Research & reports

Anna Shortly, Thembela Kepe · Forests Trees and Livelihoods · Canada (Toronto)

This paper explores the opportunities and challenges of incorporating foraging practices into parks planning and management in Toronto, Canada, where foraging is often not permitted in urban parks. The study, based on a scan of practices and interviews, concludes that urban parkland managers should establish dedicated spaces like community orchards to safely and sustainably accommodate foraging, acknowledging current restrictions.

Kristen Giombi, Anupama Joshi, Caroline Rains, Jean L. Wiecha · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · United States

To measure the reach of Oregon's farm-to-school grant program, descriptive analyses and t-tests were conducted between the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 school years. Following the intervention, the number of nonwhite students in participating districts nearly doubled, and average local food purchases, especially fruits and vegetables, increased for low-income districts. These results suggest that the opt-in approach to the grant program facilitated greater participation from low-income districts.

Lisa Berglund · · United States (Detroit)

This paper analyzes media coverage of informal practices like street vending, murals, and urban agriculture in Detroit's redeveloping neighborhoods. It reveals that while these practices are appropriated by developers and new, affluent arrivals as entrepreneurial and necessary for redevelopment, they are treated fundamentally differently from the informal practices of long-standing, marginalized residents, which are often condemned as illegal. This inconsistency highlights how legal frameworks are manipulated to exclude long-standing residents from the city's "renaissance."

Leonardo Mendes da Silva, Vanessa Dutra, Delton Francelino, Natália Oliveira Dias · Enciclopédia Biosfera · Brazil (Barbacena)

Research was conducted in Barbacena, Minas Gerais, Brazil, to identify empty urban spaces and wastelands suitable for community gardens. The study, carried out by the Center for Studies in Urban Ecology, aimed to map these spaces for potential community garden proposals to public and private entities. Ten locations were selected based on specific criteria, and general perceptions were presented to facilitate understanding and dissemination, though the study did not intend to establish planting projects or direct community contact.

Jackson Green, Lauren Maunder, Kristina Gulczewski · VTechWorks (Virginia Tech) · United States

This project presents group research on urban agriculture as a tool for revitalizing urban food deserts, utilizing a website. The website provides definitions, explanations, and examples of food deserts, urban agriculture, and their combination. The project also includes an addendum to the Green New Deal, discussing government recognition of urban food deserts.

Colleen Saxen · CORE Scholar (Wright State University) · United States

This participatory action research (PAR) explored a school garden program in a historically marginalized community during the COVID-19 pandemic and racial justice protests. School staff and community partners co-created the garden, expressing meanings, values, and visions through photovoice, mapping, and gardening activities. Participants described experiences of love, empowerment, and justice, demonstrating the value of PAR for cultivating school gardens as sites for social justice and the role of an ethic of love in community building.

Luiz Andrei Gonçalves Pereira, Marina de Fátima Brandão Carneiro, Igor Martins de Oliveira · DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · Brazil

A study analyzing the spatial organization of urban agriculture in Montes Claros, Minas Gerais, Brazil, practiced in residential backyards (quintais) and vacant lots. Methods combined a literature review with empirical fieldwork in the city's urban agriculture areas. Through theoretical and conceptual discussion, the study examines urban agricultural practices and public policies aimed at promoting food security in Montes Claros.

Guillermo Olivera, Kenia Zavaleta · Repositorio Digital Institucional de la Universidad de Buenos Aires (Universidad de Buenos Aires) · Mexico

This study argues that urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA), along with intra-urban open spaces, constitutes a "second best" land use for 21st-century cities pursuing sustainable growth aligned with the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals — whether through FAO's Greener Cities Strategy, which promotes garden-based UPA against poverty and food insecurity, or through UPA absorbed by city expansion, much of it commercial in nature. Based on analysis of official statistics and fieldwork in the Ejido Tejalpa in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico, the study finds that UPA persists there due to its historical trajectory and access to water and land, existing in commercial form rather than as urban gardens, but not without problems. Its main threat is identified as excessive urbanization and generational change among producers, and its main challenge as achieving greater involvement of urban governments through land management and urban planning, following the experience of other countries where agriculture is given more weight in metropolitan planning.

Rafael Pereira da Silva, Francisco Fransualdo de Azevedo · Revista de Geografia · Brazil

Focusing on Natal, Rio Grande do Norte state, Brazil, this study examines the role of institutional markets — particularly the National School Feeding Program (PNAE) — in commercializing food produced by family farming, drawing on a literature review and PNAE food procurement data from 2013 to 2017. Institutional markets were found to give farmers an alternative outlet for their production, complementing income from open-air markets and potentially reducing the role of intermediaries, but in Natal the PNAE has been underutilized because of problems in its operational structure.

