Research & reports

Susana Alves, Bahar Bașer Kalyoncuoğlu · Ecopsychology · Turkey (Istanbul)

This study explored the socio-ecological potential of urban agriculture in 10 family-related projects in Istanbul, where Bostans (historical urban vegetable gardens) are culturally significant. Despite their importance and UNESCO recognition, the planning and management of bostans have been hampered by rapid urbanization and a lack of integrative policies. Data from interviews, observations, and fieldwork highlighted the role of kinship in knowledge transfer and how farmers base activities on past-present affordances and future expectations.

Enes AKDENİZ, M. Bihter BİNGÜL BULUT, İbrahim HOSAFLIOĞLU, Öner Demirel · Mimarlık Bilimleri ve Uygulamaları Dergisi (MBUD) · Turkey (Iğdır)

This study aimed to determine the place and importance of urban agriculture from the perspective of stakeholders in Iğdır city and its surrounding areas. Semi-structured interview forms were used, with five questions posed to stakeholders, and data were analyzed using descriptive analysis. According to the findings, Iğdır city was concluded to hold significant potential for urban agricultural activities.

David Adams, Peter J. Larkham, Michael Hardman · Land · United Kingdom

This paper explores how porous boundary treatments and plot layouts can encourage ecological exchanges in new urban and peri-urban developments, focusing on a large-scale residential development in the English midlands. It outlines the socio-economic, cultural, and ecological significance of embedding diverse hedgerow designs into early planning, revealing a need to move beyond current models. The study suggests these designs could encourage sustainable land use and scalable urban agricultural systems.

Ruslan Zaporozhchenko, Denys Shymansky · SOCIOПРОСТІР · Ukraine (Kharkiv)

The Kharkiv Green Urban Tour 2023, held in April-May 2023, aimed to reveal the “green” practices of Kharkiv residents during the war, specifically the continuation of growing and distributing home-grown vegetables and fruits in the context of urban farming. This study, conducted as part of the FUSILLI international research project, seeks to provide a clearer understanding of how residents of an urbanized city engage in improvised farming, adapt to the military situation, and reproduce green practices while helping others.

Valentina Cattivelli · Journal of urban regeneration and renewal · Italy (Lombardy)

This paper describes the profile of foreign urban gardeners in Lombardy, Italy, based on questionnaire responses from municipalities. Foreign gardeners predominantly originate from North Africa and Eastern Europe, are mostly over 40 years old, married, and have children. While many Lombard municipalities have urban gardening projects, there is no regional database of cultivated plots or specific information on gardens cultivated by foreign-born residents.

Rachel Heaton · Archaeology Data Service · United Kingdom

This report documents archaeological work conducted during the restoration of Evesham Abbey in the UK from 2021 to 2023, commissioned by Evesham Abbey Trust. Three evaluation trenches revealed modern allotment deposits over abbey demolition material, with structural archaeology including a stone drain and a substantial wall correlating with the abbey church's northern wall. The origin of recorded robber trenches remains unclear.

Candan Türkkan · Moment Journal · Turkey (Istanbul)

This paper analyzes urban gardening practices in Yedikule Bostanlari and Kuzguncuk Bostani in Istanbul, examining the convoluted relationship between the food movement and urban agriculture. It argues that while urban agriculture initiatives are significant for generating community and proposing alternative uses for urban space, they do relatively little to mitigate the structural problems underlined by the food movement. As such, even though they are examples of urban agriculture in practice, their aspirations do not readily associate with those of the food movement.

Jens Lachmund · · United Kingdom (London)

This chapter traces the emergence of initiatives promoting urban agriculture in London, a pioneering city for urban agriculture in Europe, from a history of knowledge perspective. It identifies three formative episodes: open civic experimentation in community projects, city modeling and surveying in food planning scholarship, and government-sponsored knowledge mobilization campaigns. These processes shaped London as a food-system and a space for community engagement.

Joanna Ziemkowska · Studia Ecologiae et Bioethicae · Poland

A historical outline of school gardens in Poland and their past and current possibilities of use were presented. In recent decades, school gardens had lost their educational appreciation, remaining in few schools primarily for aesthetic functions. This article discusses how school gardens may contribute to preventing "nature deficit" and provide a sense of closeness to nature even in urban realities, noting their re-emerging therapeutic potential (hortitherapy).

Koen van der Gaast, J.E. Jansma, Sigrid Wertheim‐Heck · Agriculture and Human Values · Netherlands

This study explored how residents of Almere Oosterwold, Netherlands, envision and organize urban agriculture futures, where 50% of plots must be used for urban agriculture. Using futuring, it found that residents have diverse future perspectives and can formulate specific actions but struggle to commit to them, attributing this to temporal dissonance. The paper concludes that both planning and entrepreneurship are necessary for realizing urban food futures.

