Research & reports

Nury Katherine Da Graca Vega, Jessica Johana Roman Torres · · Colombia

This work was carried out within the framework of a research project focused on developing an urban family agriculture model as a strategy for social integration and economic development for less favored strata in Cumaral municipality, Colombia. Urban family agriculture is presented as a social development proposal that links individual needs with the use of urban spaces, fostering sustainable ecological, economic, cultural, and social activities.

Kim Gokmi, Ahn Jia · The International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology · Global

This study aimed to analyze the significance and types of urban agriculture, examine domestic and foreign cases, and seek development directions for urban agriculture. It notes that urban agriculture is taking hold in the West due to concerns over global warming, food safety, and urbanites seeking health and relaxation. The research plans to present development measures and conduct follow-up research for safe food.

Rubén Darío Peña Chacón, Viviana Alejandra Vergel Rojas · · Colombia (Bogotá)

This project implemented an educommunicative strategy through a communication piece to promote the visibility and recognition of the "Guerreros y Guerreras Unidos en Acción" urban garden in Fontanar del Río, Suba, Bogotá. The garden strengthens social fabric, offers cultivation activities and urban agriculture training, and aims to share knowledge on good practices for organic food cultivation for self-consumption and as a business option. The goal is to make the garden's urban agriculture processes and organic products visible in Bogotá, demonstrating how environmental actions can foster social cohesion, good food practices, business opportunities, and coexistence.

Dian Triastari Armanda, Jeroen B. Guinée, Arnold Tukker · Global Food Security · Global

This review examined emerging innovative urban agriculture (IUA) practices, revitalized since 2010 by scientific knowledge and agricultural technology. It assessed IUA's potential contribution to food security and environmental sustainability by comparing scientific literature and actual data from eighteen practitioners worldwide. The most productive IUA practice can yield up to 140 kg of vegetables per m2/year, indicating IUA's potential to support local food supply, strengthen the food value chain, and apply more sustainable practices for global food security.

Chiara Certomà, Chiara Tornaghi · Ghent University Academic Bibliography (Ghent University) · Global

This book is a collection of chapters unpacking the forms, functioning, and meanings of urban gardening in the context of the neoliberal transformation of cities. It offers an overview of diverse claims in the micro-politics of garden activism and discusses how these projects are fraught with social solidarities and divisions, empowerment and learning processes, conflicts and negotiations. The collection aims to contribute to a critical discussion of the “politics of urban space” and enrich the emerging debate on radical, critical, and political gardening.

Edgar Alfredo Portilla-Flores · DU & P: revista de diseño urbano y paisaje · Global

This article discusses urban agriculture as a contemporary practice that requires understanding across multiple dimensions. It states that urban and peri-urban food production encompasses not only agronomic aspects but also relates to food security, public policies, urban planning, entrepreneurship, recycling culture, environmental education, and recreational and therapeutic activities.

Daniel Bendix, Franziska Müller, Aram Ziai · · Global

This study examines alternatives to 'development' in the Global North, focusing on community-supported agriculture (CSA), a tenement trust, and the anti-coal movement. It investigates how these cases align with postdevelopment ideas such as non-capitalist practices, new commons, local knowledge, and a break with colonialism. The research questions the universalization of Western development models and their historical hegemony.

Stephan Barthel, Christian Isendahl, Benjamin N. Vis, Axel Drescher, Daniel Evans, Arjan van Timmeren · The Anthropocene Review · Global

Global urbanization and food production are in direct competition for land. Displacing crop production from urban and peri-urban land due to soil quality issues will demand a substantially larger proportion of the Earth’s terrestrial land surface than the area lost to urban encroachment. This risks triggering distancing effects, unfair social-ecological teleconnections, and amplifying effects within the Earth System, potentially leading to food riots in cities of the Global South. The paper identifies multi-level leverage points, specifically an advisory global policy aligned with regional policies enabling robust common property rights for bottom-up actors in urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA), to navigate urban expansion away from fertile croplands.

Edgar Ortiz-Mena, Jairo Ricardo Mora-Delgado · Revista de Ciencias Sociales · Colombia (Sonsón)

This hermeneutic study analyzed the Urban Agriculture Program in Sonsón, Colombia, which aims to improve the living conditions of violence victims. Through in-depth interviews and participant observation with 40 elderly beneficiaries over two months, it was found that while 40% improved their diet through broiler chicken training, beneficiaries perceived that the taught production techniques were time-consuming and did not lead to short-term cost reduction or income increase. The study concludes by recognizing the perceptions and adaptation strategies of families facing change.

