Research & reports

Coline Perrin · International Planning Studies · France, Italy

Case studies in Provence and Tuscany indicate that planning prescriptions and land-market control are insufficient for protecting farmland on the urban fringe. Farmland is not effectively protected if regulatory approaches are not integrated into a global strategy for agriculture and food based on community involvement. Farmland protection policies are more effective when combining top-down policies with bottom-up initiatives and recognizing the multifunctional character of urban agriculture.

Katrin Bohn, André Viljoen · · Germany (Berlin), United Kingdom (London)

This chapter reviews the evolving Continuous Productive Urban Landscape (CPUL) City concept in the context of Berlin and London, exploring ways to integrate sustainable food systems into the urban fabric. The CPUL City Toolkit provides an overview of key steps for planning and implementing urban agriculture as part of coherent productive urban landscape strategies. The toolkit introduces four methods of action: Action U+D, Action VIS, Action IUC, and Action R.

Ashley Courtney, Brendan McShane, Ella Wiles · · North America; Europe

This research explored how low-income urban agricultural (UA) projects in North America and Europe can be strategically supported for sustainability. The authors analyzed UA projects using the 5 Level Framework and the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development, along with Leverage Points, to understand their current reality. The study produced strategic recommendations and guidance for UA projects to foster a societal shift towards sustainability.

Paul. A. de Graaf · · Netherlands (Rotterdam)

This research offers a top-down perspective on Rotterdam's urban landscape to identify spatial opportunities for urban agriculture. It defines promising urban agriculture types based on international best practices and local expert judgment, then formulates criteria for opportunities based on spatial, environmental, and social demands and benefits. The study aims to support bottom-up urban agriculture projects by mapping these opportunities and demonstrating their potential through design case studies, linking them to urban sustainability and resilience.

Johannes Novy · · Germany (Berlin)

This seminar aims to identify the contemporary winners and losers in Berlin's urban development and how this is manifested and reproduced through urban space. Central points of interest include conflicts surrounding the "New Berlin," the potential and threats of Berlin as a "Creative City," the spatial dimension of social exclusion, the integration of migrants, and perspectives of the "right-to-the-city-movement" (e.g., guerrilla gardening). Berlin's urban landscape will be compared to those of Paris and St. Petersburg.

Barbara Uhlig · edoc Publication server (Humboldt University of Berlin) · Germany

This study analyzes guerrilla gardening as a protest movement where activists plant flowers, trees, and vegetables on derelict urban spaces without owner permission. The motivations for guerrilla gardening are pragmatic, ecological, political, and aesthetic, though its artistic status is often denied. The study demonstrates that guerrilla gardening aligns with George Dickie's institutional theory of art and can be classified as art.

Cécilia Claeys, Jean-Noël Consalès, Carole Barthélémy · · France (Marseille)

This paper re-examines the question of nature in the city through emerging environmental paradigms, using Marseille, a French Mediterranean city, as a case study. An interdisciplinary analysis combining sociology and geography revealed that new modes of urban and suburban nature management (e.g., National Park, greenways, community gardens) question spatial boundaries between wild and artificial. However, the uses of these spaces are still marked by persistent social segmentations.

Sarah Bell, Cristina Cerulli · UCL Discovery (University College London) · United Kingdom (London)

A case study of a newly established community garden in London was analyzed. The study used the multi-level perspective on transitions to sustainable development by Grin et al. (2010) and modeling of cities as complex systems by Wilson (2010a) and Batty (2005) to analyze the potential for emerging community gardens to contribute to transitions to sustainable urban food systems. Urban agriculture is considered a core element for the future of sustainable cities.

Antonio Emilio Alvise Longo · Virtual Community of Pathological Anatomy (University of Castilla La Mancha) · Italy

This essay recounts the experience of the project for the open spaces in the Martesana area, coordinated by the author following a call from Fondazione Cariplo di Milano. Moving from operational experience, the essay generally considers the role of agricultural open spaces in peri-urban areas, contextualizing it with long-term urban planning themes.

Silvio Caputo · Kent Academic Repository (University of Kent) · United Kingdom

This paper argues for a new role for urban agriculture in developed countries, focusing on environmental, social, and economic benefits. While urban agriculture can contribute to a low-carbon society and food access, it is not currently part of UK government strategies for food security. For urban agriculture to achieve its potential, it needs to become economically viable, requiring research into highly productive methods and business models utilizing local urban resources.

