Research & reports

Charlotte Potter, Silvia Sarapura, Camilo Jimenez Gonzalez, Justina Walker-Mohamed, Paul Benalcazer, Biinjitiwaabik Zaagging Anishinaabek, Netmizaaggamig Nishnabeg, Red Rock Indian Band · Rural Review Ontario Rural Planning Development and Policy · Canada (Northern Ontario)

The 'Braiding Food Systems' project, a community-led partnership with three Northern Ontario First Nations, used mixed-methods Participatory Action Research to examine conditions influencing food security and sovereignty. Community members identified structural constraints rooted in colonial governance, contemporary ecological pressures, and local transformation opportunities. This research demonstrates that sustained, community-led collaboration can counterbalance colonial food systems by reorganizing decisions, strengthening access, and enhancing resilience within Indigenous food networks.

Elisa Carvalho Lauer, Jaqueline Lima Liskoski, Kelliane Da Consolação Fuscaldi · Revista Campo-Território · Brazil

This study mapped and analyzed urban and peri-urban agriculture (AUP) legislation across municipal, state, and federal levels in Brazil, identifying 217 municipal laws in 113 municipalities, 33 state laws, and federal frameworks. The research systematized normative content into twelve thematic categories, showing AUP's integration into food security, urban sustainability, and income generation agendas. While a qualitatively consistent normative basis exists, gaps persist regarding conceptual definition, area guarantees, water access, financing, and credit. It is necessary to expand and harmonize regulations across all three spheres to consolidate AUP as a structural strategy for sustainable cities.

Hoyoon Jung · The International Journal of Social Sustainability in Economic Social and Cultural Context · Brazil (Belo Horizonte)

This study analyzes Belo Horizonte, Brazil's right-to-food model, which has reduced hunger and promoted social equity through integrated food policies like subsidized food programs and urban agriculture. Despite its successes, the model faces challenges in policy sustainability, financial constraints, and political continuity, and the study notes limitations including reliance on secondary data.

Hamed Faghiri, Zulkornain Yusop, Zainal Abidin Mohamed · IOP Conference Series Earth and Environmental Science · Malaysia

This systematic review analyzed 46 studies published between 2010 and 2025 to assess the role of urban farming in enhancing food security in Malaysia. Findings indicate that urban farming positively impacts food accessibility, availability, and affordability, while also promoting environmental sustainability and socio-economic inclusion. However, challenges such as limited space, regulatory hurdles, and public awareness gaps hinder its widespread adoption.

Eric Vukicevich · Urban Ecosystems · Global

This paper describes a class-based soil testing project where undergraduate students partner with local community gardeners to investigate urban soil health. The project involves students examining soil properties such as pH, organic matter, nutrients, and toxic elements, and ensuring crop safety. Students develop project plans, interpret data, and make recommendations for soil management.

Katie J. Field, Yolima Carrillo, Stuart A. Campbell, Jurriaan Ton, Adam Frew · Plants People Planet · Global

This special issue presents an innovative framework for sustainable land use, leveraging synergies between plants, soils, and societies to address global environmental crises and food insecurity. It notes that human activities, including land clearing for agriculture, rapid urban sprawl, and heavy use of chemical inputs, have pushed biogeochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus beyond their safe operating limits. The collection of papers collectively emphasizes the need for a fundamental shift in managing plant, soil, microbes, and human systems as interdependent components.

Yang Hua, Yong Xu, Kan ZHOU, Jie FAN · 资源科学 · China

This study analyzed the spatiotemporal patterns of supply and demand for seven major agricultural products in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (Jing-Jin-Ji) region from 2015 to 2022. It found that the region faces a dual risk of agricultural product supply-demand imbalance and spatial mismatch, with an overall surplus but local shortages. Specifically, Beijing and Tianjin generally lack self-sufficiency in agricultural products. The research proposes an integrated layout plan for high-quality agricultural bases to address these imbalances and ensure regional food security.

Supriya Dadaso Dighe · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · New Zealand

This study provides an eco-critical analysis of Eleanor Catton’s novel "Birnam Wood," exploring the entanglement of environmental activism, capitalist expansion, and identity formation. While the novel depicts conflicts between activist collectivism and corporate techno-capitalism through guerrilla gardening and land commodification, the study argues that its allegorical structure and reliance on familiar ideological binaries may constrain its capacity to generate radically new ecological insight. The research ultimately raises questions about the limits of literary representation in envisioning transformative environmental futures.

