Research & reports

Maeve Bassett · Fordham Research Commons (Fordham University) · Global

Urban gardens are advertised as a solution to limited food access in impoverished areas, but they are not productive enough to globally affect food production and the environment. However, for surrounding communities, urban gardens are cheap and effective solutions for many problems associated with poverty and food deserts, such as obesity, education, social interactions, income supplementation, health issues, dangerous neighborhoods, and refugee assimilation.

James Farmer, Charles Chancellor, Jennifer Meta Robinson, Stephanie T. West, Melissa S. Weddell · Journal of Leisure Research · Global

This study collected data from 712 individuals regarding participation in local food systems, including farmers' markets and CSA programs. Findings revealed a significant association between participants and privilege variables, suggesting that despite promotion, barriers exclude many from engaging in these agrileisure opportunities.

Laura Oliven Silberfarb, Sonja Savre, Gayle Geber · Preventing Chronic Disease · United States (Hennepin County)

Hennepin County assessed the extent to which 41 cities were engaged in making policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) changes to increase residents' access to healthful food. Results revealed that some cities, particularly those with higher resident demand for healthful food, are making nationally recommended PSE changes, such as sponsoring farmers markets. However, cities moved more slowly to make changes in areas with perceived negative cost consequences or lesser public demand, such as parks and recreation vending.

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.

· 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.

Sarah Legg · Figshare · United States (Wyoming)

ACRES Student Farm, a University of Wyoming organization, has grown significantly over six years, providing local produce, CSA shares, composting, and educational opportunities. However, the farm suffers from continuous losses in efficiency and acquired knowledge due to the transient nature of its student management and workforce, leading to unsustainable internal functioning. This project aims to develop a management plan and handbook to address these issues and improve the farm's operational efficiency.

Nevin Cohen, Kristin Reynolds · Journal of Planning Education and Research · United States (New York City)

This article examines urban agriculture (UA) policy-making processes in New York City, focusing on aspects of UA not fully addressed by existing policies, plans, and research strategies. Interviews with UA stakeholders and an analysis of the city’s UA policy-making processes show that resource needs and race- and class-based disparities within the UA system persist.

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.

최정석 · 환경정책 · South Korea

This research from South Korea identifies legal and institutional problems in securing space for urban agriculture, noting that the 2013 Urban Agriculture Promotion and Support Act has not boosted urban agriculture due to a lack of space. The study focuses on urban planning regulations, parks, green areas, the Urban Agriculture Promotion and Support Act, and other related policies to suggest solutions for these issues.

Matt Murray · Journal of Political Ecology · United States (New York City)

Efrat Eizenberg's book "From the Ground Up" explores New York City's community gardens as spaces that resist the commodification of land. The book details the history of these gardens, including their emergence during the 1970s economic crisis when primarily Black and Hispanic residents transformed vacant land into communal green spaces. As the real estate market recovered in the 1980s, land values increased, and many gardens were threatened by gentrification pressures. Eizenberg analyzes these transformations at individual, collective, and institutional levels, highlighting how gardeners create common spaces, solidify interpersonal ties, and organize to defend their gardens.

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.

Christina Jochum · · Argentina (Buenos Aires)

This study examined the social inclusion potential of urban agriculture, focusing on six community gardens in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It analyzed how urban community gardens can promote social inclusion and identified limiting factors. The research found that urban community gardens in Buenos Aires remain an informal strategy, unrecognized by political authorities. The positive impacts of communal gardening on participants and the community are limited by this lack of recognition and often by associated lack of land use rights.

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.

Jennifer Vansteenkiste · Development in Practice · Global

This paper examines the social and gender politics of a women's urban garden project in Cap Haïtien, Haiti, supported by the International Organisation for Migration. The study finds that the development process created an unmonitored symbolic space in which society's normalized gender processes were reproduced, importing broader social inequalities that in turn prevented the project from meeting the women's practical and strategic goals. It discusses how an ecohealth approach, as an alternative design framework, could make this symbolic space visible for critical engagement and analysis by participants.

