Research & reports

Godwin Arku, Paul Mkandawire, Nathaniel Djanmah Aguda, Vincent Kuuire · · Africa

The history of urban agriculture in Africa dates back to the colonial era, when farming flourished in urban areas primarily to meet the consumption needs of bureaucrats, settlers, and other elites. Urban agriculture is considered a potentially viable policy response to the complex challenge of feeding a growing urban population amidst declining food production in rural areas.

Takao Ugai · ScholarSpace (University of Hawaii at Manoa) · Global

This investigation aims to develop a new urban scheme for "Cultivating Urbanism" by adapting agricultural practices into existing urban fabrics to create pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use, high-density cities filled with agriculture. The study analyzes the history of urban systems and agriculture, drawing on New Urbanism and Agricultural Urbanism to propose new urban typologies. It investigates the paradigm of ecology, lifestyle, food products, and physical and psychological benefits, using Shinjuku, Tokyo, as a case study for applying urban agriculture methodologies to various building prototypes.

Danny Simatele, Tony Binns, Munacinga Simatele · Journal of Human Development and Capabilities · Zambia (Lusaka)

This field-based research in Lusaka, Zambia, examines the impact of climate change and urban governance on urban agriculture, which serves as a source of food and income for poor households amidst deteriorating economies. The study finds that urban agriculture is often excluded from urban development and planning policy, posing significant challenges for small-scale farmers to achieve food security. A lack of policies supporting the urban poor, combined with climatic changes like drought and flooding, makes it difficult for households to adapt to the changing urban environment.

Mary Caesar, Jonathan Crush, Trevor Hill · Scholars Commons (Wilfrid Laurier University) · South Africa (Msunduzi Municipality)

A study on food security in Msunduzi Municipality, South Africa, was part of AFSUN's baseline survey across eleven Southern African cities. The survey found that urban poor in Msunduzi are significantly worse off than those in Cape Town and Johannesburg, with one-third of households reporting frequent food shortages. Urban agriculture is not particularly significant in Msunduzi, and while supermarket supply chains dominate the food system, they do not meet the needs of the poor.

Aisha Abdulkadir, Luc Hippolyte Dossa, Désiré Jean‐Pascal Lompo, Nafiu Abdu, H. van Keulen · International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability · Africa

This study characterized the diversity of urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) households in three West African cities: Kano (Nigeria), Bobo Dioulasso (Burkina Faso), and Sikasso (Mali). A survey of 318 UPA households and cluster analysis identified six distinct household clusters based on resource endowments and the degree of integration of production activities. Common production constraints across cities included high input costs, water shortages, and lack of fertilizers, while feeding constraints and animal diseases were main issues in livestock production.

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.

Mahbubur Meenar, Brandon Hoover · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · United States (Philadelphia)

This paper examines urban agriculture (UA) projects' role in addressing food insecurity in lower-income neighborhoods of post-industrial U.S. cities, using Philadelphia as a case study. While UA projects are vital, findings indicate concerns regarding their geographic, economic, and informational accessibility, social exclusion, and spatial mismatch between participants and neighborhood demographics. Challenges also exist in distributing fresh produce to impoverished populations and UA's economic contributions in underprivileged areas.

Alberto Graglia, Giulia Mazzanti · TERRITORIO · Cuba

This paper reflects on the conditions that enabled the rapid and large-scale spread of urban agriculture practices in Cuba, making it an emblematic example of reducing economic dependency on oil. The success of urban agriculture in Cuba is attributed to the country's unique history and its economic and political circumstances.

Zhu Qing-hai · Ecological Economy · Global

This paper describes a new cultural movement in agricultural food emerging in Western developed countries, driven by concerns over food safety, environmental pollution, global climate change, and inequality. This movement encompasses community-supported agriculture, food miles, and fair trade. These initiatives are presented as ensuring food safety, promoting regional economic development, safeguarding global fairness and justice, and influencing global environmental improvement.

Marit Rosol, P. Schweizer · City · Switzerland (Zurich)

This paper investigated how urban agriculture projects based on Solidarity Economics principles can develop new economic forms as an alternative to neo-liberal capitalism, focusing on the Swiss gardening cooperative ortoloco. For two years, ortoloco, a peri-urban organic farm with explicit political aims beyond food supply, successfully applied and continuously developed these principles in its economic practice. The project demonstrates the potential for developing new economic forms based on solidarity.

E.N. Sabiiti · · Uganda

This paper reviews how agricultural wastes can be utilized to enhance food security and conserve the environment, focusing on developing countries like Uganda. In Kampala, over 1000mt of waste accumulate daily, with only 30% collected. The study highlights that these organic wastes, rich in nutrients, can serve as a bio-resource for smallholder farmers to improve soil nutrient status and crop yields, such as vegetables and maize, and enhance milk production. This approach also reduces environmental pollution and poverty.

Mohamed Olaitan Lawal, Ibrahim Rotimi Aliu · DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · Nigeria (Lagos)

A study interviewed 202 urban vegetable farmers in four areas of Lagos, Nigeria, to understand urban farming operations and contributions. Farmers typically owned linear plots under 120m by 60m, primarily growing green vegetables (Celosia argientes) and using local tools, chemical fertilizers, and irrigation wells. They used produce for household consumption, sold to local marketers, and helped stabilize vegetable prices.