Malone M., Johnson B., Richard SI., Garcia N., Hamlin S. · Journal of Environmental Management · United States (Seattle)

Compares heavy-metal concentrations in vegetables grown in urban community gardens in the Seattle metropolitan area with produce from the grocery stores participants regularly used — a question set by the partnering farmers themselves. Metal concentrations frequently exceeded health guidelines in both, but were generally higher in the community-garden produce. Cadmium and lead posed the greatest risk and may exacerbate health risks for some populations.

Magdalena Raftowicz, Mirosław Struś · Sustainability · Poland

An empirical study in Poland, based on a critical literature review and a 2024 CAWI (computer-assisted web interview) survey of CSA producers, examined whether social capital theory explains food producers' engagement in Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) and whether this holds in practice. It found that social capital theory does explain the mechanisms underlying CSA engagement, with implications for local food system and small-farm policy, but that because of Poland's low level of social capital, the CSA model there remains only a niche complement to traditional agriculture, functioning primarily for a narrow group of socially and environmentally conscious consumers and small producer clusters.

Justine Lindemann, Natalia Alvial, Theodore R. Alter · Agriculture and Human Values · United States

Framed within studies of racial capitalism and neoliberal corporate food regimes, this article examines how residents of Pennsylvania's Monongahela (Mon) Valley experience and articulate food apartheid — a racialized system of food access — and how it intersects with deindustrialization, capital abandonment, and structural racism. Drawing on engagements across three Mon Valley municipalities, the findings reveal complex geographies of food apartheid intersecting with other markers of racial capitalism: inequitable transportation infrastructure, rising cost of living alongside declining quality of life, and ineffective political representation. Residents interpret these inequities as part of a broader racialized economic injustice favoring neighboring, predominantly white municipalities, compounded by distrust of local government perceived as perpetuating exclusionary policies rather than responding to community demands. In this context, participants envision community-driven solutions that extend beyond food system and urban agriculture initiatives.

Jackson Borges de Carvalho, Murilo Couto Lacerda, Linia Dayana Lopes Machado, Rejaine Silva Guimarães · Contribuciones a las Ciencias Sociales · Brazil

A documentary literature study examined urban agriculture in Gurupi, Tocantins, Brazil, where 288 productive units exist despite the municipal master plan and local legislation not explicitly addressing the practice, focusing on the need for municipal regulation. Drawing on federal, state, and municipal legislation, academic studies, territorial diagnostics, and empirical survey data from Primo et al. (2014), the study found that urban agriculture holds socio-environmental, food, and community relevance but faces a lack of technical assistance, legal insecurity, and scarce institutional support.

Hedwig Ajeng Grahani · GeoEco · Indonesia

A 2024 systematic survey of 217 urban farming households in Yogyakarta City, Indonesia, used Stata 19 for hypothesis testing and SPSS 27 for descriptive statistics, running a multiple linear regression of net urban farming income against 22 variables covering sociodemographics, farm structure, input management, biotic stress and institutional support (R2 = 0.7448). Eleven variables had a significant effect, with farm size the most favorable factor, followed by financial support, seed subsidies and technical aid; gender and family size also showed positive effects. Crop type correlated negatively with income, and biotic stress — particularly pest type and severity — substantially reduced income, while training and market access were not statistically significant.

Julija Bakunowitsch · Urban Planning · Germany

This qualitative study examines a publicly funded urban gardening project in Dortmund, Germany, implemented as a labor-market activation measure on temporarily available land targeting employable welfare recipients. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, it combines the concept of "food justice" with valuation studies to analyze how labor, land, and exchange are valued in everyday practice. The findings reveal tensions between empowerment and dependency, care and control, and social recognition and material precarity: while participants experienced gardening as meaningful work and a source of social participation and belonging, these valuations remained bounded by welfare regulations, temporary land tenure, and charity-based food distribution. The study concludes that such temporary urban gardening projects function as sites of plural, negotiated valuation where justice is enacted only provisionally, through everyday practice, within the limits of welfare governance.