Richard Wiltshire, Louise Geoghegan · Research Portal (King's College London) · United Kingdom

This chapter explores the social organization of voluntary urban food production in Britain, identifying two dominant modes: collective activities and individual allotment gardens. It notes that the organization of unpaid labor is an under-researched aspect and a key restraint on urban agriculture's expansion. The study found that relations between these two modes can be antagonistic, particularly when land is scarce.

Lijie He · · Netherlands (Delft)

This study investigated urban agriculture development within city planning, using the Dutch city of Delft as a case study. It developed a dynamic model for land allocation in urban agriculture by applying Multi-criteria Evaluation (MCE) to assess its relation to other city development factors. MCE and Geographic Information System (GIS) were integrated to create suitability maps, providing references for urban agriculture land utilization for planners and policymakers.

FALLETTI, MADDALENA · TERRITORIO · Italy

This 2012 introductory piece for the Italian journal TERRITORIO reorganizes contributions on urban agriculture by subject matter to surface several contradictory aspects of the ongoing debate. It offers three interpretive keys: the first reproduces the debate within its own sealed compartments while attempting comparison through juxtaposition of contrasting attitudes; the second highlights a transverse conceptual dichotomy with strong implications for planning — urban agriculture as a remedy for city problems versus the urban countryside as a new form of urban plan; the third examines the debate in the specific context of Milan.

Ross Wilson · Journal of Urban History · United Kingdom

A historical study using archive material and newspaper reports examines the development of allotment gardens in the northern English city of York in the early twentieth century. Applying Giddens's structuration theory, it investigates how relationships between citizens and the York City Corporation developed, and reexamines allotment gardens as a lens for understanding wider urban life in Britain. It argues that although allotment gardens have featured only partially in studies of civic reform, identity and governmentality, their centrality to working-class life in Britain warrants greater scholarly attention.

José Luis Fernández de Casadevante, Nerea Morán Alonso · Hábitat y Sociedad · Spain

This article examines community allotment gardens as an emerging phenomenon in Spanish cities, focusing on Madrid. It describes how allotments have arisen through the efforts of neighbourhood associations, social groups, and ecologists, in a dynamic that has proliferated over the preceding six years, building a critical discourse around urban sustainability and forming coordinated structures able to introduce the topic into the public sphere and the political agenda. These allotments are spaces articulating experiences of reflection and participative intervention around the city, public space, group identities, and procedures of spatial appropriation. The initiatives are also described as approaching the notion of food sovereignty as a strategic issue for the future of cities.

David Pearson, Chris Firth · Biological Agriculture & Horticulture · United Kingdom

A profiling study of community gardens in one region of the United Kingdom, which found that gardens differ in how and when they were established, how they are managed and funded, their size, and who uses them and for what purposes. The two most common objectives cited by organizers were community development through food-related activities and contributing to environmental sustainability. On longevity, one third of the community gardens in the study region were found to be no longer active, indicating that survival is not assured. To improve durability, the study suggests gardens need to build a sense of ownership within the local community and be managed in ways consistent with their funding source's conditions and volunteers' expectations.

Ileana Cerón Palma · TDX (Tesis Doctorals en Xarxa) · Europe

This doctoral dissertation proposes urban-system strategies for reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by introducing eco-innovation into buildings across two economically, socially, and climatically different contexts: Mexico and Spain. For Mexican social housing, it examines an eco-retrofit strategy combining efficient eco-technologies, shading and insulation (roof shading, wall overhangs, window and roof louvers, green roofs), and food production (tomatoes), calculating cooling energy demand and the cumulative energy and CO2 emissions associated with shading materials. For Spain, it examines barriers and opportunities for installing intensive food-producing greenhouses on rooftops of buildings in Mediterranean European cities through multidisciplinary expert seminars, and analyzes potential heat-flow synergy between a building and a rooftop greenhouse focused on winter heating energy demand for a service building in Barcelona. Results indicate that eco-technologies can reduce annual energy consumption in social housing by 31% (35.7 kWh/m2/year), roof-shading strategies save 126 kWh/m2/year, and tomato production in social housing in Mérida, Mexico could contribute a reduction of 662 gCO2eq per kg of tomatoes produced.

Chiara Tornaghi · TERRITORIO · United Kingdom

This paper presents an English case of urban agriculture, the Edible Public Space Project in Leeds, situated within urban agriculture initiatives committed to socio-environmental justice, the reproduction of common goods, and urban planning that promotes the right to food and bottom-up construction of urban space. The case study is framed as action-research at the intersection of urban planning policy, community work, and critical geography. Unlike many similar initiatives, the project is presented not as a merely temporary activity tucked into the city's spare folds, but as an experiment that imagines and implements alternatives to current forms of urban planning, contextualized in light of the ecological, financial, and social crisis of the preceding decade.