Abdullah Adam-Bradford, Duncan McGregor, Dávid Simon · · Ghana (Kumasi)

Rapid urbanization in Kumasi, Ghana, and its peri-urban areas leads to significant pollution and waste disposal problems, exacerbated by rapid growth, poverty, and weak local governance. Waste management services are rarely provided in these peri-urban areas despite increasing settlement densities. Community-based strategies promoting nutrient recycling, such as converting organic waste into compost for urban and peri-urban agriculture, offer opportunities to address these issues.

Fungai Hamilton Mudzengerere · · Zimbabwe (Bulawayo)

This research investigated the contribution of women to food security and family livelihoods through urban agriculture in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Primary data collected through observations and interviews showed that women practice urban agriculture more than men and play a crucial role in household food security. While women make decisions on crop types, harvest times, and markets, they face challenges with land ownership, financing, and market access, which negatively affect their agricultural activities.

Barbara Strauss · EngagedScholarship @ Cleveland State University (Cleveland State University) · United States

A presentation was given at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law symposium, "Urban Agriculture: It’s Not an Oxymoron. Policies for Cultivating City Land and Increasing Access to Local Food," which focused on policy, land-use, and other legal issues related to urban agriculture and the local food movement. The Sustainability Research Guide from the Michael Schwartz Library was also introduced during this presentation.

Mulala Danny Simatele, Tony Binns, Munacinga Simatele · Journal of Environmental Planning and Management · Zambia (Lusaka)

This paper, based on recent field-based research in Lusaka, Zambia, examines the relationships between urban agriculture (UA) and extreme weather conditions, and their impact on the livelihood options of the urban poor. Despite its significance as a source of food and income in many sub-Saharan African cities, UA has not been integrated into urban development and planning policy and has come under increasing pressure from extreme weather events like droughts and flooding over the last two decades.

Sima Patel, Rod MacRae · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · Canada

A land parcel analysis in Toronto, Canada identified 77 parcels totaling 1,270 acres (514 hectares) of potential land for community supported agriculture (CSA) farming — about 1 percent of the city's surface area — with much of it located in northeast Toronto. Five commercially viable scenario types were constructed with varying land use, zoning, institutional and residential characteristics, but considerable challenges remain for widespread implementation, leading to policy and program recommendations including pilot projects, institutional linkages, program supports, training and extension.

Sofie Engberg · · Global

This study takes a corporate perspective on urban farming to identify factors enabling value creation, using a qualitative approach combining a literature review with a case study -- document analysis and interviews -- of an urban farming corporation that uses greenhouses for production. Drawing on stakeholder theory, triple-bottom-line theory and hybrid organisation theory, it concludes that urban farming can generate economic, environmental and social value simultaneously, that enabling factors include favourable resource availability and active stakeholder dialogue, and that greenhouse cultivation allows for minimal use of pesticides and fertilizers.

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.

Zilian LIN, K. Akiyama · Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · Taiwan

A study examining the progress of Taiwan's rural planning policy, implemented by the government for more than five decades, from the perspective of community building. As a case study focused on seven points, the analysis finds that an industrial-prosperity policy supporting rural communities, carried out in cooperation with relevant authorities, resulted in rural community promotion. Residents were generally satisfied with the implementation of the plans, but the study also identifies remaining issues, including strengthening a direct-sales system, better grasping residents' needs, coordinating with broader-based plans, maintaining urban agricultural land, and government support services.

Zoey Rogers, Elizabeth Bragg · Ecopsychology · Australia

This study examined what motivates residents of Melbourne, Australia, to lead an environmentally sustainable lifestyle, focusing specifically on the role of "sense of place." Nineteen in-depth interviews were conducted with residents engaged in three types of sustainability activism: personal (e.g., energy and water saving, shopping at farmers' markets), group (e.g., community gardens, sharing neighborhood goods), and political (e.g., lobbying and organizing for structural change). Participants did report a sense of place in Melbourne, but what motivated their action was a broader sense of connection with nature and the planet, awareness of the human-made and cultural/political environment, and their personal health, relationships and community — not necessarily tied to a specific geographical location within the city. Motivating factors differed slightly across activist types, though connection with nature was consistent across all groups; the authors suggest that in urban settings, local sense of place may act as an enabler and reinforcer of action — providing a place to act and people to act with — rather than as a motivator in itself.

Maira Echeverry, Sebastián Gutiérrez, Julián Pineda, Nelson Ravelo · · Colombia

This account describes Barrio San Luis, an informal settlement on the eastern hills of Chapinero, Bogotá, Colombia, formed by rural-to-urban displacement and still undergoing legalization, where residents obtained services such as a community-run water system through collective organizing. It describes the Casa Taller Las Moyas, a project founded roughly seven years earlier to serve neighborhood children and youth left without care while parents work, offering workshops in baking, ceramics, crafts and urban agriculture in two daily shifts organized around school schedules; the text ends mid-sentence and provides no further data on the seed-conservation activities named in the title.

Jonathan Crush, Bruce Frayne, Wade Pendleton · Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition · Sub-Saharan Africa

A paper on rapid urbanization and rising urban poverty shifting the historical locus of food insecurity from rural areas to the cities of Africa uses baseline survey data from the African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN), carried out in 11 cities in 9 southern African countries in 2008-2009, to demonstrate extremely high levels of urban food insecurity. It finds that lack of access to food results primarily from household poverty, high unemployment, and limited income-generating opportunities rather than any absolute food shortages. The paper also shows the growing importance of supermarkets, and finds that urban agriculture plays a relatively insignificant role in the food sourcing strategies of the urban poor.

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.