Research & reports

Beacon Mbiba · Environment and Urbanization · Zimbabwe (Harare)

This review examines local government responses to uncontrolled urban cultivation in Harare, Zimbabwe, covering both the colonial period and post-independence since 1980. The study finds that local authorities struggle to manage urban agriculture effectively and sustainably. It suggests new directions for policy and research to address these difficulties.

David Drakakis‐Smith · Geografiska Annaler Series B Human Geography · Africa

This paper focused on the impact of structural adjustment programs on the urban poor in Africa, specifically examining the urban food system in Harare, Zimbabwe. In Harare, food retailing is largely structured through supermarkets, which keeps costs high for the poor. While the informal sector has expanded, it remains relatively restricted and unorganized compared to Asian cities. Consequently, urban agriculture has grown extensively in house-gardens and illegally in the urban periphery, yet there is little coordinated or positive policy response from urban authorities.

Christian M. Rogerson · Development Southern Africa · South Africa

This paper argues that urban agriculture is an important issue for South African policymakers, noting an increase in urban food gardening and cultivation of vacant land in South Africa's metropolitan peripheries. It reviews research on informal agriculture in Asian and African cities to offer suggestions for policy debates and research in South Africa.

Pyar Ali Memon, Diana Lee-Smith · Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines · Kenya

Based on a recent survey by the Mazingira Institute in Nairobi, this article analyzes the nature of urban agriculture in Kenyan cities, focusing on food supply as part of the informal urban economy. Urban agriculture, involving crops and livestock, is a common activity in African urban centers and a key element of poor households' economies, despite being often overlooked by urban planners. The article argues that African urban theory must incorporate this vital aspect of urban reality.

Daniel Maxwell, Samuel Zziwa · Ecology of Food and Nutrition · Uganda (Kampala)

This study examines urban agriculture in Kampala, Uganda, as an adaptive response to economic hardships. It identifies significant constraints, including institutional obstacles to accessing underutilized urban land, municipal bylaws that suppress urban agriculture, and urban officials' indifferent to hostile views. The study found that these bylaws and views are based on misleading or false generalizations about urban agriculture.

Hiroshi AIZAWA, Kensuke Inoue, Masazumi NOMA · Journal of Architecture Planning and Environmental Engineering (Transactions of AIJ) · Japan

This study explained the reasons for non-cultivation in urban agricultural promotion areas and examined future subjects for conserving normal farmland surrounded by urbanization promotion areas. The occurrence rate of wasteland and infringement on agricultural land diversion in non-cultivated land differed according to city planning regulations and cultivating forms. The reasons for non-cultivation were found to be greatly related to farmers' workers, land ownership scale, and planning law, with owners of large landholdings who had no workers due to advanced age showing little intention to maintain agricultural operations or conserve farmland.

Lee M · PubMed · Ethiopia

In Ethiopia, urban agriculture faces significant challenges due to government disapproval of public land use for farming and difficulty in obtaining credit. A 1983 survey in Addis Ababa found that 17% of 1352 households produced their own food on less than 25 sq. meters, with 90% of non-farmers citing lack of land. Despite urban agricultural cooperatives demonstrating 70% higher member income, their lack of government legalization prevents access to loans for productivity improvement.

Wolschke-Bulmahn J., Gröning G. · Journal of Garden History, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 73–80 · Germany

Critically analyzes how the 'nature garden' ideology that emerged in early-twentieth-century Germany, while claiming scholarly basis, carried nationalist and native-plant preferences that fed into later Blood and Soil thinking.

Gröning G., Wolschke-Bulmahn J. · Landscape Journal, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 116–126 · Germany

Examines how German landscape architects' obsession with native plants produced 'landscape rules' that, under National Socialism, became tied to the planning of occupied territories and acquired xenophobic, ideological character.

James W. Roberts, C Wood · · Global

This paper proposes a three-way study for 1992, building on previous case studies in Milton Keynes (UK) and Almere (NL) that noted substantial differences in travel behavior due to land use. The proposed study would cover Manchester, Berlin, and a low-density, car-dependent suburb in Melbourne, examining travel habits under diverse demographic and land use conditions. It suggests potential changes in travel modes and trip lengths following planned urban structural alterations, such as reduced car space in Manchester, S-Bahn and airport extensions in Berlin, and light rail near Melbourne.

J.M. Lusugga Kironde · Urban Studies · Africa

This paper argues that the various concepts, theories, and attitudes used to define and solve African urban problems reflect assimilated and acquired notions and standards rather than indigenous ones. Over roughly the past two decades, commentators and policymakers have been urged to change their approach, but many have yet to adopt new attitudes. It argues that concepts related to urban sanitation, water supply, urban agriculture, urban transport, and aspects of housing supply need to be redefined to reflect local circumstances.

John M. Merriman · Oxford University Press eBooks · France

This chapter emphasizes the “awkward embrace” between city and country in the faubourg and the persistence of an urban agricultural population. It also considers how the troubled relationship between state and city affected the urban periphery and provides an overview of industry's role in faubourg development. To understand the urban periphery in France during the first half of the nineteenth century, it explores the state-city relationship (reflected in town walls), the persistence of rural life at the edge of and within cities, and industry's place in the emergence of the nineteenth-century faubourg.

Nelson L. Bills, Bills, Nelson L. · AgEcon Search (University of Minnesota, USA) · United States

A National Agricultural Lands Study (NALS) in the United States did not provide conclusive evidence of serious conflicts between urban development land requirements and the nation's agricultural production capacity. The study was also flawed by faulty data on farmland conversion rates.

