Research & reports

Naser Mughrabi, Mayyadah Fahmi Hussein, Naila Hussien Alhyari · · Jordan (Amman)

This study aims to propose design indicators for rooftop gardens in Amman, Jordan, to illustrate their economic, social, and environmental benefits. It presents a conceptual framework for interior designers to adopt green roofs, developed by studying existing literature and demonstrating its applicability in Amman. The research used descriptive analytical methodology, qualitative surveys, and questionnaires for residential building inhabitants, with expected outcomes including indicators for rooftop garden utilization in Amman.

Joëlle Salomon Cavin, Valérie Boisvert, Simone Ranocchiari, Quentin Dusserre-Bresson, Monique Poulot · Natures Sciences Sociétés · Global

A collective reflection on militant/activist engagement in urban agriculture research in France and the United States, based on a qualitative literature review complemented by a series of seminars. It finds that US research on urban agriculture, rooted in critical and militant geography, has concentrated on community gardening and promoted food justice, whereas in the French context the spaces and actors studied are far more diverse but critical and political reflexivity is comparatively less developed. The article concludes with a call for greater critical reflexivity in this field.

Louise Mitchell, Lawrence Houston, Michael Hardman, Michelle Howarth, Penny A. Cook · Cogent Social Sciences · Global

Against the backdrop of health services becoming stretched, particularly in ageing populations in the Global North, this paper discusses Green Infrastructure (GI) interventions including the development of social farms in urban areas and deprived communities. Social farms use farming practices as spaces for therapeutic outcomes such as care, rehabilitation, and education, framed within the concept of social prescribing alongside community gardens and urban farms as non-medical approaches. Noting that social farming and social prescribing research is currently concentrated in Scandinavian countries and the USA, the paper focuses on increased UK attention to the concept, including in DEFRA's 25-year Environment Plan. Findings show an agglomeration of social farming sites in rural rather than urban contexts, and the paper discusses tools and barriers for urban development of the practice.

Paulo Germán García Murillo, Laura Belkis Parada Romero, Juana Yadira Martín Perico, Julio Ernesto Rojas Mesa, Bernardo Garibello Suan · · Colombia (Bogotá)

This paper reports a research project on urban agriculture aimed at fostering scientific citizenship, carried out with fifth-grade students and teachers at the El Carmelo school in Teusaquillo, Bogota, Colombia. Focused on raising awareness of STEAM (environmental, technological, pedagogical and artistic) competencies, it designed two at-home experimental practices using easily obtained cargamanto bean seeds, addressing sustainability, STEAM and learning competencies while surfacing issues such as food security, nutritional culture, a culture of prototyping and strengthened scientific citizenship, and reports that the pandemic unexpectedly extended the project's reach from students to their families.

Cristina Visconti · TECHNE - Journal of Technology for Architecture and Environment · Global

A paper examines how the circular economy applied to urban contexts, within a growth-oriented neoliberal paradigm, tends to focus on environmental performance while overlooking socio-political implications. Analyzing three socio-technical assemblages—Transition Towns, Repair Cafes, and Community Gardens—as cases, it develops a counter-perspective grounded in degrowth debates and identifies the effectiveness of urban practices where circularity extends beyond purely economic interactions or eco-efficiency parameters, outlining the potential for a 'degrowing circular city' based on inclusiveness, social justice, and reciprocity.

Mosen Farhangi, Sara Farhangi, Paulien C. H. van de Vlasakker, G.J. Carsjens · Land · Iran

An exploratory case study of Rafsanjan county, Kerman province, Iran—where agriculture, one of the sectors most vulnerable to water scarcity and climate change, is losing pistachio orchards to water shortages—analyzed the actor network behind the rise of high-tech urban agriculture and examined the role of technology in supporting citizen participation in local urban planning. Against a backdrop where modernizing irrigation and transferring water from other regions had failed to succeed, data gathered through observation, document study, and in-depth interviews with farmers, planners, researchers, and policymakers showed that governmental planning bodies such as the Agricultural Research, Education and Extension Organization (AREEO) and the 10-year greenhouse development plan were the most influential actors in the transition, reconfiguring relationships with the private sector, knowledge institutes, and farmers in ways that strengthened participatory decision-making in local urban planning.

