Research & reports

Julie L. Self, Becky Handforth, Janelle Hartman, Corey McAuliffe, Elizabeth Noznesky, Rebecca J. Schwei, Laura Whitaker, Amanda Wyatt, Amy Girard · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · United States

A student-driven, community-engaged learning course was developed to enhance student understanding of complex food system determinants and food choices. The course, guided by the socio-ecological model, involved students collaborating with faculty and community partners to define its objectives and curriculum. It featured student-led modules on food preferences, agriculture systems, food access, and agricultural policy, alongside community-engaged research projects that examined food distribution models in metro Atlanta and identified strategies to improve access to healthy food in low-income areas.

W. H. Butler · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · United States

The reintroduction of livestock into urban areas in the United States creates tensions regarding public health and the urban-rural divide. This paper analyzes municipal codes to identify how communities regulate urban livestock through prohibitions of certain animals, zoning, site-level restrictions, and management requirements. The analysis demonstrates that while no two municipalities approach the urban livestock question identically, each seeks to place limits on raising livestock in urban areas using a combination of regulatory land use tools.

Carolin Mees, Edie Stone · · United States (New York City)

In New York City, community gardens were established by resident groups in the 1970s, contributing to recreation, food security, and sustainable urban development. Their number has fluctuated over the past 30 years, with approximately 600 gardens existing today, over 300 of which are on public land. Recently, in response to climate change and economic crisis, elements like beehives and rainwater harvesting have been legalized and used to maximize food production and conserve water. This chapter will use qualitative data analysis, secondary literature discussion, and participant observation to evaluate the employment and function of these garden components and how the city's community gardens contribute to a sustainable city.

Sarah Leonard · Dissent · United States

This article explores the perilous state of food and food politics in America and a wide range of responses on the Left. It describes how the existing farm bill led to a policy disaster, the relationship between Reagan-era deregulation and the obesity epidemic, and the labor exploitation endemic to the elite dining experience. The study reveals challenges in governance within the American food system and its socioeconomic impacts.

Corey McAuliffe, Laura Whitaker, Aimee Webb Girard · The FASEB Journal · United States (Georgia)

Interviews with farmers' market managers, farmers, CSA managers, and a cooperative market manager in DeKalb County, Georgia, assessed challenges in local food accessibility. Qualitative data revealed significant financial barriers to production, prohibitive policies, and limitations in marketing and distribution systems. Environmental factors also limited the accessibility of local foods through farmers' markets and CSAs.

Samantha Jones · Journal of the Arkansas Academy of Science · United States (Arkansas)

To assess the feasibility of a campus community garden at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville (UAF), an online survey of 88 campus community gardens in the United States and Canada, visits to six gardens, and interviews with UAF students, faculty, staff, and administration members were conducted. The study determined that a campus community garden at UAF was feasible if identified challenges and obstacles were properly addressed. This research identified seven best practices for campus community gardens.

Rod MacRae, Joe Nar, James Kuhns, Lauren Baker, Russ Christianson, Martin Danyluk, Abra Snider, Eric V. Gallant, Penny Kaill-Vinish, Marc Michalak, Janet Oswald, Sima Patel, Gerda R. Wekerle · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · Canada (Toronto)

This paper, focusing on Toronto, identifies subtle impediments to scaling up urban agriculture beyond self-provisioning, despite land not being an insurmountable barrier. These include taxation systems assuming agriculture is a strictly rural activity, inadequate knowledge sharing among urban producers, limited access to soil, water, and seeds, and a lack of incentives for landowners. Achieving 10% of the city's commercial fresh vegetable demand requires significant policy and program initiatives in five key areas, including governance, coordination, and financing.

Allison Oulton · · United States

This study tested social capital as a measurable indicator for community garden planning in Akron, Ohio, by identifying vacant parcels in areas with fewer civic engagement hubs. Using an adapted methodology that introduced spatial components to social capital at the neighborhood scale, it identified sites with a greater need for social capital. A limitation was that the principal hubs of civic engagement identified were churches, suggesting further fieldwork is needed to identify site-specific social hubs.

Joël Thibert · Journal of Planning Education and Research · North America

A literature review and an analysis of urban agriculture (UA) in Detroit, Toronto, and Montreal, based on interviews with practitioners, were conducted in North America. The study suggests that UA practices vary significantly and face cultural, legal, and technical challenges. These findings support the view that UA belongs within planning and that municipalities have an important role in facilitating its development.