Christian Marois, Pierre Deslauriers, Charles F. Bryan · Espace populations sociétés · Canada

This review of the scientific literature on urban sprawl and urban-agriculture interactions in the rural-urban fringe, set within a North American context, uses the metropolitan growth of Montreal since World War II as a case study. It outlines the processes and impacts of urban sprawl and examines the impact of urbanization on urban fringe agriculture, drawing mainly on recent research from Canada and the United States, noting growing interest in farmer behavior and decision-making, and identifying individual farm-level factors that influence agricultural change.

Jeffrey E Ollswang · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · Global

This introduction to the International City Design Competition outlines a vision to humanize cities by implementing tools over time, including narrowing streets, introducing electric mini-buses or light rail, and bold civic gestures. It proposes using pre-industrial town building principles and strategically building on existing character, with a focus on densification, incremental small-scale infill, domestication of highways, and urban food production.

· 法令（e-Gov法令検索・402AC0000000044） · Japan

The 1990 act promoting the development of shimin-noen (citizens' allotment gardens). Municipalities designate allotment zones and operators obtain certification of a development-and-management plan; the law treats the leasing of farmland and the building of garden facilities as one package.

Johan Pottier · Africa · Rwanda

This article explores the themes of knowledge, ignorance, and power in the context of a Rwandan development project, demonstrating how ignorance is generated through agricultural extension. It argues that agronomic services rely on power structures reminiscent of social inequality, and assesses whether the project-induced creation of ignorance leads to the displacement of local knowledge and the adoption of new methods.

· 法令（e-Gov法令検索・401AC0000000058） · Japan

The 1989 special-measures act exempting small, short-term, non-commercial farmland lettings (the allotment-garden pattern: under 10 ares, up to five years) from Farmland Act transfer permission. It let local governments, agricultural cooperatives and others run citizen farms, forming the legal foundation of Japan's allotment gardens.

Rakodi C. · The Journal of Modern African Studies · Zambia (Lusaka)

A field-based study of Zambian urban settlements in the 1970s-1980s, finding that urban cultivation serves as a vital survival strategy for low-income households and warrants integration into urban development planning.

功 梶井, 和彦 武内, 洋一 松木 · Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · Japan

This abstract describes the UTokyo Repository, an online platform aimed at centrally accumulating, preserving, and disseminating various academic achievements produced at the University of Tokyo in electronic form to the world. Its main purpose is to develop digital collections, make them available online, and preserve them for long-term access.

Youko Yokokawa, 洋子 横川 · Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · Japan

This 1988 report describes changes in Tokyo's agricultural structure driven by urbanization alongside the state of urban residents' diets. Labor and farmland shifted from Tokyo's special wards to the Tama area, where intensive cultivation of fresh produce such as vegetables was concentrated, while in mountainous districts agriculture was combined with forestry. Cultivated land had shrunk by about 60% over the preceding 25 years, and the number of full-time farm households had fallen by 70%, while part-time farm households roughly doubled. Taking advantage of proximity to a large consumer market, 118 vegetable species were cultivated, with production of daikon radish, spinach, and komatsuna increasing year on year. Self-sufficiency rates for key products were 12.7% for vegetables, 7.2% for milk, 3.4% for eggs, and 2.4% for meat. In the urban diet, average nutrient requirements were largely met, though calcium was somewhat lacking and vitamins B1 and C slightly insufficient. Intake of beans, seafood, and vegetables was low by food group, and average daily salt intake was 13.4g, above the 10g target. Eating out and skipping meals were relatively uncommon overall, but skipping meals — especially breakfast — was more common among high-school-age students and older.

和彦 武内, 洋一 松木 · Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · Japan

The available abstract for this 1987 Japanese paper consists only of a repository description (the University of Tokyo's institutional repository, UTokyo Repository) rather than the paper's content, so no findings, methods, or data about farmland's green-space value or the role of urban agriculture can be reported from it.

Christine Furedy · Water Science & Technology · India

This 1986 paper argues that sociocultural factors — the attitudes and behaviors of both planners/administrators and service recipients — need more attention in waste disposal and treatment policy in developing countries, drawing examples from Calcutta and Lucknow, India, and contending that more research on informal waste reuse practices, including in aquaculture and urban agriculture, could inform how reuse is integrated into community waste disposal systems, which would require changes in officials' attitudes toward established informal practices.

Michael S. Jamison · Sociological Quarterly · Global

This study assesses the organizational cultures of collectives and bureaucracies within the urban gardening movement, finding serious underlying differences despite government assistance. Although government agencies provided resources and established projects, collectives and bureaucracies interpreted the urban gardening experience differently. This divergence in understanding the benefits and structuring the experience reveals a source of potential bureaucratic/collectivist conflict.

Bundesrepublik Deutschland · gesetze-im-internet.de (Bundesministerium der Justiz) · Germany

The official text of the Federal Allotment Garden Act. Section 1 defines a Kleingarten as a garden used non-commercially for horticultural purposes (including growing garden produce for personal use) and recreation, situated within a site combining multiple individual plots with shared facilities. Section 3 caps a plot at 400 m² and permits a simple garden shed of at most 24 m² (including covered terrace) that must not be suitable for permanent habitation. Section 5 caps rent at up to four times the locally customary rent for commercial fruit and vegetable cultivation.