Research & reports

Michael Osei Asibey, Mohammed Abubakari, Charles Peprah · Cogent Food & Agriculture · Ghana

This paper investigated how urban farmers in Ejisu-Juaben Municipality, Ghana, cope with input and crop price fluctuations. Data from 380 respondents identified four major factors influencing input price volatility (oil prices, exchange rates, cocoa producer prices, and inflation), but farmers had no coping strategies for these. Crop price fluctuations were influenced by natural and demand/supply factors, and farmers coped by adding value to crops and diversifying income sources, among others. However, shifting to cocoa cultivation and farming in flood plains was shown to have adverse environmental and ecological implications.

Ivana Bogdanović Protić, Milica Ljubenović, Milica Igić, Miomir Vasov, Mihailo Mitković · Zbornik radova Građevinskog fakulteta · Serbia (Nis)

This paper aims to explore the potential implementation of community gardens in the revitalization process of open spaces in residential neighborhoods in the city of Nis, Serbia. It examines the concept of community gardens and analyzes an example of best practice, stating that the research results can serve as a basis for promoting the application of community gardens in urban theory and practice.

Ignacio Laorga Fernández · · Global

This study analyzed the "risk reduction" effect of organic amendments from urban and agricultural waste (coffee grounds, domestic compost, livestock manure) on metal-contaminated soils. The method aimed to reduce the bioavailability of metals by increasing soil organic matter, enabling remediation for potential reuse as urban gardens. It was shown that immediate dilution and immobilization of contaminants occur, significantly reducing their mobility and absorption by edible plants.

Eurêkoi · · Global

This record describes a query from a user of Eurekoi, a remote response service provided by librarians, seeking documents on urban self-sufficiency. The user requested information ranging from identifying needs to presenting existing solutions. Librarians from the Liège library provided the response.

Cvijetin Živanović, Miroslav Nedeljković · AKADEMSKI PREGLED · Global

This paper focuses on agricultural urbanism, using urban agriculture as a sustainable approach to food production, preparation, processing, and distribution in cities. Analytical methods like analysis, abstraction, and specialization, along with synthetic methods including synthesis, concretization, and generalization, were employed. The results indicate that, in most cases, industrialization and its growing social problems are the primary causes of disturbed human behavior, broken community ties, disrupted traditions, and increased crime and fear among people.

· International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering (IJRTE) · Singapore

Singapore has achieved significant progress in sustainable urban design, contributing less than 0.2% of global greenhouse gas emissions and being recognized as Asia's greenest metropolis. The country has applied 21st-century technological innovations to enhance sustainability in areas such as transportation, energy, building, water, and urban farming.

Héctor Ávila Sánchez · Investigaciones Geográficas Boletín del Instituto de Geografía · Global

This study analyzed the impact and potential of Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture (UPA) on urban food systems, focusing on cities in Western Europe, North America, and Latin America. It concluded that while UPA practices have increased, their presence in urban food systems remains limited, and their consideration in territorial public policies is still marginal. In developed countries, its impact has been primarily therapeutic, landscape-related, and for heritage preservation, while in poorer countries, it has contributed to self-sufficiency for low-income urban populations, public space recovery, social fabric strengthening, and community development.

Gabriel Wei En Wee, Haritharan Devanthran · TEST Engineering & Management · Malaysia

This paper explored the development and adoption of smart farming technologies in Malaysia through a meta-analysis of worldwide scientific literature and perspectives from experienced farmers. Research on smart farming in Malaysia began in 1999, with "Internet of Things" identified as the most researched technology. The development trend points towards urban farming solutions and sustainable agriculture.

Dian Triastari Armanda, Jeroen B. Guinée, Arnold Tukker · Global Food Security · Global

This review examined emerging innovative urban agriculture (IUA) practices, revitalized since 2010 by scientific knowledge and agricultural technology. It assessed IUA's potential contribution to food security and environmental sustainability by comparing scientific literature and actual data from eighteen practitioners worldwide. The most productive IUA practice can yield up to 140 kg of vegetables per m2/year, indicating IUA's potential to support local food supply, strengthen the food value chain, and apply more sustainable practices for global food security.