Henrique Freitas Alves · Cadernos PROLAM/USP · South America

Based on a literature review selected through the University of São Paulo's Portal Águia metasearch tool, a Brazilian paper presents a panorama of discussions on urban political ecology and urban agriculture. By comparing literature specific to political ecology with pathways into urban agriculture, it shows the need for closer engagement between the two in Latin American academic literature, given the scarcity of studies in the region, and discusses the complexity of the political and socio-environmental relations behind the practice of urban agriculture and the contribution of linking it to political ecology.

Laércio Stolfo Maculan, Vera Regina Tângari · Revista Nacional de Gerenciamento de Cidades · Brazil

This study examines how territory-structuring elements, including geophysical support, the Porto Alegre metropolitan region, development corridors and urban-industrial agglomerations, shaped the urban edge of Passo Fundo, a medium-sized city in southern Brazil (Rio Grande do Sul), between 2000 and 2018. It found the metropolitan region influences growth vectors, regional highways concentrate business establishments, and the city's edge hosts industrial and commercial activity alongside urban agriculture tied to the globalized agribusiness matrix.

Madeline R. Halvey, Raychel Santo, Sara N. Lupolt, Trent J. Dilka, Brent F. Kim, Grace H. Bachman, Jill K. Clark, Keeve E. Nachman · Food Policy · United States

Researchers built a framework covering authority, policy instruments, and topic areas to catalogue municipal urban agriculture policy in the 40 most populous US cities, compiling recommendations, city plans, regulations, guidance, and city-run programs. The catalogue found wide variation in policy instruments and topics, from accessory structures and composting to public land access and soil safety, and documented a growing use of public-private partnerships that shifts civil society groups from stakeholders to co-governors, raising questions about who leads urban agriculture advocacy and enforcement and how equity and food justice concerns are affected. The study also found most cities lack a clear synthesis of their scattered urban agriculture policies across departments.

Caren Freitas de Lima, Silvia Regina Nunes Baptista, Susana Arruda, Cristhiane Oliveira da Graça Amâncio · Revista Campo-Território · Brazil

This article analyzes Henri Lefebvre's concept of the "right to the city" in the context of Rio de Janeiro, a Latin American city, combining Lefebvre's framework with a historical bibliographical review of urban requalification and removals in Rio, analysis of official institutional data, and field research. In the 2000s, neighborhoods with a history of agricultural activity in Rio's West Zone — mainly Planning Area 4 (AP4), covering the Vargens region (Vargem Grande, Vargem Pequena, Camorim, and parts of Recreio dos Bandeirantes, Barra da Tijuca, and Jacarepaguá) — became targets of real estate expansion. The State enabled this expansion through urbanistic instruments such as the Vargens Urban Structuring Plan (PEU das Vargens) and the Land Use and Occupation Law (LUOS), which reduce agricultural areas. Although generally neglected in debates over urban struggles, the agroecology-based Carioca Urban Agriculture Network (Rede CAU), acting through the Articulação Plano Popular (APP Vargens), takes up the struggle for the right to the city and for urban planning, asserting that the right to the city is also the right to plant.

Jennifer A. Nicklay, Kirsten Valentine Cadieux, Mary Rogers, Nicolas A. Jelinski, Kat LaBine, Gaston E. Small · Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems · United States

This paper examines collaboration among growers, policymakers, scholars, and community members around urban farms, community gardens, and home gardens in the Minneapolis/St. Paul (MSP), Minnesota metropolitan area, proposing a "learning framework" that emerged from a five-year community-university partnership. In fall 2019 the partnership conducted its first formal evaluation of its participatory processes, examining (1) what facilitated or barred authentic collaboration and (2) the role of relationships within those processes, through qualitative surveys and interviews with researchers, partners, and students. The analysis found that urban agroecology research created a space for shared learning, facilitated through co-creation of research, embodied processes, and relationships with people, cohorts, and place.

Lily Edelman-Gold, Meredith Melendy · · United States

A report on Lewiston and Auburn, Maine (2020) compared urban agriculture ordinances and performance standards from cities including Chicago, Illinois; Austin, Texas; and Minneapolis, Minnesota, and analyzed interviews with stakeholders in those cities, finding examples of standards that allow more freedom and equitable urban agriculture practice than currently exists in Lewiston and Auburn. The report's recommendations for Lewiston/Auburn include: combined restrictions for fowl, livestock, and composting (e.g., permitting a set number of chickens on smaller lots with conditional allowances on larger ones); reduced setback requirements for bees with flyway barriers where needed; increased maximum square footage for community gardens, introduction of a "market garden" designation into city code, and allowance of on-site or farm-stand sales; and explicit guidelines on what can and cannot be composted.

Thalita Barbalho, Rita de Castro Engler · Design e Tecnologia · Brazil

A study examining design's contribution to social innovation and sustainability, aimed at showing how the design field can help improve and expand the practice of urban gardens in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Using service design tools, the study designed a service for the collective "Agroecologia na Periferia" (Agroecology in the Periphery), seeking to understand its current activities and how they could be strengthened. The methodology was a qualitative, applied approach with exploratory and descriptive aims, carried out in two stages: (1) a systematic literature review covering social innovation, service design, relational services, sustainable development, and urban agriculture; and (2) a case study following a four-stage method of exploration, reflection, ideation, and prototyping. The study concludes that service design for social innovation proved to be an approach capable of helping resolve the stated objective and build viable futures, fostering and guiding social innovations toward gradual, meaningful change toward sustainability.