Makiko Taguchi, Guido Santini · DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · Global

The FAO supports urban agriculture globally, providing technical expertise and advice to governments and working with the private sector. Its approach strengthens linkages between urban, peri-urban, and rural agriculture to enhance food security and resilience, adapting programs to local needs. Increased attention to food systems, driven by societal demands against food waste and climate change, has fostered interest in FAO's activities.

Gaston E. Small, Robert McDougall, Geneviève S. Metson · International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics · Global

This study analyzes the potential benefits and costs of urban agriculture, comparing tradeoffs in different sustainability metrics. It assesses how optimal urban agriculture varies by context, such as maximizing production in dense areas versus filling vacant land in post-industrial cities. The research also examines urban agriculture's role in making food systems resilient and includes a case study comparing resource use and pollution for lettuce production via outdoor urban agriculture, indoor urban agriculture, conventional methods, and cross-continental transport for one U.S. metropolitan area.

Ibrahima Saidou · Journal of Environmental Science and Allied Research · Cameroon (Yaoundé)

A 2014 study in Yaoundé, Cameroon, surveyed 40 farmers and analyzed soil in two valley bed suburbs, Nkolodom and Nkolbisson, to identify soil constraints on urban agriculture. While nitrogen and phosphorus levels were adequate, soil salinity at Nkolodom was brackish to moderate (810 mS/m), potentially constraining crop growth. Soil fertility was also found to decrease with distance from farmers' houses.

Delphine Bernadette Ouédraogo, Delwendé Innocent Kiba, Zacharia Gnankambary, Sheick K. Sangaré, Diakouba Sirima, Hassan Bismarck Nacro, Michel Papaoba Sédogo · Journal of Agricultural Science · Burkina Faso (Ouagadougou)

This study investigated cropping practices and their drivers in 133 peri-urban farms near Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Soil sample analysis revealed that monoculture led to low soil organic carbon, while polyculture led to low soil available potassium. The socio-economic conditions of the farms explained up to 60% of the variability in cropping practices.

Jess Halliday, D.M.R. van Veenhuizen · CGSPace A Repository of Agricultural Research Outputs (Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research) · Global

UA Magazine 36 focuses on Food Policy Councils. Urban Agriculture Magazine (UA Magazine) is produced by the RUAF Global Partnership on Sustainable Urban Agriculture and Food Systems. It facilitates information sharing, promotes analysis and debate on critical issues, and publishes good practices and impact stories related to urban agriculture and urban food systems.

Jasmine Lorenzini · Politics and Governance · Global

This article analyzes the action repertoire of food democracy to assess the influence of market-based logics on various forms of food activism. It addresses which forms of political participation citizens use to democratize the food regime, which conceptions of democracy relate to these forms, and which critiques of market-based politics apply. The article highlights the widespread risk of unequal participation, crowding out, commodification, and state retreat across forms of participation used to democratize food regimes.

Nicolas Bricas, Damien Conaré · DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · Global

The 20th century marked a significant shift in how cities approach their food supply. While the revival of urban food policies extends beyond urban agriculture and food production, urban agriculture can play a role in reintroducing nature and agriculture into the heart of the city while rebuilding social ties. The challenge is less about feeding cities, given its limited production potential, and more about its symbolic dimension.

Julian Cribb · Cambridge University Press eBooks · Global

This paper points out that none of the world's megacities can feed themselves, and food chain risks pose an imminent threat of starvation. It presents concepts such as climate-proof food supplies, novel urban food production systems, the importance of urban permaculture, rewilding, and developing wise consumers as solutions to urban food risk. However, it does not explicitly state that these solutions fully resolve the issue of urban food self-sufficiency.

Rosangela Medeiros Hespanhol · Confins · Portugal

This field research in Portugal analyzed urban gardens, identifying both spontaneously emerging gardens with no public oversight and those organized by public authorities. Interviews revealed that urban agriculture facilitates subsistence food production without pesticides, creates intergenerational and intercultural coexistence spaces, fosters social cohesion through experience exchange, and promotes environmental education. These findings emphasize the social and cultural importance of urban cultivation practices.