Stephan Barthel, Christian Isendahl, Benjamin N. Vis, Axel Drescher, Daniel Evans, Arjan van Timmeren · The Anthropocene Review · Global

Global urbanization and food production are in direct competition for land. Displacing crop production from urban and peri-urban land due to soil quality issues will demand a substantially larger proportion of the Earth’s terrestrial land surface than the area lost to urban encroachment. This risks triggering distancing effects, unfair social-ecological teleconnections, and amplifying effects within the Earth System, potentially leading to food riots in cities of the Global South. The paper identifies multi-level leverage points, specifically an advisory global policy aligned with regional policies enabling robust common property rights for bottom-up actors in urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA), to navigate urban expansion away from fertile croplands.

Paulo Charruadas, Bram Vannieuwenhuyze · Studies in European urban history · Belgium (Brussels)

While conventional historical literature distinguishes urban territory inside and outside city walls, recent research points to the greater complexity of urban reality. This research reveals the existence of urban agriculture and the emergence of more or less urban or rural "third-party" spaces that do not fit the classic urban-rural dichotomy. In the case of Brussels, the fragmented representation of space transcending the city wall and documented attempts at centrifugal extension are re-evaluated using "Spatial Turn" models and concepts to better understand these essential spaces.

Maria Rabadjieva, Anna Butzin · European Planning Studies · Global

This paper analyzes how social innovations diffuse, proposing that they spread through "travelling elements" of material, competence, and meaning, rather than solely social interaction. This perspective explains the global emergence of similar social innovations, such as urban gardening initiatives, without direct interaction between actors. The research argues that "practice fields," defined as bundles of similar social innovation initiatives, facilitate this diffusion.

Nicolas Bricas, Damien Conaré · DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · Global

The 20th century marked a significant shift in how cities approach their food supply. While the revival of urban food policies extends beyond urban agriculture and food production, urban agriculture can play a role in reintroducing nature and agriculture into the heart of the city while rebuilding social ties. The challenge is less about feeding cities, given its limited production potential, and more about its symbolic dimension.

Julian Cribb · Cambridge University Press eBooks · Global

This paper points out that none of the world's megacities can feed themselves, and food chain risks pose an imminent threat of starvation. It presents concepts such as climate-proof food supplies, novel urban food production systems, the importance of urban permaculture, rewilding, and developing wise consumers as solutions to urban food risk. However, it does not explicitly state that these solutions fully resolve the issue of urban food self-sufficiency.

Pierluigi Nicolin · IGI Global eBooks · Global

This article describes the urban farming movement as a global phenomenon, emerging in cities worldwide from Mumbai to Tokyo, where cultivated areas produce food distributed locally. Driven largely by the poor and women on small farms, this politico-cultural movement integrates with urban ecosystems through food production, educational aims, and sustainability. It creates new landscapes that warrant aesthetic analysis and could influence urban visual conventions and lifestyles if scaled up.

Wei Wei · DEStech Transactions on Social Science Education and Human Science · Global

This paper summarizes and compares successful urban agriculture experiences from the United States, the Netherlands, and Japan, then provides policy suggestions and development ideas for urban agriculture in China based on existing problems. Urban agriculture has become a global trend in modern urban suburban agriculture, solving urbanization and resource allocation issues in many developed countries.

Maurice Mitchell, Amara Roca Iglesias · Frontiers of Architectural Research · Global

This research explores opportunities for creating a green city on the recently secured Bagmati riverbanks in Kathmandu, Nepal, an area subject to rapid inward migration by landless rural farmers. It asks what architectural theory and practice can contribute to supporting the fit between emergent bottom-up initiatives and top-down city investments, developing loose fit theory, research methods, and reflective practice to investigate latent possibilities, assemble a narrative of embedded change, and create spatial imaginaries of topographical change on the riverbanks. It argues that architectural theory and practice can play a role in integrating migrants into civic institutions and helping generate a greener city by making explicit the relationship between setting and occupant, stimulating and representing alternative imaginaries, and framing civic discourse.

