Research & reports

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.

Lucia Škamlová, Agnieszka Wilkaniec, Magdalena Szczepańska, Vladimír Bačík, Petra Hencelová · Urban forestry & urban greening · Europe

This research conducted a comparative analysis of community gardens in Bratislava, Slovakia, and Poznań, Poland, to understand their development and management in post-socialist urban environments. Extensive field research, including exploratory walks, participatory observation, and semi-structured interviews with community garden representatives, was used. The analysis revealed both similarities and differences in city-specific approaches to establishing, managing, and developing community gardens, concluding that a "copy-paste" management approach does not exist and practices vary by local context.

Carme Melo Escrihuela · International Journal of Sustainable Development and Planning · Spain (Valencia)

The evolution in the preservation, management, and planning of l'Horta de València, a historical Mediterranean huerta in Valencia, Spain, was assessed. It is argued that negative changes and impacts in l'Horta are not simply the outcome of global dynamics but result from the region's planning trajectory and landscape management approach. This approach has been shaped by a lack of territorial and supra-municipal perspective and the primacy of culture, identity, and heritage aspects over the landscape's productive dimension.

Jean-Christophe Levassor · DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · France

This study addresses social divisions in Le Pile, east Roubaix, France, where over 40% of residents live below the poverty line. It states that without proactive policies, social divisions will worsen, and initiatives like urban farming and zero waste will only have a limited effect beyond a small circle of insiders. La Condition Publique aims to recreate ties among various actors to support urban renovation and foster resilience in this deprived neighborhood.

Juan Ignacio Plaza Gutiérrez, Daniel Herrero Luque, Marta Martínez Arnáiz, Eugenio Baraja Rodríguez · Cuadernos Geográficos · Spain

This article explores the singularity and diversity of peri-urban garden landscapes characterizing the surroundings of several cities in Castilla y León, Spain. The study analyzed the spatio-temporal evolution, landscape dimension, functional relationship with urban space, and the consideration of their protection, management, and maintenance in planning instruments. Results reveal the unequal persistence of traditional garden belts, their diverse types, and their uneven treatment in urban planning in the studied cases.

Guido Sali, Federica Monaco, Stefano Corsi, Chiara Mazzocchi · Archivio Istituzionale della Ricerca (Universita Degli Studi Di Milano) · Europe

This paper adopts a territorial approach to analyze agro-food systems in five European metropolitan regions. The methodology aims to assess the capacities of urban and peri-urban agriculture to meet urban food demand and its economic role. Preliminary results are provided to inform regulations in the agro-food sector.

Sofia Nikolaidou · Manchester University Press eBooks · Europe

This chapter examines new forms of urban gardening, often involving informal and temporary reuse of vacant land, and their impact on urban green space governance and planning practices. Using examples from Greece and Switzerland, it highlights differences and similarities in practices, social and institutional contexts, and collaborative governance patterns. The study calls attention to the critical role of the temporary nature of these initiatives, which affects new configurations of urban green areas and public space, and related planning practices.

Monika Szopińska-Mularz, Steffen Lehmann · Future Cities and Environment · United Kingdom

This paper explores the adaptive reuse potential of obsolete inner-city multi-storey car parks for urban farming, specifically hydroponics, in three UK cities (Portsmouth, Bristol, Brighton). The first stage of a multiple-site case study identified planning and technical limitations and opportunities through policy analysis, layout exploration, and field observation. The analysis showed that while these structures present similar adaptive reuse challenges, they could be converted for farming to address social, environmental, and economic issues, though this requires planning document innovations and further efficiency assessment.

Cristina Imbroglini · DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · Italy

A study (Italy) starting from the hypothesis that new and original landscape strategies can concretely contribute to the environmental and social reactivation of metropolitan settlements, addressing urban marginality understood as both social and spatial exclusion. It focuses on abandoned or underutilised landscapes and structures far from city centres and from circuits of opportunity and cultural exchange, and proposes two design devices: "the piers," green infrastructure or linear landscapes integrating sustainable mobility, open spaces, and urban agricultural activities; and "new social condensers," public facilities for vulnerable people realised in the most deprived urban areas through the recovery of underutilised or abandoned spaces.

