Research & reports

Katrin Bohn, André Viljoen · · Germany (Berlin), United Kingdom (London)

This chapter reviews the evolving Continuous Productive Urban Landscape (CPUL) City concept in the context of Berlin and London, exploring ways to integrate sustainable food systems into the urban fabric. The CPUL City Toolkit provides an overview of key steps for planning and implementing urban agriculture as part of coherent productive urban landscape strategies. The toolkit introduces four methods of action: Action U+D, Action VIS, Action IUC, and Action R.

Neil Ravenscroft, Niamh Moore, Ed Welch, Andrew Church · University of Brighton Repository (University of Brighton) · United Kingdom

This paper explores the theoretical foundations of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) in the UK, a cooperative venture where communities share farming risks and harvests. It suggests that CSA's theoretical underpinnings are gift-based, fostering deep connections among people, farmers, and the environment. The paper argues that CSA's significance lies in its rejection of market-based food communities and its demonstration of durable community forms for making multiple connections.

Silvio Caputo · Kent Academic Repository (University of Kent) · United Kingdom

This paper argues for a new role for urban agriculture in developed countries, focusing on environmental, social, and economic benefits. While urban agriculture can contribute to a low-carbon society and food access, it is not currently part of UK government strategies for food security. For urban agriculture to achieve its potential, it needs to become economically viable, requiring research into highly productive methods and business models utilizing local urban resources.

FALLETTI, MADDALENA · TERRITORIO · Italy

This 2012 introductory piece for the Italian journal TERRITORIO reorganizes contributions on urban agriculture by subject matter to surface several contradictory aspects of the ongoing debate. It offers three interpretive keys: the first reproduces the debate within its own sealed compartments while attempting comparison through juxtaposition of contrasting attitudes; the second highlights a transverse conceptual dichotomy with strong implications for planning — urban agriculture as a remedy for city problems versus the urban countryside as a new form of urban plan; the third examines the debate in the specific context of Milan.

José Luis Fernández de Casadevante, Nerea Morán Alonso · Hábitat y Sociedad · Spain

This article examines community allotment gardens as an emerging phenomenon in Spanish cities, focusing on Madrid. It describes how allotments have arisen through the efforts of neighbourhood associations, social groups, and ecologists, in a dynamic that has proliferated over the preceding six years, building a critical discourse around urban sustainability and forming coordinated structures able to introduce the topic into the public sphere and the political agenda. These allotments are spaces articulating experiences of reflection and participative intervention around the city, public space, group identities, and procedures of spatial appropriation. The initiatives are also described as approaching the notion of food sovereignty as a strategic issue for the future of cities.

Chiara Tornaghi · TERRITORIO · United Kingdom

This paper presents an English case of urban agriculture, the Edible Public Space Project in Leeds, situated within urban agriculture initiatives committed to socio-environmental justice, the reproduction of common goods, and urban planning that promotes the right to food and bottom-up construction of urban space. The case study is framed as action-research at the intersection of urban planning policy, community work, and critical geography. Unlike many similar initiatives, the project is presented not as a merely temporary activity tucked into the city's spare folds, but as an experiment that imagines and implements alternatives to current forms of urban planning, contextualized in light of the ecological, financial, and social crisis of the preceding decade.

Les Levidow, Katerina Psarikidou · · United Kingdom

In Manchester, England, environmental and health issues have been folded into a wider agro-food strategy aimed at making the city "more sustainable." With support from state bodies and charities, several initiatives have expanded access to fresh, healthy food, particularly in "food deserts," mobilizing resources, skills, and voluntary labor through "community engagement" to create "community spaces" for social inclusion. Manchester's agro-food networks shorten supply chains by linking peri-urban agriculture more directly with urban consumers and by promoting urban agriculture grounded in local resource mobilization and personal trust, offering an alternative to conventional agro-food chains; food relocalisation is described as helping overcome socio-economic inequalities and health problems, with Manchester initiatives cooperating to build environmentally sustainable, socially just, healthy communities and reconstructing local identities and social commitments, within a national policy context that advocates food relocalisation but provides little actual support. Despite that activity, the larger food system in Manchester remains dominated by conventional agro-food chains, and community food initiatives play only a marginal role, leading practitioners to discuss how to overcome these limitations; from 2010 onward, the UK government's austerity regime is described as undermining state support further, making community engagement even more important for mobilizing resources.

Saloua Toumi, Roland Vidal · Projets de paysage · Europe, Africa

Urban agriculture is expanding in various metropolitan areas, but its agro-economic and socio-spatial logic differs by context. Tunisia's urban agriculture is threatened by increasing urban expansion and is not yet integrated into territorial projects. Issues related to land value appreciation are dominant, and its landscape and environmental benefits could be compromised in the relatively short term if it does not find its place in urban development plans.