Ande O.T, Adetunji A. M, Akinpelu M. E, Senjobi B.A · Journals & Books Hosting (International Knowledge Sharing Platform) · Nigeria

Ibadan metropolis, Nigeria, home to about 6 million people, has raised growing concern over lowland soils in its periurban area, where much of the industrial waste transported by the River Ona is deposited; these soils are used for dry-season farming and contribute to food security. This study aimed to characterize periurban lowland soils around Ibadan and determine their vulnerability to industrial pollution, using a 50m x 50m grid with surface samples taken at 50m intervals, plus representative profile pits described using the USDA method, and particle-size and chemical analyses (phosphorus, nitrogen, exchangeable cations Ca/Mg/Na/K, manganese, and heavy metals including lead, copper, zinc, chromium, iron, and cadmium). Results showed the floodplain's surface soil was fertile, with high nitrogen (0.35 cmol/kg), phosphorus (51.25 cmol/kg), and potassium (0.61 cmol/kg), and phosphorus levels ranging from very high to toxic, between 28.99 and 87.70 ppm. Average heavy metal concentrations were lead 34.30 mg/kg, zinc 171.20 mg/kg, iron 83.97 mg/kg, copper 19.11 mg/kg, manganese 31.10 mg/kg, chromium 0.69 mg/kg, and cadmium 0.3 mg/kg. Predicted soil-to-plant heavy metal transfer coefficients (Pb 35-343; Cr 0.46-4.6; Zn 171-1712; Cu 19-191; Fe 83-840; Mn 31-281; Cd 0.1-10) indicated crops grown in the area could contain toxic levels of these metals; however, high yields and healthy plant condition observed in the field, together with farmer interviews, suggested that the high phosphorus level (28.99-87 ppm) may have inhibited uptake of some metals such as lead, zinc, and copper.

Oliver Moore, Olive McCarthy, Noreen Byrne, Michael Ward · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · Europe

This paper examines one of the earliest and most prominent community supported agriculture (CSA) initiatives in Ireland, focusing on its organizational restructuring under productivity pressure. CSA is built on sharing risk and reward, and some uncertainty is treated as acceptable, but in this case the realized risk of insufficient produce, once pushed to its limits, became in fact unacceptable to members. The process by which this member-owned and member-operated CSA critically self-assessed and restructured after this shortfall is termed "reflexive resilience" — a description of an initiative that had to acknowledge a real produce shortfall and rebuild, not merely one that anticipated shocks in the abstract.

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.

C.F.A. van Wesenbeeck, Valentijn Venus, M.A. Keyzer, B. Wesselman, D. Asare Kye · · Africa

This study examined two tomato production areas in Burkina Faso with potential for counter-seasonal production aimed at Ghanaian urban markets, identifying the main obstacles to developing a horticultural supply chain: the monopsony power of Ghanaian traders and insufficient road quality causing high mechanical-damage losses in transport. Using a spatial-temporal simulation model to assess transport effects on tomato quality, the study found refrigerated transport is not a necessary condition for successful trade, since climate conditions alone do not severely harm quality, and concluded that regional diversification of exports offers Burkina Faso producers the best opportunities for improving their position in the chain, given the persistent trader monopsony and infrastructure constraints.

Yves Cabannes, Isabel María Raposo · City · Europe

This paper conducted a comparative analysis of peri-urban agriculture in Lisbon and London to assess its contribution to migrant social inclusion and urban biodiversity. The study found that social inclusion patterns are city-specific; for example, Cape Verdean urban farming communities in Lisbon strengthen community bonds but do not necessarily lead to better integration into wider Portuguese society. Migrant urban farmers contribute to broadening biodiversity, primarily in Lisbon and to a lesser extent in London.

David Adams, Michael Hardman · Urban Studies · United Kingdom

This paper uses ethnographic data from 'F Troop', a guerrilla gardening group in an English midland city, to re-examine urban guerrilla gardening practices. It argues that these practices may not be as "resistant" or "celebratory" as often suggested in existing literature. The study highlights that the social backgrounds and motivations of participants, along with their relationships with other users of the space, are important but largely unacknowledged aspects of guerrilla gardening.

Sam E. Wortman, Sarah Taylor Lovell · Journal of Environmental Quality · United States

This review paper characterized the limited state of scientific knowledge regarding abiotic environmental factors threatening the growth of urban agriculture in the United States. It identified challenges influencing urban cropping systems, including soil contamination and remediation, atmospheric pollutants and altered climatic conditions, and water management, sources, and safety. The development of a science-based approach in these areas is noted as essential for the economic and environmental sustainability of urban agriculture.

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.

Soraya Pourjavid, Hassan Sadighi, Hossein Shabanali Fami · RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · Iran (Tehran)

This study identified constraints affecting urban agriculture in Tehran, Iran, by surveying 320 city dwellers across 22 municipal districts. The most important constraints identified were "high start-up costs" and "lack of knowledge among managers and authorities." Factor analysis revealed seven factors explaining 67.36% of the variance, including financial-economic and technical aspects.

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.