Research & reports

Carla Galán-Guevara, Francesca Forno · Agriculture and Human Values · Italy (Trentino)

This qualitative study in Trentino, northern Italy, examined how alterity is conceptualized and enacted across nine Alternative Food Network (AFN) initiatives, using a decolonial analytical lens. Findings indicate that AFNs create meaningful opportunities for collective organization, ecological learning, participatory governance, and solidarity-based exchange, yet are simultaneously shaped and constrained by regulatory frameworks, certification regimes, economic pressures, and uneven organizational capacities. The study interprets AFNs in the Global North as spaces where partial openings and socio-ecological experimentation coexist with broader structures of coloniality, capitalist market relations, and institutional constraint.

Jana Marion Böhme · PubData · Europe

This study investigated the current state and professionality of biodiversity monitoring in food forest projects and influencing social-ecological factors through an online survey and interviews with German and Dutch experts. It found heterogeneous characteristics and professionality levels in monitoring activities, primarily due to context factors like actors, governance systems, and socio-economic settings. The professionality of monitoring depended on volunteer and expert availability and funding, indicating a lack of integrated, standardized, and systematic monitoring concepts and institutionalization.

Marco Focacci, Isabella De Meo, Alessandro Paletto, Francesca Ugolini, Fabio Salbitano · Land · Italy

A study developed a procedural approach to introduce agroforestry into urban planning and tested it in Sesto Fiorentino, Central Italy, involving 170 stakeholders in a questionnaire survey. Respondents preferred gradually introducing agroforestry into green infrastructure, with educational food forests and alley cropping being favored. While decision-makers incorporated agroforestry into city technical standards, urban planners were reluctant to include it at the strategic level in the city development plan.

Mesut YILDIZ · Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems · Turkey (İzmir)

The Kadifekale Urban Orchard in İzmir, Turkey, was analyzed as a qualitative case study, showing that municipally supported urban agriculture functions as a relational public infrastructure reconfiguring women's labor, care responsibilities, solidarity networks, and public visibility. Based on one year of participant observation, in-depth interviews with 96 women, and focus group discussions, findings revealed women use the orchard to create space outside the home, build solidaristic ties, and increase public visibility. However, the case also revealed a persistent governance tension: municipal support is indispensable, yet women's influence over strategic decisions remains limited.

Charlotte Gallagher, Daniel López-García, Parisi, Anton, Cuevas, Soledad · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · Europe

An outcome report from strategic workshops in Valladolid, Flanders, and Wrocław, engaging 33 diverse local stakeholders, assessed key policy and governance challenges facing urban agriculture. The most urgent and actionable priority identified across all three regions is the lack of coordination and knowledge sharing, underscoring a critical need to build resilient urban agriculture coalitions. To address broader structural issues like land access, stakeholders emphasized bridging the urban-rural divide, overcoming political short-termism, and establishing a shared understanding of urban agriculture's multifunctionality.

Rose Jennings · DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · United Kingdom (Glasgow)

Helen Traill explores the social complexities of community growing projects based on six years of ethnographic work in Glasgow. She followed two community growing sites during the Brexit transition and the COVID-19 pandemic, examining concepts such as inclusion and exclusion, freedom, social justice, and political activism in urban agriculture projects. This study critically looks at gardens as sites for individual and community transformation.

Dagmar Haase, Dara V. Gaeva · Plant-Environment Interactions · Germany (Berlin)

An exploratory study conducted in allotment gardens in Berlin, Germany, from May to July 2019, investigated plant species richness and ecosystem services, particularly pollinator habitats and local food provision. Comparing 10 plots with varying management intensities, 376 plant species were identified. The study found that native species richness, weedy plant species richness, and the richness of species contributing to regulation and maintenance ecosystem services were significantly negatively correlated with garden management intensity. Urban allotments support pollinator populations due to a wide variety of nectar-producing plants, but this capacity is greatly affected by local gardener management.

Magdalena Raftowicz, Mirosław Struś · Sustainability · Poland

An empirical study in Poland, based on a critical literature review and a 2024 CAWI (computer-assisted web interview) survey of CSA producers, examined whether social capital theory explains food producers' engagement in Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) and whether this holds in practice. It found that social capital theory does explain the mechanisms underlying CSA engagement, with implications for local food system and small-farm policy, but that because of Poland's low level of social capital, the CSA model there remains only a niche complement to traditional agriculture, functioning primarily for a narrow group of socially and environmentally conscious consumers and small producer clusters.

