Research & reports

Devon A. Mihesuah · American Indian Culture and Research Journal · United States

In Oklahoma, tribes have initiated numerous food projects over the past three decades aimed at achieving food sovereignty. However, Oklahoma's complex history, environmental issues, and current politics present challenges such as uneven food quality, poor indigenous health, intratribal factionalism, racism, and a stark dichotomy of affluence and extreme poverty. These factors complicate the creation of self-sufficient food systems and the reconnection of tribal members with traditional foodways.

Donovon Ceaser · Ethnography & Education · Global

This study analyzed the leadership of founder John Browne at Green Shoots, a nonprofit service-learning urban farming school established in 2010, using the theory of founder's syndrome. Browne, despite an openly egalitarian community of practice ethic, created a hierarchy at the school that led to a staff walk-out and subsequent firings. Findings revealed Browne as a charming and inspirational teacher who engaged in dominating leadership contradicting the community of practice's ideals, resulting in disrespected students, disillusioned staff, and a founder unable to take responsibility for his leadership.

Elena Domene Gómez, Francesc Coll, Marta Garcia-Sierra · Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) · Spain (Barcelona)

Informal vegetable gardens have proliferated in Barcelona's urban periphery since the 1980s, serving as leisure spaces and food sources, and are a relevant form of agriculture. However, these "unregulated" spaces are not considered in urban and peri-urban agriculture promotion policies. A GIS methodology mapped these gardens in the Barcelona metropolitan area for 2009 and 2015, showing an increase in occupied surface during the recent economic crisis. The study evaluates contradictions leading municipal managers to eliminate or regulate these informal spaces, attributing them partly to the subjectivity of the urban and peri-urban agriculture concept and its supposed multifunctionality.

Seyedardalan Ashrafzadeh, Niklas J. Lehto, Gareth Oddy, Ron G. McLaren, Ling‐Fen Kang, Nicholas Dickinson, Johannes Welsch, Brett Robinson · Applied Geochemistry · New Zealand (Christchurch)

A study in Christchurch, New Zealand, measured heavy metal (HM) concentrations in suburban garden soils and soils at risk of HM contamination due to former land uses or nearby activities. HM concentrations in suburban garden soils were higher than normal background levels, with 46% of urban garden samples exceeding the residential land use national standard for lead (210 mg kg−1), and the most contaminated soil reaching 2615 mg kg−1. Arsenic and zinc also exceeded national standards in 20% of soils. These findings suggest that soil HM concentrations should be key criteria when determining future land use for former residential areas demolished due to the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes, and that redeveloping these areas as parklands or forests would result in less human HM exposure than agriculture or community gardens where food is produced and bare soil is exposed.

Nerea Morán Alonso, Ícaro Obeso Muñiz, Agustín Hernández Aja, Felipe Fernández García · Moravian Geographical Reports · Spain

This paper analyzed the evolution of peri-urban agriculture in Spain's Madrid and Oviedo metropolitan areas to identify revitalization opportunities. Using aerial images and cartographic bases, the study found that peri-urban agriculture has suffered from urban occupation and internal changes in crops and agricultural uses, experiencing a process of decline. Innovative initiatives are explored as potential revitalization opportunities.

Dorothy Menefee, Ganga M. Hettiarachchi · · United States

Soil contamination with potentially toxic trace elements and anthropogenic organic pollutants is a widespread problem in urban areas worldwide. While urban agriculture increases food security, potential risks exist without knowledge of urban soil contamination. Lead (Pb) contamination is a widespread and common urban soil issue associated with human health risks, with almost half of US EPA Superfund sites having Pb contamination. Cadmium (Cd) is also a widespread urban soil pollutant, largely from industrial activities like plastic manufacturing, battery disposal, and metal ore processing. The bioavailability of soil Pb to humans is unusually low and generally tied to Pb speciation.

Lindsay K. Campbell · Cornell University Press eBooks · United States (New York City)

This chapter analyzes why urban forestry was prioritized in New York City's PlaNYC mayoral initiative while urban agriculture was overlooked. It examines the networks, public-private partnerships, elite ties, and bureaucratic structures involved in PlaNYC, revealing that certain voices were heard while others were ignored in the sustainability planning process. The analysis highlights issues of governance and equity in urban nature planning.

Lindsay K. Campbell · Cornell University Press eBooks · United States (New York City)

In New York City, chapter six revealed how civic and public actors working outside PlaNYC iteratively embedded urban agriculture and food policy into municipal planning efforts. Within the void created by city hall’s lack of engagement, other figures in the municipal government seized the opportunity to advance food policy agendas for New York City. The 2011 update to PlaNYC included a brief crosscutting section on food, although it lacked capital funding to fuel the achievement of its stated goals, and was seen by advocates as a symbolic and political achievement.

