Research & reports

Panagiota Kotsila, Isabelle Anguelovski, Francesc Baró, Johannes Langemeyer, Filka Sekulova, James J. Connolly · Environment and Planning E Nature and Space · Spain (Barcelona)

This paper analyzes nature-based solutions (NBS) as discursive tools that create an inviting space for nature's neoliberalization processes, examining two city-initiated projects in Barcelona, Spain: the Passeig de Sant Joan green corridor and the Espai Germanetes community garden. The study found that urban nature can serve elite economic players at the expense of widespread socio-ecological benefits. It also noted that outcomes regarding neoliberalism and its contestation were very distinct between the two projects due to different forms of governance.

Jonathan London, Bethany B. Cutts, Kirsten Schwarz, Li Schmidt, Mary L. Cadenasso · Agriculture and Human Values · United States (California)

This study, based on 24 interviews with urban agriculture (UA) leaders in Sacramento, California, identifies three "taproots" of UA projects: justice, health, and market. The analysis reveals how these roots interact differently with racial capitalism, creating disparities in their growth trajectories. Specifically, UA projects associated with the justice taproot are historically underrepresented and undervalued.

Nicole Paganini, Stefanie Lemke · Local Environment · South Africa (Cape Town)

This study, conducted from 2017 to 2019 in Cape Town, South Africa, and Maputo, Mozambique, explored urban agriculture's contributions to livelihoods and food availability through a food justice lens. In Cape Town, NGO-led urban agriculture regulated production and market access, serving wealthy consumers, with only 15% of farmers consuming their produce. In Maputo, urban agriculture contributed to local food availability, with 99% of farmers eating their produce, but farmers depended on intermediary-determined prices and faced unequal access to inputs. The study revealed stark structural inequalities and uneven power dynamics in both contexts.

Rachael Baker · · United States (Detroit)

Farming on Detroit's vacant land has been used for blight reduction and food cultivation since the 1970s, supported by initiatives like Farm-a-Lot. However, in 2015, the mayor’s office directly transferred 40 acres of city-owned land to a for-profit urban agriculture business in Detroit’s east Poletown, raising concerns about equitable resource distribution.

Idris Mohammed, Abdella Kosa, Nuredin Juhar · Agricultural and Food Economics · Ethiopia

This study assessed the economic linkage between urban development and the livelihood of peri-urban farming communities in Ethiopia, focusing on current practices and policies. Data was collected from 30 municipal officials and 200 evicted peri-urban farmers across five municipalities in the Amara regional state. Findings indicate that the continuous eviction of peri-urban farmers from their indigenous land for redevelopment negatively affects their livelihood, highlighting significant equity issues. Factors contributing to urban expansion include economic policy reform, private investor incentives, and public sector projects, further exacerbated by policy limitations and lack of municipal intervention.

Michelle Glowa, Antonio Roman-Alcalá · New York University Press eBooks · United States (California)

This chapter examines the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance, analyzing its composition, genesis, and how it has confronted the tensions and limitations of neoliberal urbanization. Based on personal experiences and research, it proposes that justice-driven urban agriculture movements are influenced by political-economic changes and can be absorbed into existing neoliberal and pro-development trajectories. This indicates a critical finding regarding equity and the challenges urban agriculture faces in resisting gentrification.

Justin Sean Myers, Prita Lal, Sofya Aptekar · New York University Press eBooks · United States (New York City)

This study traced the complex and contested relationship between food-producing community gardens and gentrification in three neighborhoods in New York City's outer boroughs. These gardens traditionally emerged in response to long-term attempts by City Hall to displace residents of color. The research examines how community gardeners respond to gentrification and the role of community gardens in facilitating, accommodating, or resisting it, discussing implications for realizing food justice.

Fatmir Haskaj · Environment and Planning A Economy and Space · United States (New York City)

This article explores the historical context of community gardens in New York and Oakland, California, to understand and contest hegemonic forces in the urban environment. It posits that the work of gardeners is co-opted into a value regime through a process called "conspicuous labor." This process reconfigures the urban poor as productive, passive, and pastoral, contributing to gentrification.

Alison Hope Alkon, Yahya Josh Cadji, Frances C. Moore · New York University Press eBooks · United States (California)

In North Oakland, California, USA, collaborations between food justice organizations and residents, spurred by gentrification, were explored. The partnership and merger of Phat Beets Produce and the Self-Help Hunger Program were analyzed, initiated after a community garden was used in a gentrification advertisement in 2014. While this collaboration created a strong alliance, it was found to be insufficient to resist the structural forces driving gentrification.