Paul Miner · Journal of urban regeneration and renewal · United Kingdom

This paper evaluates the evolving role of Green Belt policy in England, arguing that both the designation and the land it protects are increasingly critical to addressing environmental, climate and public health challenges. It defines the extent and characteristics of Green Belt and other "countryside around towns" land, showing that these areas prevent urban sprawl, support nature recovery, provide public access to green space and sustain cultural landscapes, while highlighting mounting pressures including housing demand, weakened planning controls, losses in farming capacity and newly introduced "grey belt" policy reforms, and recommending measures such as reinstating strategic planning through Spatial Development Strategies, adopting a brownfield-first approach, prioritising environmental land management, and considering new Green Belt designations or expanded National Landscape protections.

R. E. Molenaar, Marcel Pleijte · · Netherlands

A Wageningen University Science Shop report examines measures to improve water management for the "duinlandjes", centuries-old allotment gardens in the dunes near Egmond aan Zee, Netherlands, that form part of the Zeesdorpenlandschap cultural heritage. Commissioned by the Duinlandjesvereniging de Noord association, it investigated sustainable solutions from sociocultural, hydrological and ecological perspectives. The duinlandjes are currently experiencing flooding that makes cultivation very challenging. A stakeholder analysis found that while collaboration between the association and drinking water company PWN has advanced, interactions among stakeholders remain fragmented, and it calls for the province of Noord-Holland to take an active coordinating role. The hydrological analysis identifies winter precipitation surplus as the main driver of rising groundwater, projecting that climate change will bring wetter winters and drier summers with greater groundwater fluctuation, though long-term groundwater trends remain uncertain while winter/spring water excess will probably continue. The ecological risk assessment highlights the vulnerability of surrounding dune habitats, noting that draining and diverting excess rainwater can cause habitat degradation and increased drought stress.

Klara Muranyi, Ina Säumel, Donoso José, Edi Emilov Ivanov, Elena Heim, Sophia Kipp, Stephanie Ligan, Marisa Pettit, Thomas Wachtel, Anneli S. Karlsson, Bettina Schneider, Stephanie Degenhardt, Hilde Marie Herrebrøden, Inken Schmütz, Tina Hilbert, Sergio Torres Gimenez, Blanka Suler, Mollenhauer Mollenhauer, Vic Borrill, Ruth Smart, Antonia Torres, Martin Regelsberger, Latifa Bousselmı, Lamia Bouziri, Kai Gildhorn, Erwin Nolde, Katrin Bohn, Primož Banovec, Atanasova Natasa, Max Manderscheid, Milena Klimek, Lucia Alexandra Popartan, Kristin Reichborn‐Kjennerud, Sarah Noémie Plassnig, Joaquim Comas, Sebastian Eiter, Wendy Fjellstad, Nevelina Pachova, Aeden Ratcliffe, Zhifang Wang, Paula Firmbach, Hanna Burckhardt, Laura Martinez, Helen Gallis, Rutger Henneman, Nienke Bouwhuis, Caroline Zeevat, Paul de Graaf, Noel Arozarena Daza · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · Europe

Deliverable D7.6, "Final ECS Curricula, Training Modules and Materials," published on Zenodo, is part of the EU Horizon 2020-funded EdiCitNet project (Edible Cities Network, 2018-2024). It compiles the curriculum for a free Massive Open Online Course, "Making Cities Edible: Cultivating Sustainable Urban Environment," covering Edible City Solutions (ECS) — an approach going beyond vertical gardens, rooftop farms, community kitchens and urban aquaponics to include biodiversity conservation, waste reduction, water recycling, social engagement and co-creation. The underlying ECS Knowledge Base was built through a co-creation process involving communities of knowledge and practice, and course content is organized into four fields: I) ECS Governance, II) Economic value of ECS, III) ECS as Ecological Systems, and IV) Socio-cultural impact of ECS. It targets initiatives, urban developers, small and medium-sized businesses and interested individuals, with the course led by a team of instructors with expertise in urban agriculture, sustainability and community development.