Branduini P. · Virtual Community of Pathological Anatomy (University of Castilla La Mancha) · Italy (Milan)

This paper reflects on management and training issues in landscape restoration, based on two pilot water meadow restoration sites in the Milanese peri-urban agricultural area. A training course for "campari" (water flow controllers) was organized at the second site, attracting diverse participants including professionals and vulnerable groups. While the course increased participant awareness, it resulted in a decrease in restoration quality compared to work by professionals at the first site. This led to a participatory management process involving owners, tenants, and volunteers to address the landscape's high perishability.

Evinç Doğan, Federico Cuomo, Luca Battisti · Sustainability · Italy (Turin)

This paper explored strategies for reviving urban greening in post-industrial landscapes through nature-based solutions (NbS), using the case of Turin's old FIAT premises in the Mirafiori Sud area. Data were collected through public literature review, interviews, and focus groups with policymakers, volunteers, and inhabitants. Qualitative thematic analysis showed that Mirafiori Sud became a co-creation hub for sustainable solutions, regenerative art in shared spaces was crucial for community engagement, and urban agriculture support could improve alternative food networks.

Amy Russell, Ziqi Li, Mingshu Wang · International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation · United Kingdom (Glasgow)

This study investigated the distribution of urban agriculture in Glasgow, Scotland, UK, finding that existing projects are mostly centrally located, covering 36% of the total population (approximately 635,000) within a 10-minute walk. A positive correlation was found between walking travel time to the nearest urban agriculture project and food desert status, indicating access disparity. Using the Maximal Covering Location Problem model, the research identified that a minimum of 15 new urban agriculture projects on vacant and derelict land could increase population coverage to 49% and equalize access disparity to a statistically non-significant level.

Tom Critchley · Temes de disseny · United Kingdom (London)

This ethnographic case study examines DIY design practices at The Grove Skatepark in London, UK, viewing it as an urban commons. Fieldwork revealed DIY practices as "learning-by-doing," fostering vocational and soft skills, and supporting a community that includes a community garden and arts workshops. However, the study also found that while the space is inclusive, its governance centers agency around "core skateboarding," reinforcing masculine hegemonies.

Davide Marino, Francesca Curcio, Francesca Benedetta Felici, Giampiero Mazzocchi · Land · Italy (Rome)

This paper proposes agroecological assessment as a tool for formulating evidence-based local food policies, adapting the Tool for Agroecology Performance Evaluation (TAPE) model on a sample of 20 farms in the city-region food system of Rome, Italy. Data analysis showed that agroecological principles are not fully adopted by the majority of farms considered in Rome. Additionally, farms with the highest agroecological level are mainly driven by social factors and have a lower propensity for innovation, which could hinder the transformation process of food systems.

Maraike Probst, María Gómez‐Brandón, Cecilia Herbón, María Teresa Barral, Remigio Paradelo · Applied Soil Ecology · Spain

This study evaluated fungal and bacterial communities in 40 soil samples from 10 urban allotment gardens in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, using DNA sequencing. While microbial richness was comparable to less anthropogenically influenced urban soils, the deterministic effect of soil properties and geographical distances was negligible. Fungal and bacterial communities followed a random distribution and formed very small, often unconnected, microbial association modules, suggesting potential implications of anthropogenic activity for soil health and ecosystem functionality.

Shivant Jhagroe · Urban Studies · Netherlands

A study of the Gandhi-garden, a community garden in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, that is part of the global Transition Towns movement, drawing on participatory ethnography, interviews, and online documents. Challenging the anthropocentrism common in research on urban sustainability and resilience, the paper analyses everyday acts such as weeding and permacultural planting as "more-than-human assemblage" place-making practices involving insects, plants, soil, and fences that challenge urban neoliberalism. It also examines expressions of solidarity with Palestine through olive trees and non-violence thinking, alongside tensions between humans and non-humans over dog waste and birds that take harvested produce.

Michael G. Parkes, Rebekah O’Rourke, Tiago Domingos, Ricardo F. M. Teixeira · Sustainability · Europe

An experimental indoor vertical farm urban-agriculture project involving 27 stakeholder groups was set up in a university building in Lisbon, Portugal in 2018 and closed in 2022; this study analyzed the governance dimension of the project's sustainability using role-constellation mapping of the stakeholder groups and force-field analysis across seven governance factors to understand why the project did not continue. It found that despite early positive outcomes across environmental, social and economic dimensions, the project failed to establish a network of stakeholders consistently engaged in governance from the outset, and that inadequate project culture and a lack of critical governance factors led to a failure to convey a sense of ownership to stakeholders, contributing to the project's closure.