Evan Weissman · Syracuse University Libraries (Syracuse University) · United States (New York City)

This dissertation explores urban agriculture in Brooklyn, New York, using a mixed-methods analysis to investigate its historical changes, motivations for engagement, and outcomes. The study argues that Brooklyn's urban agriculture is limited by its neoliberal characteristics, which undermine its potential to build a radical political movement around food issues. While urban agriculture tends to reproduce neoliberalism, it simultaneously creates political possibilities through the assertion of public rights to cultivate the city and the potential of food to serve as a tool for building solidarities towards food justice.

Nevin Cohen · · United States

This chapter discusses the nature of urban agriculture planning and policymaking in the US and the conditions necessary for policy implementation, using John Kingdon's multiple streams policy framework. Case studies of five US cities illustrate how problem recognition and policy formation, in the presence of supportive political conditions, create a window of opportunity for implementing urban agriculture policy.

Erika S. Svendsen, Lindsay K. Campbell, Nancy Falxa-Raymound, Jessica Northridge, Edie Stone, Carolin Mees · Cities and the Environment · United States (New York City)

This study introduces a longitudinal examination of community gardens in New York City, building on data collected since 2003 by the GreenThumb program. In summer 2011, structured phone interviews were conducted with representatives from a sample of 102 community gardens to examine membership, programming, partnerships, and motivations for gardening from 2003-2011. The research aims to understand the evolving role of community gardens and how they have changed over time.

James E. McWilliams · Southwestern historical quarterly · United States

This is a review of Robert Carriker's book "Urban Farming in the West: A New Deal Experiment in Subsistence Homesteads", which examines the Division of Subsistence Homesteads (DSH) program in the American West. The DSH, established in 1933 by the New Deal, aimed to redistribute population and support self-sufficient homesteads. Carriker's work offers a balanced perspective on the program, noting that "confusion over disparate objectives" and bureaucratic conflicts ultimately undermined its goals.

Danny Simatele, Tony Binns, Munacinga Simatele · Journal of Human Development and Capabilities · Zambia (Lusaka)

This field-based research in Lusaka, Zambia, examines the impact of climate change and urban governance on urban agriculture, which serves as a source of food and income for poor households amidst deteriorating economies. The study finds that urban agriculture is often excluded from urban development and planning policy, posing significant challenges for small-scale farmers to achieve food security. A lack of policies supporting the urban poor, combined with climatic changes like drought and flooding, makes it difficult for households to adapt to the changing urban environment.

Monica J Kelly · Scholarship@Western (Western University) · Canada (Toronto)

An ethnographic study conducted in summer 2010 at HOPE community garden in Parkdale, Toronto, explored how collective belonging is built. The research found that differences and interpersonal conflicts within the garden were embraced as opportunities to strengthen community cohesion. Contrary to romanticized views of harmonious community gardens, the study revealed that conflicts, negotiation of differences, and institutional practices of inclusion and anti-discrimination significantly contribute to a successful and inclusive community project.

Nate Millington · International Journal of Urban and Regional Research · United States

This article analyzes representations of urban nature in Detroit, Michigan, focusing on journalistic and photographic work over the past 5 years. These representations, part of a discourse on Detroit's decline, ultimately reflect dominant conceptual divisions between the city and nature. Journalists and commentators perceive nature in the city as a reflection of the city's absence rather than its materiality, suggesting an ambivalence about emergent urban ecologies.

T.M. Anholts · Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) · United States (New York City)

This paper, written for the TIDO-course AR0532 Smart & Bioclimatic Design Theory, proposes utilizing the urban environment for agricultural activities in New York. It states the importance of offering a place to experiment and showcase opportunities for the design of a new environmental council to be added to the United Nations Headquarters in New York.

Zee Leung, Dean Middleton, Karen Morrison · BMC Public Health · Canada (Ontario)

This qualitative study, using semi-structured interviews with ten participants from the public health sphere in Ontario, explored how One Health and EcoHealth approaches are shaping public health practice. Four major themes emerged: the importance of connecting human health with the environment, the role of governance in promoting these ideas, the value of partnerships, and the challenge of operationalizing holistic approaches.

