Research & reports

Alastair Fuad‐Luke · Estudos em Comunicação · Global

This theoretical essay spans agriculture, art, digital media, design and philosophy to reframe Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) as part of an "expanded field" of agri-culture. Tracing experimentation in alternative production systems from medieval times through the rise of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) from the 1980s onward, it applies Felix Guattari's concept of ecosophy to ask how AFNs mediate their activities online and how they might construct new producer-consumer relations. It is an exploratory conceptual paper examining design's potential contribution to scaling AFNs, and presents no empirical data.

Consolata Angello · Lincoln (University of Nebraska) · Africa

A literature review examines how information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be used to access and disseminate livestock husbandry information to improve urban livestock keeping in Tanzania, drawing on existing studies of urban agricultural practice and the challenges of keeping livestock in urban areas. It surveys the state of ICT integration in agriculture globally, in Africa and in Tanzania specifically, examines the information needs of urban livestock keepers and the challenges they face using ICTs, and identifies gaps in the literature with recommendations for stakeholders going forward.

RESET · RESET · France

Article from the German web media outlet RESET describing La Caverne, an underground farming project by startup Cycloponics in a disused 3,500 m² Paris car park. It grows mushrooms, endives, and microgreens, with yields ranging from 2 kg for herbs up to 300 kg for endives depending on the crop. The project uses energy-efficient LED-lit hydroponics, won the City of Paris's 'Parisculteurs' competition, and plans deliveries by electric bike and fully electric vehicles.

Zhenshan Yang, Pu Hao, Weidong Liu, Jianming Cai · Habitat International · China (Beijing)

A study in peri-urban Beijing, China, investigated recent agricultural development practices to explore approaches to agricultural transformation during rapid urbanization. The investigation found that high-tech precision agriculture, downstream processing, and agro-tourism have emerged as major forms of peri-urban agriculture in Beijing. These peri-urban agricultural developments were identified as economically appealing, socially inclusive, and environmentally friendly.

Edwin Joseph, Elizabeth O'Dea · Advances in environmental engineering and green technologies book series · United States (South Bend)

This chapter examines South Bend, Indiana, a city facing urban decay and food insecurity among its poor, similar to some developing countries. It reviews the city's history, economic strategies, and efforts by various organizations to alleviate poverty and hunger. The chapter advocates for integrating spatial technologies, such as GIS, to promote collaboration and sustainable urban agriculture among diverse stakeholders to address poverty and malnutrition.

Eromosele George Oko-Oboh, Philip A. Adewuyi · · Nigeria

This work developed an affordable microcontroller-controlled home irrigation system for urban farmers in Nigeria, aiming to conserve water and mitigate urban poverty and food insecurity. The system, utilizing a PIC16F877A microcontroller, was designed to be cheap in procurement, maintenance, and running costs compared to conventional irrigation. Performance tests conducted in the Proteus VSM environment showed improved performance and energy savings over existing conventional irrigation systems.

Isbat Uzzin Nadhori, Ahmad Ahsan · JAICT · Global

This paper proposes an information technology system to manage the supply chain of perishable products in urban farming. The system aims to increase the availability of fruits and vegetables for urban residents by shortening the distance between farmers and consumers. It enables all supply chain members, including producers, distribution centers, administrators, retailers, and consumers, to access and manage relevant information, thereby facilitating easier and faster planning of planting schedules, product selection, harvest schedules, and request fulfillment.

Greg Keeffe · Research Portal (Queen's University Belfast) · Global

This paper proposes a "Hardware-Software-Interface" model to understand urban agriculture, which differs from conventional agriculture in technology, crop choice, and market approach. "Hardware" refers to the technological components, including aquaponics or soil-based methods, adapted for small scales and potentially polluted soils. "Software" represents the ecological elements that produce crops, influenced by factors like permaculture or local market demands.