Santiago Restrepo Vélez, Jairo Mauricio Velásquez Posada · Revista de la Facultad de Derecho y Ciencias Políticas · Global

A paper presenting the experiences and results of a research project titled "Design and creation of urban agricultural garden practices and systems." It frames urban agriculture as a tool for institutional and non-governmental political actors, and concludes by analyzing the role gardens have played during the COVID-19 period.

Sérgio Manuel Serra da Cruz, Anja Steglich, Pedro Vieira Cruz, Ana Claudia Macedo Vieira · · Global

A book chapter, noting that the world's largest cities continue to grow amid urbanization processes that differ in complexity between developed and developing countries, argues that well-managed urban spaces can offer opportunities for economic and social development. It investigates current challenges and opportunities in urban agriculture (UA) and discusses whether adopting urban computing (UC) and information and communications technologies (ICT) can help urban dwellers, farmers and planners advance UA in global north and global south countries such as Germany and Brazil, also touching on new joint-research possibilities raised at the 8th Brazil-Germany Frontiers of Science and Technology Symposium (BRAGFOST).

Yassine Moustanjidi · · Morocco

Taking Casablanca, Morocco as a case study, this work analyzes the development trends of growing megacities and the challenges they face, particularly in developing countries, and proposes approaches, methods and tools for integrating green, productive infrastructure based on urban agriculture as a multifunctional component of urban planning. Casablanca is characterized as facing an urban and ecological crisis driven by rapid urban and demographic growth since the early twentieth century combined with a chronic lack of integrative urban strategies, including a housing crisis, social segregation, high unemployment, persistent congestion, air and water pollution, and a near-absence of open and green space. The work repositions urban agriculture within the discourse on sustainable urban development and climate change impacts, proposes a new multifunctional model of urban management, and redefines the role of green open spaces in Casablanca's urban development context, focusing on regenerating inner-city brownfields and vacant spaces as multifunctional facilities built around urban agriculture.

Jassen Callender · · Global

This essay frames city sustainability as a lifecycle question centered on end-states, arguing that water and soil are essential supports for urban farming — water comprising three interlinked cycles and soil representing a phase of nutrient cycling — and that lifecycle concerns intersect with cities' basic, "physiological" needs in Maslow's sense. It presents a conceptual discussion rather than original data, measurements, or a defined study population.

Hannah Hemmelgarn, John F. Munsell · Urban Agriculture & Regional Food Systems · Global

This exploratory synthesis examines functions beyond food production that urban agroforestry systems — urban forest gardens (UFGs) — can serve, focusing on their capacity to include diverse, biologically important, and culturally relevant non-timber forest species with medicinal properties, decorative and landscaping uses, and craft raw materials. Reviewing literature on the social and ecological aspects of designing "beyond-food" specialty crops in UFGs, the study identifies a need for collaborative, participatory, and culturally relevant decision-making that addresses access inequities, potential contamination from urban pollutants, and continued gaps in education and awareness of UFG multifunctionality. It argues these spaces can serve as a biological and cultural repository for otherwise overlooked species, but notes that case studies showing contextual implementation details are still needed to establish specific cultural and health-sovereignty benefits.

Carolina Baldini, Mariana Edith Marasas, Andrea Alejandra Drozd · Journal of Environmental Planning and Management · Colombia

A land-cover change study (Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 2021) applied a supervised classification of Landsat satellite imagery from 1986, 1996, 2005, and 2015 to Argentina's largest peri-urban horticultural region in South America. Between 1986 and 2015, open-field horticulture extent decreased by 51.47%, while greenhouse area increased by 2652.83%, high-density urbanization expanded by 111.58%, and low-density urbanization increased only between 1986 and 2005—expansion that came at the expense of natural grassland, herbaceous parks, and livestock land. The authors conclude this reflects a regional process of urban growth and productive intensification that has caused losses of open-field horticultural areas and produced a non-equitable distribution of remaining semi-natural areas, and they call for territorial planning that prioritizes ecologically resilient, semi-natural land cover.