Barbara Strauss · EngagedScholarship @ Cleveland State University (Cleveland State University) · United States

A presentation was given at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law symposium, "Urban Agriculture: It’s Not an Oxymoron. Policies for Cultivating City Land and Increasing Access to Local Food," which focused on policy, land-use, and other legal issues related to urban agriculture and the local food movement. The Sustainability Research Guide from the Michael Schwartz Library was also introduced during this presentation.

Mulala Danny Simatele, Tony Binns, Munacinga Simatele · Journal of Environmental Planning and Management · Zambia (Lusaka)

This paper, based on recent field-based research in Lusaka, Zambia, examines the relationships between urban agriculture (UA) and extreme weather conditions, and their impact on the livelihood options of the urban poor. Despite its significance as a source of food and income in many sub-Saharan African cities, UA has not been integrated into urban development and planning policy and has come under increasing pressure from extreme weather events like droughts and flooding over the last two decades.

Mahbubur Meenar, Jeffrey P. Featherstone, Amy Laura, Julia McCabe · · United States

A paper examining urban agriculture in United States post-industrial cities, which since the mid-20th century have experienced dramatic loss of population, community resources, and economic growth even as their wider metropolitan areas continued to grow, and which are characterised by high levels of crime, substance abuse, unemployment, poverty, food insecurity, vacant land, and urban blight. Many such communities rely on urban agriculture as a means of food security and sustainability as well as community resilience, vacant-land remediation, and neighbourhood development, yet the paper argues that urban agriculture has been treated as a temporary, informal land use, with land tenure conflict causing the untimely demise of many projects. In terms of urban design, it further argues that urban agriculture projects in many cities have developed as a "patchwork," lacking physical connectivity to other gardens, open spaces, and community infrastructure.

Sarah Schindler · Faculty publications · United States

This article addresses the conflict between local governments and "locavores" seeking to use private property to produce food — for personal use and for sale — and municipal zoning ordinances that separate agriculture from residential uses. It examines the police power rationales behind ordinances disallowing urban homesteading in urban and suburban communities, then argues that public health, civic virtue, and free market principles can justify ordinances expressly permitting these activities. It discusses problems associated with industrial agriculture — food insecurity, food deserts, obesity tied to processed foods, monoculture-induced environmental harm, harm to animals, and greenhouse gas emissions — that could be partly alleviated through urban agriculture, noting that some local governments have already begun passing ordinances expressly allowing gardens, chickens, and the sale of produce in residential areas.

Robert Connolly, Samantha E. J. Gibbs, Mallory L. Bader · Museums & Social Issues · United States

This paper examines the outreach program that the C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa, located on the grounds of a prehistoric earthwork complex in Memphis, Tennessee, has run toward the surrounding African-American community over the past decade. The archaeological site was first investigated, and the museum was founded, as a byproduct of 1930s Jim Crow-era segregation policies; since its founding, the site and museum have functioned as a place of academic privilege that ignored the surrounding community. Transparency and a commitment to community engagement are described as central to the outreach program, whose highlights include installing an African-American Cultural Heritage exhibit, hosting community events, establishing a community garden, and collaborating with community partners on service projects. Based on a participatory model, the museum has moved to position itself as a social asset and stakeholder in the Southwest Memphis community.

Margaret C. Kirnbauer · Journal of Environmental Informatics · United States

Amid growing interest among community groups in using vacant and underutilized land for urban food production, but with few community-based tools available to assess site suitability or location-allocation decisions, this U.S. study describes a scientific software tool, built in Microsoft Excel, to help community groups identify and inventory the location and condition of vacant and underutilized land, determine relative site suitability, and allocate urban agricultural reuse strategies across the urban landscape. The tool augments the prototype community-based decision support tool (C-SAP) developed by Kirnbauer and Baetz (2011), which already includes a binary scoring methodology for the vacant and underutilized land inventory (VULI) process and an analytic hierarchy process for calculating site suitability indices (SSI). The added capacity, called LOCAL, formulates a multi-objective binary integer program for location-allocation of reuse strategies at the neighborhood, community, or city-wide planning level. The paper summarizes and discusses applying the prototype tool to 21 sites identified as potential future urban agriculture sites.

Bellon M. R., Hodson D., Hellin J. · PNAS 108(33):13432-13437 · Mexico

Assesses farmer-based traditional maize seed systems in Mexico and their vulnerability to climate change, with implications for maintaining and adapting landrace diversity in situ.