C. K. Cartagena · Southeastern geographer · United States

This paper reviews "Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farms Practical Guide To Liberation on the Land" by Leah Penniman and Karen Washington. The book serves as a step-by-step guide for Black farmers, detailing historical struggles and solutions against oppression and racial discrimination in the farming sector, including cases like Pigford v. Glickman and the over-policing of Ron Finley's property. It offers instruction on obtaining land and resources, farm business plans, land restoration, crop planning, preserving harvests, raising animals, urban farming, and movement building. The book acknowledges obstacles faced by Black farmers and aims to provide a reference for sustaining productive farmland and activism to achieve land autonomy.

Adrián H. Hearn, Thaís Mauad, Chris Williams, Luís Fernando Amato‐Lourenço, Guilherme Reis Ranieri · Journal of Urbanism International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability · Australia (Melbourne)

This article analyzed the phenomenon of urban agriculture promotion by real estate developers and community associations in Melbourne and São Paulo. Developers of upmarket condominiums advertise urban agriculture as a purchasable commodity, but the gentrifying effects of these developments deepen rather than alleviate social and environmental ills. In contrast, community projects in four case studies emphasized urban agriculture's ability to confront the long-term neglect of land, employment, and environment.

Olivia Lee · Johns Hopkins University eBooks · United States (Chicago)

This study, drawing on affect theory, examines community gardens in Chicago's low-income, primarily Black South Side neighborhoods. It argues that while these gardens offer a spatial break from violence, they appear unable to fully counteract the ongoing marginalization by race and socioeconomic status. The gardens represent a quiet, nascent resistance against neoliberal injustices through intimate human-nature interaction.

Justine Lindemann · New York University Press eBooks · United States (Cleveland)

This chapter explores how gentrification in Cleveland, Ohio, impacts Black urban farmers' and gardeners' access to land in disinvested neighborhoods. It examines the ancillary effects of development on alternative land reuse efforts. The study highlights that despite a seemingly endless supply of vacant lots, gentrification negatively affects land access for these communities.

Pamela Arnette Broom, Yuki Kato · New York University Press eBooks · United States

This chapter examines the gentrification of foodways in post-Katrina New Orleans, combining the author's own experience as a long-term urban gardener with grower interviews. It argues that the emerging narrative presenting urban agriculture as a new idea obscures the city's long-standing tradition of local food production and procurement, and that the new geographic notion of local tends to dissociate from the social and cultural dimensions of preexisting folk foodways; it concludes that the popularity of urban agriculture among newcomers, though well-intended, had the adverse effect of discouraging many long-term residents from engaging with urban agriculture and from opportunities such as entrepreneurship, community health and urban sustainability.

Caren Freitas de Lima, Silvia Regina Nunes Baptista, Susana Arruda, Cristhiane Oliveira da Graça Amâncio · Revista Campo-Território · Brazil

This article analyzes Henri Lefebvre's concept of the "right to the city" in the context of Rio de Janeiro, a Latin American city, combining Lefebvre's framework with a historical bibliographical review of urban requalification and removals in Rio, analysis of official institutional data, and field research. In the 2000s, neighborhoods with a history of agricultural activity in Rio's West Zone — mainly Planning Area 4 (AP4), covering the Vargens region (Vargem Grande, Vargem Pequena, Camorim, and parts of Recreio dos Bandeirantes, Barra da Tijuca, and Jacarepaguá) — became targets of real estate expansion. The State enabled this expansion through urbanistic instruments such as the Vargens Urban Structuring Plan (PEU das Vargens) and the Land Use and Occupation Law (LUOS), which reduce agricultural areas. Although generally neglected in debates over urban struggles, the agroecology-based Carioca Urban Agriculture Network (Rede CAU), acting through the Articulação Plano Popular (APP Vargens), takes up the struggle for the right to the city and for urban planning, asserting that the right to the city is also the right to plant.

Chiara Certomà, Martin Sondermann, Susan Noori · Manchester University Press eBooks · Europe

This chapter critically analyzes the relationship between urban gardening and socio-spatial justice, exploring whether and how urban gardening practices can tackle social and spatial injustices. Urban gardening points out less visible sides of urban governance and planning, unveiling different forms of power, dominance, and resistance to the unequal distribution of benefits and burdens in space. The analysis questions the contradictions in the constitution of urban spaces and their capability to mitigate material, political, and social exclusions, unfairness, and inequalities.

