Research & reports

Bethany B. Cutts, Danqi Fang, Kaitlyn Hornik, Jonathan London, Kirsten Schwarz, Mary L. Cadenasso · Environmental Justice · United States (California)

This study introduced a Qualitative Historical Geographic Information System (QHGIS) method to investigate how newspapers reflect changing meanings of place in relation to environmental burden and benefit. Applying QHGIS to urban gardening and soil lead issues reported in Sacramento, California, the method revealed the distribution of public narratives of environmental concern across the city, the politics embedded in location names, place name-changes, and how locations serve as framing devices for environmental concerns.

Diana Mincytė, Karin Dobernig · Environment and Planning A Economy and Space · North America

This article examines manual work in urban farming within alternative food networks in the Northeastern United States, based on ethnographic fieldwork and 40 interviews. The analysis reveals that while manual work counters alienation, it also reproduces consumer society institutions and reinforces neoliberal values like productivity and self-improvement. Urban farms function as "experiential production" sites, where the farming experience is continuously commodified despite re-embedding in community and environment.

Thaís Cristina Schneider, Paulo André Niederle, Myrian Regina Del Vecchio-de Lima · Razón y Palabra · Brazil

This article analyzes urban agriculture from a communication perspective, focusing on how practitioners and non-practitioners understand its critical and alternative role regarding the modern food system. The study of Quinta da Videira in southern Brazil found that while urban agriculture is used to counter conventional food production and associated lifestyles, there are also resistances to integrating agricultural practices into the urban environment.

Elizabeth Vibert · Journal of Contemporary African Studies · South Africa

This article examines the Hleketani Community Garden in Limpopo Province, South Africa, highlighting the successes of women farmers in reducing poverty and improving health outcomes. Despite these benefits, the research identifies significant structural barriers, including lack of access to resources, unfavorable policy frameworks for small-scale agriculture, and worsening climate change, that hinder small-scale farmers, particularly women.

Lal, Prita · Academic Commons (Stony Brook University) · United States (New York City)

This dissertation studies the relationship between community gardens and gentrification in New York City. It argues that low-income people's efforts in revitalizing their blighted neighborhoods by building community gardens in the 1970s and 1980s contributed to gentrification in the 1990s and beyond. The research points out that real estate developers preyed on people's efforts, and the people subsidized the city's revitalization. It concludes that while gardeners did not cause gentrification, their efforts played a significant role in the process, and stronger policy protections for gardens are needed as city policies permitted gentrification.

Marion Ernwein · Open Collections · Switzerland (Geneva)

This paper critically examined municipal involvement in community garden and urban agriculture development in the canton of Geneva, Switzerland, focusing on a case study in Vernier. It found that the municipality's urban agriculture program serves contradictory functions, being simultaneously progressive in reversing space privatization and nature commodification, yet also reinforcing the neoliberal production of individualized, self-responsible, and self-entrepreneur subjectivities. The highly-regulated nature of these municipal community gardens complicates their categorization as either grassroots or purely institutional projects.

Alfred Wong, Alan Hallsworth · Kobra (Universitätsbibliothek Kassel) · Canada (Vancouver)

This paper examines urban/community gardening in Vancouver, Canada, from the perspective of basic farming realities such as growing season and land availability. It was found that securing low-cost land within dense urban limits, insufficient ambient temperature and water supply during the growing season, and contemporary societal structures pose significant obstacles to community gardening producing affordable food. Overcoming these fundamental hurdles carries significant negative environmental and economic consequences.

Joshua Zeunert · UNSWorks (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia) · Australia

Urban public green spaces typically require external budgets for maintenance, with most projects costing municipal authorities more money than they generate, making them economically unproductive. For instance, the Adelaide Parklands annually costs AU$9 million for maintenance while generating less than AU$1 million in income. Maintenance spending on public green spaces in the USA, UK, and Australia has been declining, a trend accelerated since the 2008 global financial crisis.

John Taylor, Sarah Taylor Lovell, Sam E. Wortman, M.K. Chan · Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems · United States (Chicago)

In Chicago, semi-structured interviews and plant inventories were conducted with 59 African American, Chinese-origin, and Mexican-origin households regarding ecosystem services and tradeoffs in their home food gardens. A total of 387 plant species were identified; gardens of African American households were rich in ornamental species, while those of Chinese-origin households had a depauperate flora. Shade trees and a developed shrub layer were absent from most gardens, suggesting a tradeoff in ecosystem services favoring food production. Only 9.6% of the inventoried species were native to the Chicago area.