Lucy Rose Wright, Ross Fraser Young · Manchester University Press eBooks · Global

This chapter introduces the concept of political gardening, contextualizing its rise within neoliberal processes and academic interest in urban gardening. It conflates political gardening with injustice, drawing on Rawls' theory of social justice. The chapter uses case study examples to define political gardening as a six-stage iterative process that participants undergo to address injustices and become engaged, democratized citizens.

Pierluigi Nicolin · IGI Global eBooks · Global

This article describes the urban farming movement as a global phenomenon, emerging in cities worldwide from Mumbai to Tokyo, where cultivated areas produce food distributed locally. Driven largely by the poor and women on small farms, this politico-cultural movement integrates with urban ecosystems through food production, educational aims, and sustainability. It creates new landscapes that warrant aesthetic analysis and could influence urban visual conventions and lifestyles if scaled up.

Antoine Perrin · Working paper/Working paper CIRIEC ... · Global

A study examining that, alongside calls from international institutions and states for food security through large-scale subsidies and improved market access, small initiatives addressing access to healthy, sustainable food are emerging everywhere - farmers' self-help groups, shared gardens, community-supported agriculture, cooperative supermarkets, and similar organisations - and analysing the discourse and practices of 20 such initiatives dealing with agriculture and food. The study drew on roughly 500 hours of fieldwork within the initiatives and 50 interviews with project planners, coordinators, and monitors, chosen from two contrasting social and economic contexts: Nancy, a medium-sized French town, and Ahmedabad, a large Indian city. The results identify two major trends common between France and India and across small farmers, shared gardens, cooperatives, and other social and solidarity initiatives: first, a general call for localised, short food circuits, with producers and consumers seeking a direct connection to each other or growing their own food; and second, participants not claiming to be part of a recent innovative wave but instead falling back on traditional ways to grow, sell, and cook food. The initiatives studied were themselves small in scale, with around 200 participants each.

Jessica Ann Diehl, Kate Oviatt, Amanda Jennifer Chandra, Harpreet Kaur · Sustainability · Global

This study examined household food security among migrant urban farmers by surveying and conducting semi-structured interviews with market-oriented small-to-medium scale farmers in three rapidly urbanizing cities: Delhi, India; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Quito, Ecuador. Participation in urban agriculture was found to have a positive impact on household food security through direct means (self-consumption) and indirect means (improved income and access), though the form of low-income migrant urban agriculture differed across the three cities.

Maurice Mitchell, Amara Roca Iglesias · Frontiers of Architectural Research · Global

This research explores opportunities for creating a green city on the recently secured Bagmati riverbanks in Kathmandu, Nepal, an area subject to rapid inward migration by landless rural farmers. It asks what architectural theory and practice can contribute to supporting the fit between emergent bottom-up initiatives and top-down city investments, developing loose fit theory, research methods, and reflective practice to investigate latent possibilities, assemble a narrative of embedded change, and create spatial imaginaries of topographical change on the riverbanks. It argues that architectural theory and practice can play a role in integrating migrants into civic institutions and helping generate a greener city by making explicit the relationship between setting and occupant, stimulating and representing alternative imaginaries, and framing civic discourse.

Julian Cribb · Cambridge University Press eBooks · Global

This concluding chapter lists the book's policy recommendations without presenting new data: build a global food system based on regenerative farming, aquaculture and urban food production; redesign cities to recycle nutrients and water into local, climate-proof food production under permaculture principles; reallocate 20% of world military spending to food-based conflict prevention; rewild half the planet under leadership of small farmers and indigenous peoples; introduce a "Year of Food" in every primary school; and put women in leadership across business, politics, government, religion and society.

Jean-Louis Yengué · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · Cameroon

Focusing on the Cameroonian capital Yaoundé and one of its valleys, the Ekozoa, this study examines the forms taken by urban residents' cultivation of food and horticultural crops and its place within the urban fabric. Despite its illegality, this agriculture proved essential to the survival strategies of the poorest households, improving their nutrition and economic base, and it also played an environmental role through waste recycling and greening the city. At the same time it raised numerous problems related to pollution and public health. The solution proposed by the authorities is to bring these areas under control as non-buildable zones, incorporating them into a green network that is more ornamental than productive.