David M. Lapola, Belen Paez, Sandra Costa, Roberto Donato da Silva Júnior, Daniela M. Peluso, Paulo Moutinho, Maíra C. G. Padgurschi, Denilson Baniwa, Sônia Bridi, Nadino Calapucha, Zienhe Castro, Fander Falconí, James Junior, Mapulu Kamayurá, Eduardo Kohn, Anderson Mattos, Pedro Meloni Nassar, Laurent Troost, Manari Ushigua, Robert B. Wallace, Marko Zangas · UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) eBooks · Global

This book chapter offers a brief, non-authoritative overview of the physical and cultural relations between rural (forest) and urban areas across the Amazon region. It identifies improvement points including economic incentives to draw healthcare professionals to rural areas, peri-urban agricultural belts to strengthen urban food security, expanded access to urban green space, and investment in a "smart cities, smart forests" concept, and states that mobilising human, financial and institutional resources to restore cultural, spiritual and affective bonds between urban and forest inhabitants is perhaps most important.

Aamir Mehmood Shah, Gengyuan Liu, Fanxin Meng, Qing Yang, Jingyan Xue, Stefano Dumontet, Renato Passaro, Marco Casazza · Energies · Global

This review article examines knowledge gaps regarding small-scale urban green-blue infrastructure (GBI) from the perspective of the food-energy-water (FEW) nexus, focusing on the literature on urban ecosystem services (positive effects) and dis-services (negative effects) associated with different GBI typologies. It found that GBI can contribute environmentally, socially, and economically to FEW security and urban sustainability, but that these positive effects must be weighed against ecosystem dis-service tradeoffs: urban food production is commonly connected with heavy water and energy consumption, particularly under dry climate conditions, and is sometimes linked to excessive use of manure, pesticides, or fertilizers that can pose risks to water quality and local insect survival, or to enhanced mosquito breeding from irrigation. The review also found that few nexus modeling techniques have been discussed in terms of their benefits, drawbacks, and applications.

Johan Colding, Stephan Barthel, Robert Ljung, Felix Eriksson, Stefan Sjöberg · Social Inclusion · Global

A conceptual paper drawing on the authors' prior research on urban commons to examine their role in climate-proofing activities. It distinguishes three types of environmentally oriented urban commons: "urban green commons" such as allotment and community gardens, which the authors say contribute to environmental learning that supports climate-change mitigation and adaptation; "coworking spaces," framed as reducing commuting and domestic transportation through a sharing economy; and "community climate commons," where local communities pool resources to create shared low-carbon assets. The paper closes by identifying determinants for scaling up such commons, without presenting original empirical data.

Masato Kobiyama, Karla Campagnolo, Marina Refatti Fagundes · LA Referencia (Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas) · Global

This literature review traces the institutional and scientific history of hydrology's growing focus on urban areas, where population density and socioeconomic and environmental problems concentrate. It argues urbanization has negative hydrological effects by removing natural vegetation, soil, and rainwater conditions, and revisits the concept of "ruralization"—proposed in 2000 as the reverse of urbanization—through hydrological, philosophical, and applied lenses, detailing measures such as urban rainwater storage, rainwater harvesting, and urban agriculture, while stating that all such practices should be grounded in data obtained from experimental watersheds (bacias-escola).

Global Methane Pledge · Global Methane Pledge / Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC) · Global

Launched at COP26 in 2021 by the EU and the US, the Global Methane Pledge is a voluntary initiative to cut global methane emissions at least 30% below 2020 levels by 2030, with 159 participating countries plus the European Commission. Methane is described as responsible for 30% of total warming since the Industrial Revolution, and without action, emissions are projected to rise by up to 13% between 2020 and 2030.