Júlio Cézar de Almeida Lopes, Hélder Ribeiro Freitas, Eliéser Santurbano Gervásio · Cadernos de Agroecologia · Brazil

This study evaluated the adoption of a drip irrigation kit in an agroecological community garden in Juazeiro, Brazil. The introduction of the system and the social organization of the group led to low adoption of the drip irrigation system, with several farmers returning to manual watering and, to a lesser extent, micro-sprinkler systems.

Chiara Casazza, Stefano Pianigiani · Civil Engineering and Urban Planning An International Journal (CiVEJ) · Global

Urban agriculture is a complex phenomenon that responds to the common need for sustainable cities in environmental, economic, social, and institutional terms. It encompasses various approaches and intervention typologies, from low-tech to high-tech solutions like community gardens and vertical farms. This field characterizes cities at different scales, including territory, town, neighborhood, building, and house, addressing diverse user exigencies and requirements.

Bettina König, Ranka Junge, András Bittsánszky, Morris Villarroel, Tamás Kőmíves · Ecocycles · Global

A literature review was conducted on the social, environmental, and economic impacts of aquaponics. The technology has potential applications in various settings, including commercial or community-based urban food production, industrial-scale production, small-scale farming, and educational systems. However, it is concluded that due to the complexity within markets, value chains, communities, infrastructure, and policy settings, further research and data acquisition are needed to fully assess all sustainability aspects.

M. A. Anderson · IEEE Spectrum · United States

A team of technologists at MIT suggests that urban agriculture may be on the verge of an Internet-enabled revolution, driven by recent technological breakthroughs such as high-efficiency blue LED lighting. This news article explores the potential future of urban agriculture.

Fabrizio Valpreda, Ilaria Zonda · Sensors · Global

This study presents Grüt, a gardening sensor kit for children, aiming to change children's attitudes towards food and reduce waste by increasing their knowledge about food production and consumption. The project combines real and virtual reality, connecting plants to the Internet of Things via sensors and an app. User testing was executed with Dutch children in Amsterdam.

刘颂, 潘鸿婷 · 中国城市林业 · China

This review discusses the definition of urban agriculture landscapes, examines the significance and characteristics of creating them, and identifies the need to introduce new technologies into their construction. It summarizes the application of related techniques from three perspectives — habitat construction, vertical (stereoscopic) agriculture, and artistic creation — as a reference for building urban agriculture landscapes that combine productivity, technical refinement, and landscape aesthetics.

徐正挺 · 合作经济与科技 · China

An article on agricultural innovation within Suzhou's national independent-innovation demonstration zone in Jiangsu province, China, presents Shanghai's modern urban agriculture as a leading example: Shanghai Guoxing Nong company's "Internet+Agriculture" approach uses a "five-ring linkage" business model that integrates agricultural production, technology and services with internet information technology to support the pre-production, production, post-production and sales stages. The article argues that Changshu, which already has a solid agricultural base, should draw on this model and the "Internet+" strategy to build platforms that raise agricultural quality and efficiency.

Qing Guo · · China (Dalian)

This paper, based on the China urban agriculture development report 2013 and a SWOT analysis, studied the development of urban modern agriculture in Dalian. The study found that the agricultural industrial structure, shopping basket program, agricultural management system, land circulation, and agricultural information technology have restricted the development of Dalian's urban modern agriculture.

崔丽丽 · 上海信息化 · China

In recent years, the popularization of mobile phones has significantly increased internet usage in rural China, leading to growing acceptance of rural e-commerce due to a wide selection of online products and freedom from market and regional constraints. As the rural e-commerce industry emerges, agricultural IoT has become a major driving force for increasing urban agricultural output, promoting rural economic development, reducing the number of agricultural workers, and increasing farmers' income. Therefore, in the "Internet+" era, cultivating local agri-business enterprises and building urban agricultural IoT is of extreme importance.

