Research & reports

Nicholas Henderson, Quentin Lefèvre · Sens-Dessous · France

This article investigates biology, economics and landscape through the lens of a relational paradigm that the author identifies as pervasive across both the social and life sciences, positing the relational nature of the world as an actant reality that remains largely invisible. It also examines the human relationship to the living world amid what it frames as a crisis in that relationship, and analyzes a shared permaculture garden as a manifestation of "relational design" — an approach to design centered on relationship.

Cordula Kropp, Clara Da Ros · · Europe

Ethnographic case studies examined urban farming movements in Leipzig, Germany and Nantes, France. The Leipzig movement is strongly oriented toward building an environmentally friendly, sustainable post-growth economy, while the Nantes movement is aimed above all at overcoming social inequality and exclusion; in both cities, participants respond to forces in urban development they perceive as opposed to their own needs and interests, encouraging fellow citizens to reclaim local spaces and cultivate them for community subsistence.

Jakob Laage‐Thomsen, Anders Blok · Environment and Planning E Nature and Space · Europe

Drawing on a case study of a civic-driven permaculture garden in Copenhagen, Denmark, this article develops an analytical grid for the imaginative and material domain of public aesthetic norms that shapes tensions over interventions in, and valuations of, the city's multiform green spaces. It models this domain along two axes — "orderliness" versus "wildness," and "pastoral nature" versus city-nature "imbrication" — and uses the grid to make sense of internal debates and external criticisms surrounding the Copenhagen permaculture garden. It explains how and why the garden struggled to secure a legitimate place in a city otherwise committed to urban nature, and argues that attention to variable aesthetic commitments around urban greenery helps recast questions of urban sustainability politics.

Anna Pigott · Environment and Planning E Nature and Space · United Kingdom

Drawing on extended fieldwork with a Community Supported Agriculture project in south Wales, this article re-imagines soils as lively, complex, more-than-human ecologies by examining the largely sidestepped subject of spirituality in agriculture. It explores how care is cultivated through biodynamic farming, a non-conventional method incorporating astrological and spiritual principles, arguing that biodynamic narratives and rituals encourage attentiveness to more-than-human agency and energy, to depth both underground and in above-ground influences of air and celestial bodies, and to reciprocity between soil biota and humans — while also resisting drives to measure and map and leaving room for mystery. It also notes that despite biodynamic farming's growing popularity, its spiritual elements tend to be kept quiet, overshadowed by more familiar secular narratives.

Mirosław Struś, Magdalena Kalisiak-Mędelska, Michał Nadolny, Marian Kachniarz, Magdalena Raftowicz-Filipkiewicz · Sustainability · Poland

A survey of 400 agricultural holdings across nine municipalities of the Wrocław district in Poland examined the potential for Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) to develop in the district, given its proximity to the Wrocław market in Lower Silesia. The research found that the CSA model opens opportunities for long-lasting cooperation between farmers and consumers, but that implementing it requires raising the prices farmers charge for their produce by about 50%, along with solutions to problems related to the cost of transporting agricultural products.

Pierre Donadieu · Territoire en mouvement · France

This is a review-style article introducing a June 2019 opinion document from France's Conseil economique, social et environnemental (CESE), L'agriculture urbaine: un outil determinant pour les villes durables (98 pages). It notes that during the 2010s, six major publications sought to characterize urban agriculture as an economic and social phenomenon that has been emerging or resurging in France and worldwide for at least 20 years, and traces this literature back to three earlier French-language collective works, including one titled Agriculture urbaine: amenager.

Fatih Özden · Turkish Journal of Bioethics · Turkey

This paper discusses the community supported agriculture (CSA) model in Turkey from the perspective of food ethics. It identifies the adverse effects of synthetic agrochemicals on human and ecosystem health, corporate dominance of the food supply chain, and intellectual property rights as issues on the food ethics agenda.

Kévin Bernard, Aurélie Bonein, Douadia Bougherara · RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · France

A study eliciting inequality aversion and risk preferences among 162 French community-supported agriculture (CSA) consumers through incentivized field experiments. Consumers were found to be concerned about payoff inequalities, showing advantageous inequality aversion toward CSA farmers but also disadvantageous inequality seeking. Consumers were risk averse and loss averse and distorted probabilities. The study observes that inequality aversion and risk preferences in the loss domain may complement each other in ways that strengthen consumer support for CSA farmers.