Katalin Horotán, Jana Táborská · Repository of the Academy's Library (Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences) · Europe

Against the background of children's gradually weakening connection to nature amid spreading urban lifestyles and digitalization, this paper presents the concept of "accessible nature," which places direct, local experience of nature at the center of environmental education. The described program, "The World of Our Garden" (Kertünk világa), uses urban gardens as learning environments and offers modular activities grounded in experiential and inquiry-based learning. Through observation and hands-on activities, students gain insight into natural processes while developing scientific thinking, an emotional connection to nature, and cooperative skills. Using examples, the paper shows how a schoolyard or community garden in an urban setting can become a complex, motivating learning space for sustainability education.

Julija Bakunowitsch · Urban Planning · Germany

This qualitative study examines a publicly funded urban gardening project in Dortmund, Germany, implemented as a labor-market activation measure on temporarily available land targeting employable welfare recipients. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, it combines the concept of "food justice" with valuation studies to analyze how labor, land, and exchange are valued in everyday practice. The findings reveal tensions between empowerment and dependency, care and control, and social recognition and material precarity: while participants experienced gardening as meaningful work and a source of social participation and belonging, these valuations remained bounded by welfare regulations, temporary land tenure, and charity-based food distribution. The study concludes that such temporary urban gardening projects function as sites of plural, negotiated valuation where justice is enacted only provisionally, through everyday practice, within the limits of welfare governance.

Guilherme Raj, Flor Avelino, Marie-Claire Bribois · Cambridge University Press eBooks · Europe

This chapter argues that power dynamics have received limited attention in sustainability-transitions research despite their centrality to lasting societal change, and introduces two frameworks -- "power to, over, and with" and "three relations of power" -- to analyze how power relations shift over time and are constituted. Applying these frameworks to a case study of community-supported agriculture in Portugal, the analysis shows how individual and collective agency, human and non-human interactions, and historical structures of social relationships shape opportunities and barriers for transitions. It concludes that more power-aware research incorporating non-Western and Indigenous epistemologies is needed.

· Wikipedia (English) · Spain

According to English Wikipedia, the Water Tribunal of the Plain of Valencia was founded during the reigns of the Caliphs Abd-ar-Rahman III and Al-Hakam II, in 960 CE, as an institution of justice to settle disputes over irrigation water. It is made up of one representative (síndic) from each of nine Irrigation Communities, one of whom serves a two-year term as president. It meets every Thursday at Casa Vestidor on Plaça de la Mare de Déu in Valencia, and in 2009 was inscribed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage alongside the Council of Wise Men of the plain of Murcia.

Ajuntament de Barcelona · Ajuntament de Barcelona / Institut Municipal de Parcs i Jardins · Spain

The official page of Barcelona's municipal allotment network, offering 15 allotment sites across the city's ten districts, with plots of 20-40 m2 leased to residents aged 65+ and non-profit organizations. The program formally launched in 1997 with the Can Mestres allotments, though the very first allotment, Hort de l'Avi in Gràcia, dates to 1986 following a resident petition. Plots for individuals are allocated by lottery and for organizations by competition, with stated goals of environmental education and intergenerational coexistence.

· Wikipedia (italiano) · Italy

An Italian Wikipedia article on the cascine (traditional farmsteads) of Milan, of which about a hundred survive today, 59 of them municipally owned. Eighteen are derelict, while the rest are used as libraries, recreation centres, facilities for the elderly and disabled, or housing; thirteen remain active farms engaged in rice cultivation, dairy farming, or horse breeding. The oldest, Cascina Chiesa Rossa, dates to the 10th century, with other major cascine built between the 11th and 15th centuries.

· Wikipedia · United Kingdom

According to the English Wikipedia article 'Manor Garden Allotments', the Manor Garden Allotments in London was a 4.5-acre (18,000 m2), 80-plot allotment site established in 1924 by Major Arthur Villiers. It was cleared in October 2007 to make way for landscaping of the London 2012 Olympic Park, and tenants were moved to a temporary site two kilometres away. Restoration on the original site and a 2.1-hectare provision of replacement plots were promised, but the successor Pudding Mill Lane allotments did not open until roughly four years after the Games ended.