S. S. Horowitz, Liu JuanJuan Liu JuanJuan · CABI eBooks · China (Wuhan)

This chapter, focusing on a case study of intra-urban agriculture in Wuhan, China, mapped the dynamic relations between actors, institutions, processes, and spaces. Theoretical and practical challenges to growing food within Chinese cities were identified, and ways for state and non-state actors to collaborate in reassembling intra-urban agriculture to maximize its social, ecological, and economic contributions were suggested.

Gabin Korbéogo · Environment and Urbanization · Burkina Faso (Ouagadougou)

This article explores how land tenure, water flows, and water quality are legally, politically, and socially framed in urban agriculture in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Urban agriculture serves as a revenue source and a socio-political arena involving state representatives, experts, and farmers. Public authorities monitor legal standards for water use and hygiene, while farmers strive for efficient resource use, sometimes challenging official norms. These competing interests lead to conflicts over resource use or rule legitimacy, which are negotiated through institutional or informal bargaining.

Georgia Pollard, Philip Roetman, James Ward · Kobra (Universitätsbibliothek Kassel) · Australia (South Australia)

While urban agriculture is seen as a sustainable approach to improving food security, there is a significant knowledge gap regarding the financial accessibility of urban food production for all households. If urban agriculture remains primarily a middle-class discretionary activity, its role in city-wide food security improvement will be limited. This paper demonstrates that citizen science offers an effective approach to investigate the inputs (labor, costs, water use) and outputs (produce yields, value) of urban food gardens, using the Edible Gardens project in South Australia as an example.

Jason Byrne · · Global

Research on urban greenspace, including parks, gardens, and green infrastructure, consistently demonstrates that marginalized and vulnerable communities have less access to these areas. This chapter overviews environmental injustice research on urban greenspace, examining debates and challenges for researchers and policymakers, and highlighting issues like climate injustice and food insecurity related to environmental inequality.

Sertaç Güngör · Journal of Agricultural Faculty of Gaziosmanpasa University · Turkey (Konya)

This study investigated the current state of gardens in 7 nursery schools in Selçuklu district, Konya city, Turkey, regarding landscape design and space usage. The findings revealed that the nursery school gardens were not used effectively, lacked sufficient green space in their landscape design, and were not properly designed to contribute to children's mental and physical development.

Bethany B. Cutts, Jonathan London, Shaina Meiners, Kirsten Schwarz, Mary L. Cadenasso · Local Environment · Global

This paper applies a dynamic spatial politics framework to interpret a 30-year conflict over an urban garden in Sacramento, California. It examines how urban gardens, often idealized, are also sites of conflict due to competing visions of "soil" versus "dirt." The study highlights that contaminants like lead in the soil contribute to this instability, reframing fertile soil as dangerous dirt, and influencing the garden's transformation from a countercultural space to a gentrified amenity.

Rémi Schweizer, Cyril Mumenthaler · VertigO · Switzerland (Genève)

This case study in Geneva, Switzerland, examined the integration of urban agriculture and food sovereignty into public policy, focusing on the regional brand Genève Région - Terre Avenir (GRTA). The analysis, based on a cognitive approach, highlighted compromises and imbalances among actor communities with divergent value systems. Ultimately, the study demonstrated the difficulty in challenging the dominant agricultural framework.

Yoonah Jang, Sun Jin Jeong, Kyeong Suk Han, Gyung Mee Gim, InChan Choi, Joonyung Heo · The Korean Journal of Community Living Science · South Korea

A study investigated the status of school gardening in 164 elementary schools (39.4% of 416) in Jeollabuk-do, South Korea. The installation and automation of garden facilities, such as greenhouses and tool sheds, were poor. Teachers, who most often operated the gardens, reported difficulty managing them due to a lack of knowledge about sustaining gardens and expressed a need for training programs.

Matthew Reed, Daniel Keech · Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems · United Kingdom (Bristol)

This study investigated how urban food activists related to the media, represented themselves, and how others represented their agenda during 2015 when Bristol was the European Green Capital. The research found that mass media primarily focused on topics other than food, and urban food was not a salient issue in their coverage. The self-representation of urban food networks revealed a narrow focus of interest, which may have contributed to a lack of connection between potential allies within the city, indicating limited connections of urban food networks to circuits of power and influence.

Sydney Giacalone · Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography · United States (Boston)

This ethnographic study, conducted in Boston and Somerville in the summer of 2016, investigated how urban chicken keeping might transform keepers’ thinking about food systems and animal relationships. The research revealed the unexpected discovery of lead contamination in urban chicken flocks in the Boston area, which unsettled the imagined simplicity of urban agriculture and exposed a "metabolic rift." This finding prompted keepers to engage more deeply with the history of the soil and opened new ways of thinking about collective metabolism, multispecies living, and food politics.

Norbert Becker, Stefanie Schön, Alexandra‐Maria Klein, Ina Ferstl, Ali Kizgin, Egbert Tannich, Carola Kuhn, Björn Pluskota, Artur Jöst · Parasitology Research · Germany

The first mass development of Aedes albopictus, likely introduced by trucks from Italy, was confirmed in an allotment garden area in Freiburg, Southwest Germany, in 2015. Surveillance confirmed a high infestation, with the container index exceeding 30% in August 2015. Control measures, including citizen awareness, environmental management, and Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis (Bti) tablets, successfully reduced the Aedes albopictus population, with the number of gardens without containers increasing from 17% to 35% by September 2015.