Martin Šlachta, Tomáš Erban, Alena Votavová, Daniela Tomešová, Marta Václavíková, Taťána Halešová, Elena Shcherbachenko, Tomáš Bešta, Magda Edwards‐Jonášová, Renata Včeláková, Vladana Procházková, Pavel Cudlín · Journal of Apicultural Research · Europe

This study investigated pesticide contamination using larval food provisions (a mix of pollen and nectar) of mason bees (Osmia spp.) nesting in artificial shelters at twelve allotment garden sites in Prague and Brno, with seven commercial croplands (fruit orchards, oilseed rape fields) selected for comparison. In total, 79 samples of larval provisions were analyzed using a validated UPLC-MS/MS method covering 262 pesticides and related metabolites. Fifty-six pesticide residues were detected in the allotments and 74 in cropland sites, with 50 compounds common to both; fewer residues were found in allotments (mean 14.3±0.9) than in croplands (21.5±1.1; df=17.4, t=-2.9), though some residues exceeded 10 ppb. The highest levels were observed for the fungicide pyrimethanil (mean 1,989 ppb, maximum 3,983 ppb) and, among insecticides, thiacloprid (mean 136 ppb, maximum 170 ppb). The results supported the view of a lower risk of pesticide exposure in urban allotment gardens than in croplands, though given limited knowledge of sublethal effects of pesticides, and especially pesticide mixtures, on solitary bee development, the study recommends regulation or control of pesticide use in allotment gardens.

Anni Müüripeal, Bianka Plüschke-Altof, Anton Küünal · Cities · Europe

Drawing on the practitioner memoirs of Tallinn gardener Anton and in-depth interviews with city officials and gardening activists, this case study traces how Anton moved from community gardening to guerrilla gardening. It applies a more-than-human theoretical lens to show that the strong emotions driving early community gardening experiments led to a more controlled, institutionalized governance model, which alienated first-generation activists like Anton and pushed him toward guerrilla gardening instead.

Alicia Papanek, Catherine Campbell, Hannah Wooten, John Diaz, Valeria Caicedo Zapata · EDIS · Spain

A Spanish extension publication aimed at urban residents, students, community members, extension agents, and local government officials interested in developing, supporting, or participating in urban agriculture. It covers the definition of urban agriculture, common characteristics, types of food produced, commonly used production methods, and the goals of different types of operations, closing with a list of additional resources on urban agriculture and gardening techniques for beginning and experienced growers.

Julia M. Schmack, Monika Egerer · Urban Ecosystems · Germany

A study in 30 urban community gardens in Berlin and Munich, Germany, observed 20 focal plant species and 13 common bee and non-bee flower visitor groups, examining how landscape urbanization and the availability of floral and nesting resources within gardens affected the complexity (nestedness, linkage density, connectance) of pollinator interaction networks. Dominant flower visitors changed over the growing season, with non-bee visitors such as ants and flies dominant early in the season and bees becoming important later. Nestedness of the flower visitor network increased with floral richness within gardens, while floral abundance, the impervious surface surrounding gardens, garden size, and nesting resource availability did not strongly influence the networks. The findings indicate that high floral richness in community gardens can ensure the complexity and stability of flower visitor networks, that non-bee visitors play an important role especially in the shoulder seasons, and that urban gardeners play a key role in mediating flower visitor interactions through their gardening practices.

Jesús Sanz Abad, Sara Sama Acedo, Gaël Carrero Gros · · Spain

Case studies of two cooperative enterprises (in finance and forestry) and one new urban commons — community gardens in Madrid — all located in Spain, were analyzed using ethnographic methods within the field of solidarity economy and commons. The analysis found tensions between the initiatives' economically and politically "transformative" aspirations and the reality of operating in a market-driven capitalist environment, alliances and tensions arising from interactions with established institutions, and dilemmas or conflicts between maintaining ideological coherence and extending the initiatives' social base.

Noémi Gonda, Péter József Bori · Geoforum · Europe

A study using the case of Hungary examined how agricultural initiatives such as Community Supported Agriculture, permaculture, and small-scale and regenerative farming relate to sustainable rural politics under an authoritarian regime. Based on qualitative interviews conducted in Hungary, it identifies three rural pillars sustaining the Hungarian authoritarian regime — unequal land relations, agricultural subsidies, and agricultural commodity sales — and proposes emancipatory alliances, counter-knowledge claims, and emancipatory subjectivities as potential rural pillars of sustainable democracy in response.

Maria Dankowska · Protection of cultural heritage · Poland

This study examines a design proposal, the Green Ring of Tradition and Culture, for a system of attractive spaces surrounding the city centre of Lodz, Poland, incorporating green areas such as parks and allotment gardens, greenery along the Lodka and Jasien rivers, cemeteries, and post-industrial buildings including factories and owners' villas, with Piotrkowska Street and its adjacent buildings serving as the connecting element. The Green Ring is currently not implemented but is presented as a system of public spaces that could highlight and preserve the city's most valuable cultural and natural heritage elements.