· Wikipedia (ドイツ語) · Germany

This German Wikipedia article on the Edible City movement traces its origin to 2008 in Todmorden, England, where Pamela Warhurst and Mary Clear founded 'Incredible Edible'; by 2017 the UK Incredible Edible Network linked more than 100 groups. In Germany, the association 'Essbare Stadt' was founded in Kassel in May 2009 based on permaculture principles, while Andernach's municipal project began in 2009 and gained nationwide attention after being presented at Berlin's International Green Week in 2014. By 2017 over 140 such initiatives calling themselves 'edible' were found online. Since 2008, Toronto has promoted a comprehensive municipal program including community gardens, education, and food-waste initiatives.

· Wikipedia · United Kingdom

This Wikipedia article covers Incredible Edible, an urban gardening movement started in 2007 in Todmorden, UK by Pamela Warhurst, Mary Clear and others, run on a 'three spinning plates' model of community (public-space growing anyone can pick from), business (supporting local food firms), and learning (food education). As of 2018 there were 120 official UK groups and over 700 worldwide; UK groups reported a 37% year-on-year rise in produce, 9,763 sqm of growing land, 4,861 participants, and 207 events. The project received a £500,000 grant from the Big Lottery Fund.

· Wikipedia · Europe

This Wikipedia article on allotment gardening covers its history and national systems. In the United Kingdom, an 1809 engraving of Birmingham already shows allotment gardens surrounding the town, and the 'Great Somerford Free Gardens' in Wiltshire were founded in 1809; the 1908 Small Holdings and Allotments Act legalized allotments, amended in 1922 and 1950, with plot numbers rising from 244,268 in 1873 to a peak of about 1.5 million in 1918 before declining to roughly 300,000 by 2009. In Germany, 'Schrebergarten' plots trace to the 'Schreber movement' begun in Leipzig in 1864, formalized by the 1919 Small Gardens and Small Leaseholds Land Law; there are now about 1.4 million allotments covering 470 square kilometers, including 833 allotment complexes in Berlin alone. In France, family gardens that emerged in the late 19th century are managed by the 'Fédération Nationale des Jardins Familiaux et Collectifs,' with about 135,000 members. In the Netherlands, the article states the first allotment garden was founded in 1838, there are now 240,000 allotment gardens, and the 'Algemeen Verbond van Volkstuindersverenigingen in Nederland' (AVVN) was founded in 1928.

AVVN · AVVN (official) · Netherlands

The official site of AVVN, the Dutch federation of allotment/community gardening associations. It describes its mission as bringing together garden enthusiasts, associations, and green initiatives across the Netherlands, and operates a knowledge bank (covering social greening, vegetable gardens, natural/sustainable gardening, and association management), webinars and activities, and news articles. It is based at Rijnzathe 12, Utrecht. The homepage displays a member/affiliate count of '+1,489.' The page itself does not state a founding year, which could not be confirmed here.

· Wikipedia · Europe

This Wikipedia article on 'city farm' states that an early city farm was set up in 1972 in Kentish Town, London, combining farm animals with gardening space — a combination inspired by children's farms in the Netherlands — and that other city farms followed across London and the United Kingdom. The article does not, however, provide further detail on the origin or history of the Dutch children's farms (kinderboerderij) themselves.

European Social Fund Plus (European Commission) · European Social Fund Plus, Social Innovation Match · Netherlands

A case study of Herenboeren, a Dutch citizen-owned cooperative farm model started in 2016. Around 250 households jointly finance and govern each 'Herenboerderij', paying a one-off investment of roughly €2,000–2,500 and a monthly fee of about €45–80 (depending on location and meat consumption) in exchange for a weekly share of seasonal vegetables, fruit, eggs, and optionally meat. Professional farmers are employed to run nature-driven production. As of 2026 there are 23 operational farms across the Netherlands with more than 9,000 citizen members.

· Wikipédia (français) · France

French Wikipedia entry on 'jardin ouvrier' (workers' garden), tracing origins to Félicie Hervieu's initiative in Sedan (1889), Abbé Lemire's 1896 league, the rapid growth of gardens in the Paris region from 48 in 1904 to 1,515 in 1913, and a nationwide total of 250,000 gardens by the end of World War II. The law of 26 July 1952 formalized the term 'jardins familiaux'.