Thomas Krikser, Ingo Zasada, Annette Piorr · Sustainability · Germany

An empirical study in Germany combined qualitative and quantitative survey data with multi-value qualitative comparative analysis across three urban agriculture models — self-harvesting gardens, intercultural gardens, and community gardens — to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for socio-economic success. It found that different value systems and cost-benefit considerations applied across models: a service-focused farmer-consumer relationship ensuring self-reliance mattered most for self-harvesting gardens, self-reliance combined with sharing mattered for intercultural gardens, and community gardening success depended on self-governance and individually determined factors beyond production output, with participants across models showing a post-productive orientation that goes beyond conventional trade-off thinking.

Inés Melón Izco · · Spain

"Madrid To Go" is an architectural design proposal for an intermodal transit station in Madrid, Spain, positioned above existing rail platforms to connect two neighborhoods historically divided by the rail yard, combining a covered, climate-controlled station with a food market and a strip of urban gardens intended primarily for cultural, educational, leisure and awareness purposes, with the roof shape referencing the profile of the Sierra de Madrid visible from Chamartín.

남진보, 김근호 · · United Kingdom

This 2019 study examined community-led gardens for particulate matter (PM) abatement in London, UK, as case studies for addressing PM problems, using place-keeping theory as its analytical framework and analyzing the gardens' management structures. It found that strong governance backed by local policy support is key to addressing PM issues, alongside stakeholder partnerships, community-generated supplementary funding, regular evaluation through community monitoring, and long-term maintenance. The study concludes that community garden management should take a self-sustaining structure built on strong governance, and recommends policies that encourage community involvement in decision-making, expand external funding including from private and business sectors, provide PM-monitoring tools and education (for example via universities), and plant low-maintenance vegetation to sustain gardens against funding and labor shortages.

Marco Picone, Filippo Schilleci · Nova Science Publishers (Nova Science Publishers, Inc.) · Italy

A critical essay examining an urban-garden participatory process underway as part of Palermo, Italy's "Laboratorio Palermo città educativa," launched by the municipality in 2015 to convert abandoned or degraded public green areas into urban gardens for educational activities across all ages, in the name of neighborhood community reappropriation. The paper argues that in a context of austerity urbanism, it is easy for the municipality to exploit the absence of public investment to mobilize active citizens as protagonists of urban change, and that the idea of creating urban community gardens—like other recent slogans such as smart cities and creative cities—tends to become a universally praised, virtuous development model without scrutiny. It further notes that the lack of an effective regulation governing the use of public green spaces in the city continues to create obstacles to the solutions proposed by the thematic working table. The author concludes that field-based qualitative research is still needed to determine whether these reappropriation processes conceal neoliberal dynamics that delegate a false decision-making power to citizens while using them to fill current political vacuums.

Teresa Marat-Mendes, João Cunha Borges · Repositório do ISCTE-IUL · Europe

This 2019 presentation introduces the ongoing SPLACH (Spatial Planning for Change) research project focused on the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA), Portugal, home to about 3 million people, most of whom live in peripheral residential areas developed over the 20th century. These areas face problems including social isolation and car dependency, while municipal and private initiatives, including the promotion of urban agriculture, have sought to counteract such issues. SPLACH has surveyed a number of case studies to theorize the planning and housing dynamics in the LMA and their impact on territorializing ethical principles grounded in urban agriculture initiatives. The presentation raises the question of what specific issues identified in the SPLACH case studies offer opportunities to rethink urban planning and urban form toward a more sustainable environment and to promote the social role of urban planning.

V. Yarovyi, О. В. Фраєр · Ukrainian society · Europe

This paper examines how Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) has formed, and what models and forms it has taken, in various countries, synthesizing this foreign experience from the perspective of implementing CSA in Ukraine. It discusses the preconditions for CSA's development, the incentives that lead producers and consumers to join CSA, and the conditions needed for its social and economic efficiency.

Géraldine Brown, Nathan Kerrigan, Jana Fried · Pure (Coventry University) · United Kingdom

This report presents an evaluation, conducted by a team of Coventry University researchers, of Garden Organic's London Food Poverty Project (LFPP) in Southwark, London, UK, which adapts the organization's Master Gardener Programme. Prior independent evaluations of the Master Gardener Programme had identified positive outcomes for volunteers, communities, households, and substance-misusing prisoners across health and wellbeing, skills and employability, community life, food eating and buying, food recycling and composting, relationship building, and recovery support. Funded by the Hirschmann Foundation, the LFPP aimed to build resilience and knowledge in an urban locality identified as an area of deprivation, targeting individuals and families across Southwark communities at risk of or experiencing food poverty, using an approach that encourages participation in food growing and cooking on a low income. The report is organized into four sections: background context, the collaborative community research approach, key findings on community growing, cooking, and networks, and reflections and learning points.