Birhanu MW, Negussie ZT · The Scientific World Journal · エチオピア

A PRISMA-based review synthesising peer-reviewed articles published between 2015 and 2025 on the status, challenges and opportunities of home and urban vegetable gardening in Ethiopia. It frames urban and home-based gardening as a practical response to food insecurity, malnutrition and environmental degradation in rapidly urbanising areas where the search for better opportunities has driven rising unemployment and limited access to nutritious, affordable food. The barriers it identifies — limited access to land and clean water, gendered barriers to women, limited technical knowledge, inadequate extension services and weak institutional support — all hinder production and sustainability. It further notes that widespread irrigation with untreated wastewater poses significant health and environmental risks through heavy-metal contamination and soil-transmitted infectious disease. Opportunities such as using vacant urban lots, promoting vertical gardening and supporting local seed production remain untapped; government support for urban gardening has grown recently but its implementation remains inconsistent. The review also identifies a significant geographical gap within the existing literature.

Liz Ignowski, John Luis Lagdameo, Liel Gonzalez, Arma Bertuso, Pepijn Schreinemachers · Urban Agriculture & Regional Food Systems 11(1) · Philippines (Quezon City, Metro Manila)

A quantitative survey of 300 urban food producers in Quezon City, one of the 17 cities of Metro Manila, examining who practises urban agriculture, the methods and technologies used, the challenges met and the benefits gained. Production is mainly small-scale and subsistence-oriented, with commercialisation limited except among those with access to agricultural land. Self-produced food does increase access to fruit and vegetables, but participation reflects economic vulnerability rather than food sufficiency, and both scale and commercialisation depend strongly on land access — a structural barrier in dense cities. The authors conclude that urban agriculture in Quezon City acts as a safety net rather than an income source, while also providing enjoyment and stress relief, and that urban food-security policy should be realistic about the limited role of urban food production.

Paul Emile Tchinda, Thi-Thanh-Hiên Pham · Canadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes 70(3) · Cameroon (one large and one medium-sized city)

Urban agriculture appears in many sustainability agendas yet has been ignored in the public policies of many African countries. Combining multi-scale mapping (city and neighbourhood) with semi-structured interviews in one large and one medium-sized Cameroonian city, this study tests how well those techniques characterise urban agriculture for local decision-making. Mapping from 5-metre SPOT satellite imagery gives a general grasp of the spatial distribution of practices, but crop types, emerging entrepreneurial practices and the temporality of crops are invisible to it and surface only through field mapping and interviews. Echoing critical remote-sensing scholarship, the authors propose a methodological framework for profiling urban agriculture and argue that the choice of research method shapes our understanding of it, so it should be made with each city's specific characteristics in mind.

Kremer, Peleg, Borowiak, Craig, Scolio, Madeline · Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development · 米国（ペンシルベニア州フィラデルフィア）

US community gardens embody a conundrum: vital to community well-being and integral to urban social infrastructure, yet profoundly vulnerable through insecure land tenure, fragmented policy support and systemic disinvestment. This reflective essay examines the Philadelphia Garden Data Collaborative (PGDC), a multistakeholder initiative documenting, protecting and advocating for community-managed green space, from the authors' position as participant researchers. It traces the shift from grassroots mapping to coordinated data stewardship, which enabled both emergency interventions (such as preventing sheriff-sale evictions) and long-term preservation strategies, and examines the ethical dilemmas of collecting sensitive community data where bureaucratic neglect has rendered gardens invisible and where visibility can expose them to new risks. It concludes that data can strengthen advocacy and inform policy, but must be coupled with secure tenure mechanisms and sustained public investment.

Nkrumah B. · Urban Science · アフリカ（都市部・系統的レビュー）

A systematic review of the irony between abundant arable land and persistent hunger in African cities. It asks why a disproportionate share of urban residents do not produce their own food, even as food insecurity rises with heavy reliance on market-bought food, high poverty and rapid urbanisation, screening peer-reviewed literature via PRISMA and five inclusion benchmarks to clarify the debate on low uptake of urban agriculture.