Małgorzata Ćwieląg‐Drabek, Agata Piekut, Klaudia Gut, Mateusz Grabowski · Scientific Reports · Europe

A study of family allotment gardens (FAGs) in Silesia Province, one of the most polluted regions in Poland, analyzed 219 soil samples and 64 edible plant samples to link the geochemical disturbance caused by past mining and smelting activity to consumer exposure to toxic and carcinogenic metallic trace elements. Contents of these elements in topsoil were spatially diverse and depended primarily on the location of industrial pollution sources. Average cadmium (0.52 mg/kg fresh weight) and lead (0.57 mg/kg fresh weight) content in vegetables exceeded maximum permissible concentrations under European quality standards. A human health risk assessment based on three dietary exposure scenarios found that, in every scenario, potatoes — a staple of the Polish diet — carried the highest average daily dose for all three elements. The study concludes that consuming vegetables grown in Silesia Province's family allotment gardens may pose a significant health risk to consumers.

Małgorzata Burchard‐Dziubińska · Economics and Environment · Europe

An analysis of urban gardening's role in building city resilience to economic and social change and global warming examines whether Polish cities use it to strengthen resilience to climate change. It finds that using urban gardening for climate resilience is becoming more common worldwide, but that Polish cities have not yet joined this trend.

Flora Del Debbio · estudoprévio revista do centro de estudos de arquitectura cidade e território da Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa · Europe

Using primary sources such as historical written documents and cartography, an article examines how the interpenetration of urban and rural space has been a defining feature of Lisbon, Portugal's history, and attempts to map in detail the agricultural land occupation within the city's urban soil. The available abstract breaks off mid-sentence while describing a balance maintained over the centuries, and no further specific findings are given.

Valentina Cattivelli · Sustainability · Italy

Urban gardens have attracted considerable academic attention in recent years, with studies emphasizing their positive contribution to social integration, community health, urban regeneration, and food security, as well as exploring individual gardeners' motivations. While these topics are well documented for metropolitan urban areas, few studies have examined mountain areas, an interest gap likely due to lower urbanization in such areas, a preference for other forms of horticulture (essentially home gardens), or the use of different approaches to mitigate negative social effects. The recent proliferation of urban gardens in South Tyrol, Italy, makes this mountain province an interesting setting for studying the practices and narratives associated with socially innovative urban gardening. The paper characterizes all urban gardening initiatives in South Tyrol through cartographic representation and explains gardeners' and public institutions' motivations as well as non-gardeners' perceptions, based on semi-structured interviews conducted in the South Tyrolean municipalities where urban gardening projects have been undertaken. The results suggest that the social and environmental aspects of urban gardens are of great importance, and that there is interest in reconnecting with food practices even when food access is not a priority.

Devi Bühler · Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften digital collection (Zurich University of Applied Sciences) · Germany

An essay in the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) digital collection argues that "urban mining" and "urban farming" have little in common with conventional mines and farms, proposing instead that buildings themselves can serve as the mines and farms of the future. The piece presents no empirical study, data or measurements.

Ana Poças Ribeiro, Robert Harmsen, Giuseppe Feola, Jesús Rosales Carreón, Ernst Worrell · Sociologia Ruralis · Europe

A study of 17 alternative food networks (AFNs) across Poland, Portugal, and the Netherlands, drawn from interviews with AFN organizers, examined the factors that constrain and facilitate the emergence and consolidation of different AFN types. Using a multi-actor perspective framework, the researchers categorized six AFN types: consumer-led, producer-led, third-sector led, community supported agriculture, public-led, and business platforms. Key challenges and facilitating conditions varied by AFN type and country; unlike in the Netherlands, low social capital was commonly cited as a challenge in Portugal and Poland. AFN organizers exercised innovative power in creating new forms of food provision, but the study concludes that a wide scope of actions by both governmental and non-governmental actors is needed to support the emergence of more AFNs.