Pei Xin Koh · DR-NTU (Nanyang Technological University) · Singapore

This study aimed to verify the viability of vertical farming systems with LED supplementary light compared to conventional hydroponic farming systems, focusing on energy consumption, cost, plant growth quality, and yield. Experiments with Butterhead lettuce showed that LED lights contributed 90.12% of the total energy consumption in the vertical farming setup. The commercial viability and realistic cost levels of vertical farming have not been established, and a detailed cost-benefit and energy-benefit analysis is yet to be made.

Christine Brown-Paul, Sam Ross · Practical Hydroponics and Greenhouses · Australia

A Sydney-based company supplies hydroponics products and services to a diverse range of clients in Australia, including home growers, market gardeners, commercial growers, schools, and community gardens. This broad client base provides a competitive advantage in the current market.

Anna Maria Orrù · Chalmers Publication Library (Chalmers University of Technology) · Sweden (Stockholm)

This paper investigated whether engaging citizens as design agents through an alternate participation platform could bridge the gap between urban design processes and citizens. This approach was applied to Stockholm's urban agriculture movement, aiming to engage citizens in locating existing and potential food growing places and gathering information. Results showed that a combination of digital and bodily approaches was necessary for critical cartography to holistically engage citizens as spatial agents informing urban policy.

Stephen R. Miller · · United States (Newark, New Jersey)

This article proposes a new approach to financing local food, viewing it as a finance problem similar to urban manufacturing, to scale up local food production. It explores the necessity of large-scale urban agriculture, focusing on vertical farms, and examines creative financing examples like AeroFarms in Newark, New Jersey. The paper suggests deploying existing and potential financing types, modeled on economic development agreements, to advance local food initiatives.

Takahiro Kawamura, Akihiko Ohsuga · IEEE Intelligent Systems · Global

In response to growing interest in urban agriculture and greening, the authors proposed "Green-Thumb Camera," an Android application that allows users to search for plants fitting specific environmental conditions from the linked open data (LOD) cloud. The application uses smartphone sensor information for queries and augmented reality to overlay an image of the adult plant in a specified space. The authors described the LOD content generation method and application details, then evaluated the accuracy of the LOD data and the application's usability.

Steven J. Zuiker, Kyle Wright · Interactive Learning Environments · United States

A design-based research study following one enactment of the Connected Gardening project, in which a fourth-grade class in the United States organized and refined a school garden plot using observations of the physical environment alongside data from a networked digital probe. Through qualitative analysis, it characterizes the interplay among individuals, materials and activities, and among an ecosystem, a garden and graphical representations of environmental indicators, framing these cyber-physical systems as supporting participatory culture inside and beyond the classroom.

René Tijerino · · Mexico

CASA UNAM, a multidisciplinary university project from Mexico's UNAM, was installed at Ciudad Universitaria after winning an award at an international competition held the previous year in Versailles, France; among its recognitions, it won the right to be installed beside the Universum Butterfly House at the Museum of Sciences. The structure consists of three modular living units adjacent to an urban garden that includes a medicinal-plants section, to be monitored for 12 months and open to the thousands of visitors Universum receives annually. Built as a modular, lightweight, customizable construction system with photovoltaic panels for power generation and a system for efficient wastewater disposal, it is presented as a strategy for making use of unused urban spaces in high-density areas of Mexico City such as the Vicente Guerrero housing complex in Iztapalapa. The project involved a multidisciplinary team from the schools of architecture and engineering, the Institutes of Engineering and Biology, the National School of Social Work, and the faculties of Chemistry and Arts and Design, which had won first place in the Engineering and Construction category at Solar Decathlon Europe 2014.

Ahmad Ahsan · · Indonesia

In response to rising demand for perishable produce such as fresh vegetables and fruit driven by healthy-living campaigns, and the weaknesses of traditional supply chain management that lacks demand information for operational decisions such as planting schedules, a paper proposes an information-technology-based integrated supply chain management system for urban agricultural products that lets producers, distribution center administrators, retail administrators, store administrators and consumers share network-wide information. The system is presented as making planting-schedule planning, crop selection, harvest scheduling and demand-fulfillment reporting easier to carry out.