Katrin Bohn, André Viljoen · University of Brighton Repository (University of Brighton) · United Kingdom

A 2011 paper from the UK discusses the Continuous Productive Urban Landscape (CPUL), a strategic concept for introducing interlinked productive landscapes into cities. It focuses on the environmental benefits of integrating urban agriculture as one of CPUL's major spatial and functional components, tracing, with reference to international exhibitions and publications, how urban agriculture has moved from a fringe interest toward the center of contemporary urban and architectural discourse. It concludes that while urban agriculture is attracting more attention, further cross-disciplinary work is needed to build the theory underpinning productive landscape design and the policy rationale to support it.

Qian Xiong Jin · Chinese Landscape Architecture · United Kingdom

An overview of the history and future of the allotment garden in the United Kingdom. It originated in the subsistence needs of people who had lost their land during urbanization, grew steadily under legislative promotion, and peaked during the two World Wars and the Great Depression driven by national mobilization, before declining during the postwar period of economic recovery. Since the 1990s it has shifted character from allotment garden to leisure garden, and in the context of a pluralistic contemporary society it has become recognized as an important cultural heritage due to its unique social significance and long history, gradually recovering within the framework of sustainable development strategy and the 21st Century Agenda.

Robert Rogerson, Sue Sadler · Strathprints: The University of Strathclyde institutional repository (University of Strathclyde) · United Kingdom

This case study, prepared by BRASS (Centre for Business Relationships Accountability, Sustainability & Society), is part of an HCA/ESRC funded research project. The project investigated skills and knowledge applied in sustainability initiatives related to housing, land, food, and transport.

Laura Terragni, Hanne Torjusen, Gunnar Vittersø · Anthropology of food · Europe

Drawing on studies conducted over the past 15 years at the Norwegian National Institute for Consumer Research (SIFO), this article analyzes alternative food consumption in Norway centered on organic food. Tracing the organic movement from its origins, it shows organic products have gained a notable position within the conventional market even as they face conventionalization, while other alternative initiatives are emerging, including fair trade, farmers' markets, farm food outlets, box schemes, and community supported agriculture (CSA). It argues the consumer's role must be understood contextually, and that products consumers identify as "alternative" are those that, in a given time and place, are socially constructed to best reflect alternative values.

Rosie Cox, Lewis Holloway, Laura Venn, Liz Dowler, Jane Ricketts Hein, Moya Kneafsey, Helena Tuomainen · Local Environment · United Kingdom

This paper examines the motivations of producers and consumers participating in a community-supported agriculture (CSA) project in Scotland. It reveals the diverse motivations and philosophies consumers bring to the scheme, contrasting them with the organizers' stated aims. The study argues that effective communication within direct marketing schemes is important for fostering long-term commitment between producers and consumers, and for encouraging consumers to consider broader behavioral changes.

André Viljoen, Katrin Bohn · University of Brighton Repository (University of Brighton) · United Kingdom (London)

This paper, from a U.K. perspective, discusses urban agriculture using London as an example. While the benefits of urban agriculture for food security and income have often focused on the Global South, its integration into a multifunctional land use strategy could significantly reduce a city's ecological footprint, raising questions about its wider implementation.

Anne C. Bellows · Food and Foodways · Poland

Polish allotment gardeners collectively represent the largest land managers in Poland, with a formalized urban allotment food production system dating back to 1997. This system, combining local and national government policy with NGO management and private use, provides a model for food security and urban open space. However, this arrangement also creates ongoing tension among stakeholders and a contentious debate regarding the private and public uses of urban land.

Arjan van Timmeren, Wiek Röling, Marleen Kaptein · · Netherlands (Culemborg)

This paper focuses on an innovation in urban development in the Lanxmeer district of Culemborg, Netherlands. A "Sustainable Implant (SI)" based on permaculture and organic design principles will be built in conjunction with the EVA-Center and an ecological city-farm. The SI functions as an interconnector for three "essential" flows in urban planning, such as wastewater management and energy generation, facilitating both vertical and horizontal integration. It is considered a sustainable hub operating at three scales: the Culemborg region, the Lanxmeer urban district, and the nearby EVA Center.

Joe Howe · Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning · United Kingdom

This article explores the neglect of research concerning food grown within urban areas and its land-use policy implications. It details findings from a UK study on land-use policy and urban agriculture, investigating land-use officials' attitudes and knowledge of urban food production and the regulatory framework used. The article concludes that despite extensive urban agriculture practice, its urban land-use policy implications require more attention from both land-use officials and researchers than previously given.

Jonathan Rutherford · The Review of Education Pedagogy & Cultural Studies · United Kingdom (London)

This record describes demonstrations in Parliament Square, London, on May Day 2000. Reclaim the Streets organized a Guerrilla Gardening spectacle, digging up the lawn in the center of the Square and planting in protest against capitalism.