Singapore Food Agency · Singapore Food Agency (SFA) · Singapore

The SFA's CEO explains Singapore's food security strategy despite importing over 90% of food from about 170 countries and having only 1% of land for farming. Under the "30 by 30" goal, funds such as the Agriculture Productivity Fund, research grants, and the 30x30 Express Grant support farm technology upgrades, with nine urban farm sites on multi-storey carpark rooftops projected to produce about 1,600 tonnes of vegetables annually.

WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities · WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities · Argentina

Rosario, Argentina launched an urban agriculture program in response to the 2001 economic crisis, evolving through a 2004 ordinance allowing temporary use of vacant land, two flood-mitigating 'Parques Huerta' opened in 2007-2008, and a 2011 ordinance designating 800 hectares of peri-urban land as a green belt. The program now covers 75 hectares of agroecological production plus the 800-hectare peri-urban belt, yields 2,500 tons of produce a year, involves more than 2,400 participating families, and has created 7 new permanent market spaces. Locally produced vegetables are estimated to cut associated greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 95%, and the project won the WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities 2020-2021 grand prize.

· Quito Informa (Municipio del Distrito Metropolitano de Quito) · Ecuador

An official municipal news article reporting that Quito's Metropolitan Council, in an extraordinary session (No. 173, September 13, 2021), approved the Land Use and Management Plan (PUGS) in its second and final debate with 15 votes in favor. The plan is valid for 12 years, replaces the former Land Use and Occupation Plan (PUOS), and shifts the city's urban model from expansive to polycentric.

Martin Daniel Florez Camelo · Observatorio Ambiental de Bogotá · Colombia

The Bogotá Environmental Observatory reported on 4 October 2021 on "Bogotá es mi huerta," a digital co-creation platform jointly launched by the Bogotá Botanical Garden (JBB) and the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI). The article states the city has more than 20,000 urban farmers and over 4,000 gardens, with surplus-producing gardens generating about 1,778 kilograms of vegetables, herbs and fruit per month. Since 2004, the Botanical Garden's urban agriculture program has cumulatively trained 71,286 people, provided technical assistance to 55,426 gardeners, and supported 25,022 gardens.

Guido Lautaro Padin · La tinta / Revista InterNos · Argentina

Reporting on Rosario's 2021 WRI Cities Prize win ($250,000, selected from 262 proposals across 54 countries), this article explains the programme's mechanics and history: 40 hectares across 7 Park Gardens (2.5-3 ha each) producing 2,500 tonnes a year, over 250 participating families/organizations, land granted through free indefinite loan (comodato). It also notes that around 2000-2002, roughly 800 community gardens sprang up within two years serving about 40,000 people, and that the municipality has reserved 700 hectares of peri-urban land as a protected 'green belt'.

Vernooy R., Sthapit B., Bessette G. · Development in Practice · Global

Drawing on case studies from Bangladesh, Cote d'Ivoire, India, and Zimbabwe, examines how community seed banks operationalize farmers' rights through conservation, access, and seed sovereignty at the local level.

Diehl J. A., Sweeney E., Wong B., Sia C. S., Yao H., Prabhudesai M. · Global Food Security · Singapore

Analyzes how Singapore's land-use planning supports high-tech intensified production, an AgriFood Innovation Park, and commercial/industrial urban farms, framing the policy and private-sector roles enabling value-added corporate agriculture in a land-scarce city.

Spataru, A., Faggian, R., Docking, A. · Journal of Rural Studies 74, 34–44 · Australia (Melbourne)

Presents principles of multifunctional agriculture for Greater Melbourne's peri-urban zone, developing a sustainable design framework for urban-rural-linked farming across four axes: food supply, landscape, ecosystems and community.