Leila A. Graves, Harrison Hughes, Meena M. Balgopal · Journal of Agricultural Education · Global

This case study examined the implementation of a horticulture-based curriculum by two 3rd grade teachers and two STEM coordinators. While one STEM coordinator found the curriculum addressed academic science standards and provided relevant inquiry activities, the other STEM coordinator and teachers believed garden plants did not address science standards and only supported enrichment. This highlights a divergence in perception regarding the curriculum's alignment with academic standards.

Valerie Chiykowski, Guhan Chendurnathan, Jun S. Lee, Lius Daniel · cIRcle (University of British Columbia) · Canada

This project at the University of British Columbia's Student Union Building (SUB) aimed to reduce contamination in post-consumer organics bins using visual prompts. While the intervention successfully decreased both the percentage weight and level of contamination, the overall weight of compostable waste also decreased post-intervention. The study suggests considering confounding factors like a sustainability fair during baseline data collection and improved bins, and proposes an infrared sensor-based audio prompt system for future efforts.

Sheri L. Johnson, Dalila Cardona, J. H. C. Davis, Benjamin Gramling, Chelsea Hamilton, Ray G. Hoffmann, Sabrina J. Ruis, Douglas J. Soldat, Steve Ventura, Yan Ke · Progress in community health partnerships · Global

This study used community-based participatory research to explore backyard gardening practices and soil lead concentrations in urban neighborhoods. Interviews with 20 adult gardeners revealed perceived benefits but few initial concerns about lead exposure, despite children's active involvement. Soil lead concentrations from 17 residential properties ranged from 7 to 3,234 mg kg-1, significantly higher than commercial soils (6 to 13 mg kg-1), indicating a contamination risk.

Becky Lundberg Witt · FLASH - Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship & History (Fordham University) · United States (Baltimore City)

This article argues that property law in Baltimore City, Maryland, creates a significant barrier to urban growing by prioritizing the right to exclude others from vacant and abandoned land. Thousands of fallow lots remain inaccessible to neighbors for community benefit due to property ownership laws, which can neglect the human rights of the poorest citizens. The paper examines how the universal right to adequate food might legally support urban farming and gardening.

Charlotte Prové, Joost Dessein, Michiel De Krom · Ghent University Academic Bibliography (Ghent University) · Belgium; Poland

A study evaluating urban agriculture in Belgium and Poland argues that current governance approaches fail to reflect the importance of local context. The authors found that considering city-specific factors is crucial for urban agriculture to reach its full potential. They recommend a broader policymaking strategy that acknowledges benefits beyond food production.

Elifnaz Durusoy · MEGARON / Yıldız Technical University Faculty of Architecture E-Journal · Turkey (Istanbul)

The Yedikule Urban Gardens in Istanbul were studied as an example where cultural conservation and social inclusion have been challenged by economic development due to the growth of urban development. This study emphasizes both destruction and development within the context of physical, natural, economic, and social change. It demonstrates the hardships faced when attempting to sustain urban gardens during periods of urban growth.

Andrew Hursthouse, T. E. Leitão, Annette Voigt, Avigail Heller, Béatrice Bechet, Paulo Brito da Luz · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · Europe

This chapter overviews factors influencing the chemical, physical, and biological status of soils, water, and the biosphere in urban allotment gardens. It highlights that urban garden soils, water, and biosphere are affected by pollution due to their location in city centers or suburbs, with traffic infrastructure and industrial zones widely identified as impacting soil and water quality. Concerns over long-term risks from pollutant transfer (mainly metals) from soil to plants in these uncontrolled environments have been widely publicized.

· International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR) · India

A study of the pink hibiscus mealybug (Maconellicoccus hirsutus), documented as a growing urban pest in the agricultural fields of Vadodara, India. Regular visits to agricultural fields and community gardens over two years (April 2013-April 2015) tracked the pest's morphology, biology, distribution, and relation to biotic and abiotic factors, along with damage type and extent on different host plants. Major infestation occurred on Annona squamosa, followed by significant infestation on Hibiscus rosa-sinensis and Gossypium hirsutum (cotton), with adult females and nymphs as the main infesting stages and damage peaking in the winter months of November to February. The study also documented a mealybug-ant mutualistic association and noted that the prevailing use of chemical pesticides in the city is a probable reason for the growing mealybug population.

