geographical Research · Australia (Sydney)

This paper examined the failure of Sydney's 'green zones' farmland protection policies, which were abandoned due to protests. The failure was attributed to a lack of consultation with Sydney's diverse small-scale farmers, rather than a rejection of farmland protection itself. Farmer interviews suggested that a bottom-up policy-making approach would have been more successful in maintaining farming in peri-urban areas.

Kirstie Cadger, Thembela Kepe · Development in Practice · Botswana

Challenges facing community garden initiatives among the San of Botswana were analyzed through semi-structured interviews and participant observation in two San communities. The study found that the failure of the gardens related to how the San are treated and how they view their situation as destitute people. Forced resettlement, historical livelihood disruption, and government and NGO policies of development through welfare neglecting genuine empowerment were concluded to be responsible for the limited success of the community gardens.

Robert Garey Stewart, Marcel Korth, Laurenz Langer, Shannon Rafferty, N Rebelo Da Silva · · Global

This paper is a protocol for a systematic review on the impacts of urban agriculture programs on food security and nutrition in low and middle-income countries. It notes potential disadvantages of urban agriculture, including contamination, spread of diseases, depletion of water supplies, soil erosion, and health risks from pesticides. The review aims to identify, appraise, and synthesize evidence on these impacts comprehensively and transparently, given that the existing evidence-base is not well understood.

Josiah Taru, Hardlife Stephen Basure · Russian Journal of Agricultural and Socio-Economic Sciences · Zimbabwe (Harare)

This study applied Norman Long's interface analysis to understand the causes of conflicts and struggles among urban agriculture (UA) actors in Kuwadzana Extension, Harare. Intensified competition for scarce land and water escalated conflicts, particularly in off-plot agriculture due to its contentious nature outside institutional frameworks. Actors with different power bases used them to dispossess and marginalize others. Conflict resolution mechanisms (mediation, litigation, conciliation) often lacked legal binding or institutional backing, tending to generate more disputes.

Yuki Kato · Sociological Inquiry · United States (New Orleans)

This case study of a community-supported agriculture (CSA) organization in New Orleans focused on the lack of participation by local residents in the CSA market despite its intentions. Interview and ethnographic observation data indicated a general consensus on economic constraints, while some non-resident supporters attributed the issue to a lack of knowledge about the food system. Residents, however, pointed to spatial and sociocultural barriers, including produce selection, purchase options, market access convenience, and the race-related historical and spatial context of the market's location, making the market less accessible to them.

Giovania Genevieve Tiarachristie · · United States (Harrisburg)

This qualitative study explored race-class conflicts around food and urban gardening in South Allison Hill, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a diverse, low-income neighborhood. Seven interviews with neighborhood leaders revealed that the "Whiteness" of a new wave of urban gardening can create race and class tension, hindering collaborative partnerships and local food systems development. The findings indicate structural limitations and social roadblocks, suggesting that urban gardening can exacerbate existing inequities if not approached with structural economic justice and cultural competency.

Phil. Caleb Mireri · African Journal of Agricultural Research · Kenya (Kisumu)

This study surveyed 194 urban farmers in Kisumu municipality, Kenya, to assess urban agriculture's role in income, employment, and food supply. It found that most urban farmers and their employees receive very low income, with a mean monthly income of US$135 (US$0.64 per person per day), which is below the acceptable one dollar a day per person. Urban agriculture primarily supplements food requirements for the urban poor and provides income for a few commercial farmers.

Marcelo Ortega Romero, Juan Mingot Marcilla, María Jesús García Martínez, Eduardo de Miguel, Miguel Izquierdo‐Díaz, Amaya Gómez · · Spain (Madrid)

This study evaluated the potential health risk from trace elements in urban garden soils in Madrid, Spain. Thirty-six composite soil samples were collected from the top 20 cm of six urban gardens, and concentrations of cobalt, chromium, copper, nickel, lead, and zinc were determined. The findings indicated that urban soils are significantly enriched in trace elements relative to background levels, suggesting a potential health risk.

Terri Evans, Christiana Miewald · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · Global

Community gardens and other local food initiatives are insufficient strategies to replace the quantity and efficiency provided by contemporary globalized food systems for supplying cheap food to urban populations.