Joshua Sbicca · Digital Collections of Colorado (Colorado State University) · Global

An article examining food as an entry point into the politics and processes of gentrification, discussed with reference to cities globally rather than a single case. Where traditional explanations of gentrification hinge on either political-economy or cultural drivers, the article shows the relationship between the two to argue that food gentrification is multifaceted, changing a neighborhood's class and ethnoracial demographics, foodscapes and foodways, and housing. It states that poor communities in cities around the world can experience harmful effects of food-driven gentrification, such as developers using urban agriculture to attract new residents and increase property values. It also describes food itself as being gentrified in two ways: for communities marginalized by race or ethnicity, culturally important foods become "cool," unaffordable and dispossessed from them, while the upscaling of food retail displaces former bars, cafes, restaurants, grocery stores and gardens. The article closes with a brief discussion of social movement strategies and policy approaches to prevent these harmful effects.

Elizabeth A. Miernicki · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · United States

A study from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, that identifies soil contamination as a universal concern in urban agriculture and notes that the long-term benefits of alternative soil management systems such as raised beds have not been explored in the scientific literature. Its stated objective is to determine the effects of six soil management options - direct soil with synthetic fertilizer (DSF), direct soil with organic amendments (DSO), raised-bed mixture with synthetic fertilizer (RBMF), raised-bed mixture with organic amendments (RBMO), raised-bed compost-only with synthetic fertilizer (RBCF), and raised-bed compost-only with organic amendments (RBCO) - on yield of kale, garlic, pepper, cilantro and radish, on soil biological, chemical and physical properties, and on ecosystem services such as water and nutrient retention. Data collected include marketable versus cull yield, soil nutrients and organic matter, soil moisture, weed emergence, infiltration rate and bulk density, but this abstract does not report the comparative results themselves.

Jonathan Crush, Bruce Frayne, Cameron McCordic · Journal of food security · Africa

This study uses household survey data from Maseru, Lesotho, to assess the relationship between household engagement in urban agriculture and food security. It found no consistent, statistically significant relationship between urban agriculture practice and food security; some urban agriculture practices were associated with significantly greater odds of food security only among middle-income households in the sample. Because the observed benefits appeared conditional on household income, the study concludes that a generalized, production-centered approach to food insecurity may not be the most effective means of addressing household food insecurity in Maseru.

Katyelle Rafael, Ariella Andrade Marchioro, Cristiane Maria Colli, Bruna Tiaki Tiyo, Fernanda Ferreira Evangelista, Renata Coltro Bezagio, Ana Lúcia Falavigna-Guilherme · Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene · Brazil

This study genotyped Giardia duodenalis in raw-eaten vegetables (crisp lettuce, regular lettuce, kale, chicory, and rocket) sampled from street markets and community vegetable gardens in an urban area of southern Brazil. Researchers analyzed 130 samples from street markets and 130 from community gardens (260 total), washing them in Tween 80 solution, filtering through a cellulose acetate membrane, amplifying the GDH gene by semi-nested PCR, and genotyping positive samples by PCR-RFLP. 7.3% (19/260) of samples tested positive for G. duodenalis, from both street markets (10/130) and community gardens (9/130), including both organic and non-organic products. Assemblage AI predominated, but assemblages B and E, which carry zoonotic potential, were also found. The study concludes this points to a need for investigating commercially sold raw vegetables and establishing stricter quality control.

Miriam Hermi Zaar · OKARA Geografia em debate · Brazil

Arguing that analyzing territory across multiple scales requires an analytical framework grounded in the dynamic, repeated interweaving of elements and processes that combine into — and clash as — diverse "territorial fragments," this paper examines urban agriculture as a site where city and countryside, urban and rural, and their diverse practices approach, blend and are sometimes confused with one another. Focusing on horticulturists in the Gramorezinho Community in Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, as its case, the study shows that historical and spatial singularities — environmental, socioeconomic and administrative — have produced distinct processes that at times align and at other times contradict one another.

Richard Blaustein · BioScience · United States

Against a backdrop of heightened concern about lead exposure following the lead-contaminated water supply in Flint, Michigan, a review examines prior research on whether sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) can remove lead from urban garden soil through phytoextraction, in which plants draw contaminant metals up into their shoots. Some preliminary studies suggested sunflowers could phytoextract lead, but more extensive research has been disappointing; adding the chelating agent EDTA raises lead's solubility and plant uptake but is expensive and only meaningful combined with other practices such as compost application. Retired USDA scientist Rufus Chaney states that, unlike successful cases such as alpine pennycress extracting cadmium or canola extracting radioactive cesium, no serious study supports significant lead phytoextraction.