Giampiero Mazzocchi, Davide Marino · International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health · Italy (Rome)

A 2020 study of the process by which a local group of stakeholders drew up a proposal for a metropolitan-scale food policy for Rome, Italy, combining a network analysis of the bottom-up process — who took part, what was negotiated — with an analysis of the Roman food system and an overview of urban food policies in Italy. The authors' starting point is that although numerous food-related initiatives have appeared in Rome in recent years, they are unrelated to one another and lack coordination and political coherence. The analysis maps the actors and topics involved and identifies what a more comprehensive participatory process for a systemic metropolitan food strategy would require. As the title 'a policy without politics' indicates, the paper records a situation where participatory policy drafting advanced without the political backing needed to institutionalise it — evidence that a participatory process does not by itself deliver a policy.

Baldock K.C.R., Goddard M.A., Hicks D.M., Kunin W.E., Mitschunas N., Morse H., Osgathorpe L.M., Potts S.G., Robertson K.M., Scott A.V., Staniczenko P.P.A., Stone G.N., Vaughan I.P., Memmott J. · Nature Ecology & Evolution, 3(3):363-373 · United Kingdom

A large, well-replicated study of floral resources and pollinators across 360 sites in four British cities, comparing pollinator abundance among urban land uses. It shows that residential gardens, allotments and community gardens are urban pollinator hotspots, demonstrating that citizen-tended plots are central to urban biodiversity conservation, and models the benefit of interventions such as adding flowerbeds.

· International Journal of the Commons · Germany (German-speaking countries)

A comparative institutional analysis of 51 urban community gardens across Anglophone and German-speaking countries, examining the rules and arrangements that sustain collective gardening.

· Sustainability · Germany

Surveyed urban gardening projects across Germany, finding that community spirit, neighbourhood and solidarity are central values in the majority of projects contributing to a sustainable lifestyle.

· Sustainability · Germany (Berlin)

Examines urban commons for the edible city, offering first insights for future sustainable urban food systems based on Berlin.

Doernberg A., Horn P., Zasada I., Piorr A. · Food Policy · Germany

Analyzes key actors and policy instruments in urban food policy across German city regions, finding integrated food strategies still rare and informational/procurement instruments most common.

Sieveking A. · Politics and Governance · Germany (Oldenburg)

Studies the Oldenburg food policy council (2016–2018) to assess whether food policy councils can serve as loci for practising food democracy.

Moruzzo R., Di Iacovo F., Funghi A., Scarpellini P., Espinosa Diaz S., Riccioli F. · Social Sciences · Italy

A study exploring how care and social farms provide inclusive environments supporting the personal growth of participants, by researchers affiliated with universities in Italy.

Johannes Langemeyer, Diego Wedgwood, Timon McPhearson, Francesc Baró, Anders L. Madsen, David N. Barton · The Science of The Total Environment · Spain (Barcelona)

This study developed a spatial multi-criteria screening tool in Barcelona, Spain, to prioritize green roof locations and designs for optimal ecosystem service provision. Fifteen spatial indicators and five green roof designs were analyzed and weighted by local experts. The assessment found high demand for green roof ecosystem services across Barcelona, especially in dense residential and industrial areas, with habitat, pollination, and thermal regulation being most needed, while runoff control and food production were least demanded. Naturalized roofs offered the highest potential for 87.5% of rooftop area.

Barbara Maćkiewicz, Raúl Puente Asuero, Antonio Garrido Almonacid · Quaestiones Geographicae · Spain

This study investigated how urban allotment gardens in Baeza, Andalusia, Spain, affect the city’s sustainable development. The research showed that allotment gardens in Baeza endorsed all three pillars of sustainable city development: ecological, economic, and social. However, it was found that developing broader community relations on the city scale, reviving the declining local grocery market, and disseminating environmental initiatives that allotment gardens could promote and facilitate were missing.

Roberto Henke, Francesco Vanni · · Italy

This paper examines the multifunctional role of peri-urban agriculture in Italy through a comparative analysis of farms located within the main Italian urban poles. The analysis identifies both internal and external drivers influencing farmers' decisions to diversify income towards multifunctional activities. It shows that, within the post-productivist paradigm, peri-urban farms can play a pivotal role in sustainable land use and in enhancing entrepreneurs' provision of diverse social and economic services to the urban population.