Alex Dias da-Silva · Revista Geográfica de América Central · Brazil

A qualitative, descriptive and exploratory study investigating public policies that promote urban agriculture as an instrument of urban sustainability in the city of João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil. Because urban agriculture promotion is a recent phenomenon locally, the study examines whether a specific legislative framework exists for it. It finds that the municipal government has fostered public policies supporting urban agriculture management and improvement since 1993.

Samantha Senda-Cook · Argumentation and Advocacy · United States

Gifford Park, a neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska, United States, has been recreating itself through urban agriculture like many neighborhoods across the country. This case study conceptualizes urban agriculture as a "place ballet" — describing interactions between places and bodies — extending the idea that places can function as spatial arguments. The analysis found that urban agriculture reveals a complex material argument about the positive impacts places and bodies can have on communities and their members, while simultaneously overlooking the economic and racial privileges inherent in these efforts, and concludes that the place-ballet concept itself carries its own implications of economic and racial privilege.

World Future Council · World Future Council / futurepolicy.org · Brazil

A World Future Council policy profile explaining how the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte guaranteed the right to food through Municipal Law 6,352 of 1993, establishing a food and supply secretariat (now SUSAN) coordinating 20 interlinked programmes with a 20-member advisory council, funded by 2% of the city's annual budget. It reports that the infant mortality rate fell from 34.4 to 3 deaths per 1,000 live births between 1993 and 2006, that the 2019 Emergency Food and Nutrition Assistance Programme (PAAN, Law 11.193/2019) serves 1,000 families a month, and notes the (as-yet-unmet) national requirement that 30% of school-meal funding go to family-farm purchases.

Bennett A.B., Lovell S. · PLoS ONE, 14(2):e0212034 · United States (Chicago)

A study of 19 urban agricultural sites in Chicago examining how surrounding land cover (landscape scale) and on-site design (local scale) shape bees and pollination services. Bee responses varied by body size and nesting habit: increasing impervious cover lowered bee richness and reduced pollination services, while more local floral area boosted small soil-nesting bees. It recommends minimizing impervious cover at large scales and adding floral resources locally so urban agriculture can conserve pollinators in the surrounding ecosystem.

Sarah Grace Davenport, Joanna Mishtal · Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment · United States (Florida)

Based on 2017 ethnographic fieldwork, this paper critically examines the sustainability initiatives and practices of an urban farming program in Florida, exploring the extent to which they consider a community's race and socioeconomic class. The authors argue that the program's initiatives overlook food justice concerns and apply the same approach across disparate communities, focusing on environmental rather than community benefits. They call for incorporating social justice themes into sustainability agendas.

Juily Phun, Elise Dang · AAPI Nexus Journal: Policy, Practice, and Community · United States (San Gabriel Valley)

This article focuses on a service-learning program at Cal State LA (Food Justice, the Body, and the Environment in the API Community) that partners with schools across the San Gabriel Valley to build culturally relevant produce gardens for students in a region with a large low-income Asian American population. The essay centers on the partnership process, noting that a lack of procedural transparency within university structures is one of the greatest barriers to community–university partnerships.

Rachel Romero, Deborah A. Harris · City & Community · United States (Austin, TX)

This study uses in-depth interviews with urban farmers and their supporters and with residents of gentrifying East Austin to examine competing definitions of "community" in the dispute over rewriting Austin, Texas's urban farm code. Drawing on the concept of "interpretive communities," it argues that when communities feel threatened they coalesce to defend their position, showing how class, race, and ethnicity remain tied to environmental justice.

Mysha Clarke, Melissa Davidson, Monika Egerer, Elsa C. Anderson, Nakisha Fouch · People Place and Policy Online · United States

This paper argues that community gardens should be a prioritized element of green infrastructure to improve cities' adaptation to climate change. Community gardens can reduce urban heat islands, provide ecosystem services, and increase stormwater retention. However, a qualitative analysis of 18 policy documents for Baltimore, Chicago, and New York City, U.S.A., found that green infrastructure for climate change adaptation prioritizes rain gardens, bioswales, and green roofs, but seldom acknowledges the role of community gardens.

Michael Carolan · Journal of the American Planning Association · United States

This 2019 study, based on 82 interviews in Denver, New York, and San Francisco, investigated how traditional and digital urban agriculture converge and diverge regarding land use and gentrification. It found that both digital and traditional urban farming systems are linked to gentrification and inequitable land use patterns. Digital urban farming systems also operate in a regulatory gray area, with their "digital" aspects used to gain more zoning permission than traditional urban agriculture.