Noxolo B.M., Kanosvamhira T.P. · Urban Agriculture & Regional Food Systems · 南アフリカ・ケープタウン（低所得地区）

Surveys and interviews assess whether hydroponics, of interest because dense settlements leave little space, is actually viable in Cape Town's low-income urban areas — deliberately supplementing a literature skewed towards Global North cities. Farmers perceive benefits in improved yields, water conservation and efficient land use, all valuable in a water-scarce, space-constrained city, but high setup costs and limited government support remain significant obstacles. Drawing on urban political ecology, the paper argues these financial and institutional barriers are rooted in historically produced inequality and ongoing capitalist dynamics of urban development. It concludes that while hydroponics has potential as a sustainable alternative, its high costs hinder broader applicability, and it is not yet a viable large-scale route to food security where resources are unequally distributed; supporting actors must first address financial feasibility and local expertise.

Kanosvamhira T.P., Magidi M. · International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability · 南アフリカ・ケープタウン／ジンバブエ・ノートン

A qualitative case study comparing the motivations, operational dynamics, land access challenges and legislative contexts of urban agriculture in two contrasting cities — Cape Town (South Africa) and Norton (Zimbabwe) — through stakeholder interviews and policy analysis, guided by social capital theory. In Cape Town urban agriculture is semi-institutionalised, backed by governmental and civil society actors and framed within wider food justice and community development agendas, yet practitioners face significant constraints from land access, urban policy fragmentation and competition over space. In Norton it is largely informal, a survivalist response to persistent socio-economic hardship with minimal formal support but relatively flexible regulation, where land-tenure insecurity and the threat of eviction are the pressing concerns. The paper argues that context-specific legislative frameworks, secure land rights and inclusive urban planning are the enabling conditions, situating urban agriculture within debates on land governance and urban informality.

Kissoly L. · Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems · タンザニア・ダルエスサラーム

An exploratory qualitative case study and policy analysis of urban agriculture's current landscape and possible futures in rapidly urbanizing Dar es Salaam, drawing on targeted literature and document review, a policy and regulatory scan, and 52 key informant interviews with municipal actors, urban farmers and food-system practitioners conducted between April and September 2025. Urban agriculture is valued for household food supplementation, small-scale income and fresh-food provisioning through short-cycle vegetable production close to consumers, but remains shaped by tolerated informality, insecure land access, fragmented regulation, contamination risks, weak institutional coordination and pressure on peri-urban land. Five evidence-informed trajectories are proposed — managed river-corridor cultivation; sacks, buckets and roofs for dense-ward micro-production; institutional land clusters; peri-urban foodshed belts with circular-resource hubs; and small-scale aquaculture with insect-based feed — presented explicitly not as tested feasibility models but as differentiated options requiring further technical, environmental, spatial and economic assessment. The paper argues the future depends not on a single large-scale model but on risk-sensitive, institutionally grounded forms of support.

Paul Β. Thompson · · Global

This article discusses urban agriculture, noting that the decline of grocery stores in inner cities and projected vulnerabilities in megacities outside the global West suggest distinct moral imperatives. It contrasts urban agriculture with rural resilience and sustainable intensification, highlighting its focus on consumption and present needs. The article describes two urban agriculture archetypes: one embracing high-tech solutions and another emphasizing local solidarities and urban-based control over the food system.

Florien Misago, Isaac Nzayisenga, Henri Jacques Ngirinshuti, Leon De Pere Irakoze, Richard Mind’je · East African Journal of Agriculture and Biotechnology · Rwanda (Kigali)

This study evaluated the potential of rooftop and wall-based urban agriculture to enhance food security in Gasabo District, Kigali, Rwanda. It used GIS and remote sensing to map suitable spaces and assessed 400 household heads using the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS). Findings showed that 41.5% of households experienced moderate to severe food insecurity, and approximately 32% of rooftops and walls were structurally appropriate for urban agriculture. While 57.8% of households expressed willingness to adopt rooftop or wall gardening, 67.4% cited structural and financial constraints.

Ibnu Akmal Khuluqi, Muhammad Azhari, Rahmawati Munir · TRANSFORM Journal of Tropical Architecture and Sustainable Urban Science · Indonesia (Bontang Baru)

A qualitative case study in Guyub Rukun RT 18, Bontang Baru, Indonesia, investigated the implementation of urban farming. The study found that urban farming improved local food security, strengthened social ties, and was supported by CSR funds. However, it faced challenges such as limited technology and resources, which were overcome through manual adaptation and cross-sector collaboration.