Arturo Sergio Lanzani · TERRITORIO · Italy

This study treats Brianza, Italy, as a prototype of recurring relationships between residential and agricultural spaces in contemporary towns and cities, using their differences to trace the evolution of the historical landscape, the causes of its deterioration, and new planning possibilities. The simplified rural fabric of the Vimercate countryside, the strings of woodland and built-up areas in the hills, urban clearings, and the woodland and countryside of Groane are each said to open prospects for new, locally specific types of urban agriculture. The proposed future is plural, examining different relationships among agriculture, collective spaces and redevelopment of existing settlements, while opting for a halt to urban growth and reconstruction of infrastructure and landscape quality in the Brianza area.

Les Levidow, Katerina Psarikidou · · United Kingdom

In Manchester, England, environmental and health issues have been folded into a wider agro-food strategy aimed at making the city "more sustainable." With support from state bodies and charities, several initiatives have expanded access to fresh, healthy food, particularly in "food deserts," mobilizing resources, skills, and voluntary labor through "community engagement" to create "community spaces" for social inclusion. Manchester's agro-food networks shorten supply chains by linking peri-urban agriculture more directly with urban consumers and by promoting urban agriculture grounded in local resource mobilization and personal trust, offering an alternative to conventional agro-food chains; food relocalisation is described as helping overcome socio-economic inequalities and health problems, with Manchester initiatives cooperating to build environmentally sustainable, socially just, healthy communities and reconstructing local identities and social commitments, within a national policy context that advocates food relocalisation but provides little actual support. Despite that activity, the larger food system in Manchester remains dominated by conventional agro-food chains, and community food initiatives play only a marginal role, leading practitioners to discuss how to overcome these limitations; from 2010 onward, the UK government's austerity regime is described as undermining state support further, making community engagement even more important for mobilizing resources.

Jin Qian · Xiandai chengshi yanjiu · Europe; United States

This paper compares allotment gardens in Europe and community gardens in the United States. It notes that stable European allotment gardens rely on policy frameworks, national laws, and cooperation among local government, public, private, and non-profit organizations. In contrast, American community gardens often depend on loosely organized non-profits to acquire land and foster community autonomy without official support.

Saloua Toumi, Roland Vidal · Projets de paysage · Europe, Africa

Urban agriculture is expanding in various metropolitan areas, but its agro-economic and socio-spatial logic differs by context. Tunisia's urban agriculture is threatened by increasing urban expansion and is not yet integrated into territorial projects. Issues related to land value appreciation are dominant, and its landscape and environmental benefits could be compromised in the relatively short term if it does not find its place in urban development plans.

Nerea Morán Alonso, Agustín Hernández Aja · · Europe

This historical review traces the functions and characteristics of urban agriculture (UA) in Western cities. It notes that UA flourished during economic and energy crises for self-sufficiency, serving subsistence, hygiene, and social control in the 19th century and patriotic functions during 20th-century world wars. Since the 1970s, UA projects have focused on local development, social integration, and environmental education, led by community and ecological organizations.

Katrin Bohn, André Viljoen · University of Brighton Repository (University of Brighton) · United Kingdom

A 2011 paper from the UK discusses the Continuous Productive Urban Landscape (CPUL), a strategic concept for introducing interlinked productive landscapes into cities. It focuses on the environmental benefits of integrating urban agriculture as one of CPUL's major spatial and functional components, tracing, with reference to international exhibitions and publications, how urban agriculture has moved from a fringe interest toward the center of contemporary urban and architectural discourse. It concludes that while urban agriculture is attracting more attention, further cross-disciplinary work is needed to build the theory underpinning productive landscape design and the policy rationale to support it.

Jordi Franquesa Sànchez · Revista iberoamericana de urbanismo · Spain

A survey of garden communities (urban interventions built around private-garden housing types with strategic use of open space and facilities) in the Catalan region of Spain, spanning the late 19th century to 1960 — the point at which the rise of private-vehicle access marked a substantial shift in community design ideas. The study finds that these garden communities show versatility in adapting to different cultural contexts while retaining their main identifying features, resulting in a wide range of design outcomes and constituting a precedent relevant to the growth of present-day cities.