JTC Corporation · JTC Corporation · Singapore

Published by JTC on 27 Feb 2019, this article describes urban farming company Comcrop, whose founder Allan Lim started his first community farm in Bukit Panjang in 2011, later ran a rooftop farm at *SCAPE, and then built a 36,000-square-foot facility with six greenhouses at a JTC site in Woodlands. The Woodlands farm grows leafy vegetables such as pak choy, lettuce and mizuna at high output; CEO Peter Barber states the first greenhouse alone can produce 40 to 50kg a day. Barber envisions placing farms in every neighbourhood in Singapore to employ locals and supply supermarkets, while Lim stresses the need to build agricultural research capability in Singapore.

Jonathan Stoltz, Christina Schäffer · Frontiers in Psychology · Global

This paper explores the salutogenic potential of urban green spaces, proposing edible forest gardens as a concept for urban green space use and management. It argues that including edible forest gardens in urban green spaces (today globally dominated by lawns) could reinforce several affordances of salutogenic importance, such as social cohesion and restoration from psycho-physiological stress and attention fatigue. Increased opportunities for contact with nature and food production processes may also reinforce pro-environmental behaviors in the population.

Suranga Wadduwage · Journal of Land Use Science · Australia (Adelaide)

A multi-criteria spatially-explicit study in the Adelaide metropolitan area, Australia, investigated agricultural land vulnerability to urban sprawl under opposing policy directions. The study showed higher agricultural land vulnerabilities in “Business-As-Usual” and “Accelerated Economic Development” scenarios, extending into rural areas with a leap-frog effect. This confirms the need to sacrifice farmland uses to maintain land supply for urban development under these conditions.

Neslihan Demircan · ATLAS JOURNAL · Global

This workshop evaluated the impact of urbanization and population growth on urban agriculture. Amid challenges to food security and hygienic maintenance due to decreasing urban agricultural lands, global urban allotment models and research on their benefits to local ecosystems and the negative aspects of climate shifts were revealed.

Khadija Benis, Rukaia Gashgari, Adnan Alsaati, Christoph Reinhart · DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · Saudi Arabia (Riyadh)

The Urban Foodprints (UF) methodology was applied to assess the environmental sustainability of high-yield urban agriculture in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, focusing on tomatoes. While urban production in high-yield greenhouses could reduce Global Warming Potential by 9% and water savings were significant, the energy needs of these greenhouses were considerably higher than the baseline. This indicates a trade-off where environmental benefits are partially offset by increased energy consumption.

Valentina Gulin Zrnić, Tihana Rubić · Narodna umjetnost : hrvatski časopis za etnologiju i folkloristiku · Croatia (Zagreb)

This paper examines four urban gardening communities in Zagreb, Croatia, focusing on their actors, structures, and garden aims. It discusses the practice of illegal "wild" gardens and the changing contexts of urban gardening, using ethnographic examples to illustrate diverse organizational methods, communality, and governance issues. The analysis highlights the heterogeneity and dynamics of these gardening communities and considers their potential in urban governance strategies.

Abubakar U. Benna · Advances in e-business research series · Global

This chapter reviews literature and case studies on collaborative consumption in agriculture to support small- and medium-scale farmers in developing countries. It notes limited research on collaborative consumption as a catalyst for agricultural development. The study provides observations to assist with strategies for increasing producer and customer satisfaction, value addition, and engagement.

Georgia Pollard, James Ward, Philip Roetman · Sustainability · Australia (South Australia)

This paper explores the economic sustainability of home food gardens in South Australia using new data from the Edible Gardens project online survey. While saving money is a top motivation for many respondents, the study notes that it remains to be seen whether current gardening practices actually support this aspiration. The paper concludes that more work is needed to measure the full costs of different gardens to better predict their financial accessibility and economic sustainability.