Anne Barbillon, Christine Aubry, Nastaran Manouchehri · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · France

This French guide, "R.E.F.U.G.E.," developed by AgroParisTech, sets out a four-step methodology to help urban-planning actors in the Île-de-France region assess and manage soil contamination risk before establishing urban agriculture on available land: a historical and environmental site study, a sampling strategy, interpretation of soil analyses, and, where warranted, a formal health risk assessment. Based on France's national methodology for managing polluted sites and soils, it is intended as a first harmonized technical tool for the field and was slated for a testing phase applying it to future urban agriculture projects. The abstract itself does not report contamination measurements or findings from any specific site; it describes the assessment procedure rather than presenting soil contamination data.

Giuseppe Aliperti, Silvia Sarti · Manchester University Press eBooks · Italy

This study analyzes, as a case study, an urban gardening initiative in the central neighbourhood of a mid-size Italian city, developed through participatory planning interventions and the requalification of urban sites. Noting that most existing research on spatial justice has focused on metropolitan settings, it examines the issue in a smaller urban area. Several actors were involved in implementing the initiative, and residents and local retailers were identified as the groups potentially subject to spatial injustice. Comparing the perspectives of these different stakeholders, the study measures both the positive and negative impacts of the initiative on the local community.

BBC News · BBC News · United Kingdom

BBC News reported that Gorgie City Farm in Edinburgh closed after going into liquidation on November 1, 2019, with the loss of 18 jobs. The charity had provided volunteering opportunities and support to disadvantaged young people and adults and drew about 200,000 visitors a year. It had survived a 2016 closure threat via a crowdfunding appeal that raised more than £100,000, but trustees decided it could not find a sustainable future amid declining external funding and rising costs. Its roughly 100 livestock and pets were to be sold or re-homed.

Luc Menapace · Gallica (Bibliothèque nationale de France, blog) · France

Blog article from the BnF's Gallica platform recounting how Abbé Lemire founded the Ligue du Coin de Terre et du Foyer in 1896 to promote workers' gardens. The league was recognized as a public-interest body in 1909, renamed the Fédération nationale des jardins ouvriers in 1921, and renamed again to the Fédération nationale des jardins familiaux in 1992. Gardens were framed as remedies for insalubrity and alcoholism and as sources of food and leisure.

Will Thompson · Plinth · United Kingdom

Published 12 June 2019, this piece estimates that UK charities spend around 15.8 million hours a year on grant monitoring reports, roughly £204 million in staff time. It assumes an average of 40 hours per grant, about 391,280 grants distributed per year and an average grant of around £50,000. Charities with at least one full-time-equivalent member of staff typically juggle five to ten different funders, each asking for similar information in different formats at different times, so the administrative load accumulates without producing learning. The estimate draws on interviews with ten people at small and medium charities reporting to six local authorities and more than fifty funders.

Rory James Ridley-Duff, Michael Frederick Bull · Social Enterprise Journal, Vol.15 No.2, pp.243-263 (Emerald) · United Kingdom

A paper using the FairShares Association's model rules to recover the communitarian philosophical roots of 1970s social enterprise. The authors trace links between developments in UK social enterprise and solidarity cooperatives across continental Europe, Asia and the Americas, arguing that the communitarian origins of social enterprise are 'disturbingly obscured and hidden'. They propose the FairShares Model as a way to distribute wealth and power among social entrepreneurs, workers, service users and community investors, and contend that this pluralist turn — 'new cooperativism' — could transform labour and consumer rights. Abstract only was consulted.

Barykina N. · Urban History (Cambridge University Press) · Germany

Analyzes Berlin's Horseshoe Estate (Hufeisensiedlung) by Taut and Wagner, examining how Weimar public-housing policy, new technologies, bureaucracy, and garden-city ideals shaped this modernist Siedlung as both aesthetic vision and social environment.

European Parliament Research Service · European Parliament — In-Depth Analysis IPOL_STU(2018)617468 · Europe

A comparative analysis of urban and peri-urban agriculture policy across EU member states, systematizing the impacts and challenges of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) on urban farming and offering policy implications for EU-wide support.

Gullino P., Battisti L., Larcher F. · Sustainability (MDPI) 10(5), 1625 · Italy

Evaluates the multifunctionality of peri-urban farming in the Turin metropolitan area from a sustainability perspective, presenting a method to quantify multifunctional values across food production, landscape, ecosystems and socio-culture.