E.N. Sabiiti, Constantine Bakyusa Katongole · Water science and technology library · Uganda

Wakiso district, the peri-urban area surrounding Kampala, Uganda's capital city (population about 1.51 million), ranks first nationally in poultry production and second in pig production, accounting for 7.4% and 6.3% of the national chicken and pig populations respectively. The chapter finds that agricultural land in these peri-urban areas is increasingly at risk from urban encroachment, driven by population growth, distorted land values, a construction boom, and expanding recreation and leisure facilities competing with farming for land, which is likely to adversely affect the city's food security.

Hiran Roy, C. Michael Hall, Paul W. Ballantine · · Global

This excerpt is the introduction to a chapter on barriers facing hospitality businesses' use of local food; it covers only the background on rising North American and European consumer demand for local food, driven by desire for fresh food access, support for local farmers and communities, and concerns over trust, locality, transparency, animal welfare and food safety, alongside the post-1990s growth of farmers' markets, food box programs and community-supported agriculture. The specific economic barriers and constraints named in the chapter's title are not described within this excerpted text.

Rosalie M. Sharp · Wellesley College Digital RepositoryWellesley (Wellesley College) · United States

Through an interdisciplinary literature review and interviews with stakeholders in the Boston, Massachusetts urban agriculture network — including The Food Project — this study examines the social and historical context of lead exposure in urban gardens in the Dudley neighborhood. It shows that products of structural racism, particularly redlining and disinvestment, created the social and physical environments that allow lead contamination to persist in low-income communities of color like Dudley. An alternate growing material or soil amendment was found to dilute lead concentrations, reduce lead bioaccessibility, and limit fine particle resuspension, and working with The Food Project, these findings shaped gardeners' behavior to reduce lead exposure. The findings on urban soil lead bioaccessibility are presented as contributing to a broader body of research that informs policy decisions such as benchmarks for safe soil or compost lead levels.

Efrat Eizenberg, Simone Tappert, Nicola Thomas, Andis Zīlāns, Kristine Abolina, Theodosia Anthopoulou, Jevgenijs Duboks · · Europe

A book chapter examines the changes and challenges facing allotment gardens in European cities from the perspective of urban political economy, reading these new urban configurations within the macro-framework of capitalism and governability. It traces past and current processes of urban change through the economic, political and spatial lens of the "entrepreneurial city," discusses the impact of urban restructuring on allotment gardens' structure, operation and meaning, and states that political and spatial restructuring in the entrepreneurial city has been accompanied by a sharpening of social and economic inequalities within cities.

Christopher Bryant, Ghalia Chahine · Geographical Research · Canada (Montreal)

This 2015 case study from the Montreal Region, Canada, analyzed an action research project initiated in 2008 to reduce the vulnerability of peri-urban agriculture. Despite initiatives since the mid-1960s, significant pressures continue to increase the vulnerability of peri-urban farming, with farmland often removed from agricultural reserves. The project in Senneville involved farmers, non-farm actors, and municipal presentations over three years, aiming to integrate conservation and leisure activities.

Sofya Aptekar · Sociological Forum · United States (New York City)

This 2015 ethnographic study, conducted between 2011 and 2013 in a diverse and gentrifying New York City neighborhood, analyzed conflicts within a community garden. It found that disputes among gardeners over aesthetics and conduct reproduced broader gentrification struggles, with privileged gardeners leveraging resources to impose their vision. However, less privileged gardeners, through cross-class and cross-racial relationships, were able to destabilize hierarchies and defend their alternative visions for the public space.

Rose Tardiff · Syracuse University Libraries (Syracuse University) · United States

The Salt City Harvest Farm (SCHF) in Kirkville, NY, is an all-volunteer project with limited capacity and concerns about long-term sustainability, despite providing benefits to New American participants. Research identified challenges and suggested organizational improvements, including clearly defining roles and integrating New Americans into decision-making. The study found that the SCHF would best suit participants' interests by remaining a place for growing their own food rather than transitioning to an incubator model.

Eric Holt-Giménez · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · Global

This paper argues that the modern food system, shaped by 30 years of neoliberal globalization, has led to unprecedented global inequality, disproportionately affecting people of color. Despite the emergence of a U.S. food movement focusing on various components like urban agriculture, the underlying structures of the corporate food regime continue to control the context of these alternatives, hindering systemic change.