Efrat Eizenberg · Manchester University Press eBooks · Global

This concluding chapter reviews the literature on urban gardening, outlining both enthusiastic approaches that focus on its transformative potential and critical approaches that analyze it as greenwash or a strategy of neoliberal development. The chapter discusses how the book's chapters address this gap in understanding urban gardening and the resolutions and new directions they offer. It states that urban gardening is sometimes analyzed as a form of greenwash and a strategy of neoliberal development.

Lisa Westholm, Madelene Ostwald · Agroforestry Systems · Africa, Asia, Latin America

This literature review of 104 scientific articles across Africa, Asia, and Latin America examined food production and gender relations in multifunctional land use systems. The review found that the specific role of landscape multifunctionality for women's food security opportunities is rarely explicitly studied. It also showed that products controlled by women are often secondary and far from markets, risking neglect by policymakers, and efforts to increase their value may adversely affect women's empowerment if powerful actors appropriate benefits.

Alma Clavin · Manchester University Press eBooks · United Kingdom

A study using qualitative, visual methods and Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach in five community garden sites in the UK and Ireland examined their potential for human agency and ecological sustainability. While positive agency and wellbeing benefits were observed, the gardens were found to be limited in their ability to truly enhance political freedoms and overcome asymmetric power relations. The research indicates that these initiatives may perpetuate neoliberal forms of unsustainable and uneven development, alongside ongoing issues of tenure insecurity.

Carrie Chennault · Iowa State University Digital Repository (Iowa State University) · United States

This three-year feminist ethnographic study examined the Growing Together Iowa community donation gardening and food rescue program, focusing on its institutional and community partners. The research aimed to understand how solutions to food insecurity emerge from social relations and socio-historical contexts. Findings demonstrated that uneven power relations permeate even well-intended efforts to address food insecurity within such initiatives.

Blaire O’Neal · · United States (San Diego County)

This research investigates the significance of soil in distinguishing urban agriculture forms in San Diego County and examines how soil-based and soilless growing methods relate to justice. The results illustrate that while the way food is grown is important for urban agriculture organizations' identity and practices, it is only one of many factors influencing justice, such as socio-spatial context. Justice is an ongoing process that evolves as urban agriculture commodities travel through their circuits and interact with placed networks filled with intentions, actions, discourses, objects, actors, and forces.

Michael Hardman, Mags Adams, Melissa Barker, Luke Beesley · Manchester University Press eBooks · United Kingdom (Todmorden)

The Incredible Edible Todmorden (IET) movement in Todmorden, UK, was investigated using a qualitative approach. The scheme was found to have an overwhelmingly positive impact on the town, providing social, environmental, and economic benefits and contributing to a more just food movement through its "free for all" philosophy. However, negative aspects were also highlighted, including maintenance issues and a lack of perceived inclusivity in some parts.

Lucy Rose Wright, Ross Fraser Young · Manchester University Press eBooks · Global

This chapter introduces the concept of political gardening, contextualizing its rise within neoliberal processes and academic interest in urban gardening. It conflates political gardening with injustice, drawing on Rawls' theory of social justice. The chapter uses case study examples to define political gardening as a six-stage iterative process that participants undergo to address injustices and become engaged, democratized citizens.

Alice A. Oluoko-Odingo · Journal of Climate Change and Sustainability · Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper examines gender mainstreaming in adaptation to weather and climate extremes, centered on peri-urban farming in Sub-Saharan Africa. Although women provide most agricultural labour, they remain poor and among the most vulnerable to weather and climate extremes because of inequalities in ownership of and decision-making over land, assets and cash; even in well-planned African cities, developmental and environmental challenges continue to perpetuate inequality, discrimination and underdevelopment, with low-income communities living in risky areas without access to key services and facing heightened vulnerability. Combining literature review with fieldwork in peri-urban Nairobi (Machakos and Kajiado Counties), Kenya, the paper discusses how gender mainstreaming in peri-urban farming could support Sustainable Development Goals 5 and 13, while noting the research gap on gender mainstreaming in peri-urban farming as itself a problem the field has yet to address.

Lucy Rose Wright, Ross Fraser Young · Manchester University Press eBooks · Global

A chapter introducing the concept of political gardening. It begins by situating the re-evaluation of "everyday space" within neoliberal processes of privatization, devolution and entrepreneurialism, then connects the rise of academic interest in urban gardening with the movement's political dimension. Drawing on Rawls' theory of social justice, it conflates political gardening with injustice, uses case studies to unpack that process of addressing injustice across six iterative stages, and arrives at a definition of political gardening as both a term and a process through which participants become "democratized" citizens.