Research & reports

Carolina Yacamán Ochoa, Daniel Ferrer Jiménez, Rafael Mata Olmo · Land · Global

This paper critically reviewed recent literature on Green Infrastructure (GI), highlighting a lack of references to peri-urban agriculture's role in GI planning. It emphasized peri-urban agriculture's positive contribution to local food supply and other services. Furthermore, the paper proposed a methodology to integrate practical GI planning in metropolitan regions to maximize the activation of traditional agricultural landscapes and improve landscape connectivity.

Samantha Noll · Open Philosophy · Global

This study explores how justice-oriented urban agriculture projects, guided by "food justice" and "food sovereignty" goals, transform city contexts by reducing regulatory barriers that could perpetuate systems of oppression. The study argues that by removing regulatory barriers, urban agriculture projects are transforming cityscapes in ways that cultivate justice at the system level.

Michael Deflorian · Social movement studies · Global

This article examines the volatile participation of critical creatives in collective alternative everyday practices (CAEPs) like community gardens, which often involves irregular engagement and adherence to unsustainable consumer lifestyles. Drawing on Late-Modern Subject Theory, it argues that participants attempt to embody an idealized Self but fail persistently due to structural constraints and personal liberties in late-modern society. This results in "refigurations" of utopia that are bound to fail, highlighting a governance challenge in sustaining engagement.

Pauline Marsh, Suzanne Mallick, Emily J. Flies, Penelope Jones, Sue Pearson, Iain S. Koolhof, Jason Byrne, Dave Kendal · International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health · Global

This study assessed the socio-spatial context of a proposed Campus Community Garden (CCG) at a student university accommodation site. It explored perceptions of the space and the proposed garden through interviews, focus groups, a survey with diverse university and community stakeholders, visual observations, and public life surveying. Results confirmed known problems associated with an underutilized site and identified unknown barriers, including socially disconnected stakeholders and community distrust of the university.

Fanni Bársony · Tér és Társadalom · Hungary

This study examines urban community gardens in Hungary through fieldwork and group interviews. It investigates how these gardens function as urban commons, focusing on community characteristics, resource relationships, and sharing practices. The research concludes that for urban commons, it is insufficient to focus solely on the shared resource and access conditions; the commons must be examined in relation to the operating community.

Jani Kozina, Nela Halilović · Capacities · Slovenia (Velenje)

The book "Velenje, an industrial city in transformation" aims to illuminate aspects of the Slovenian industrial city of Velenje's past, present, and future transformation, providing an overview of its developmental factors. It emphasizes social, cultural, spatial, environmental, and economic aspects, alongside a critical evaluation of future development resources and actions. Through 16 diverse contributions, the book highlights the importance of utilizing endogenous development resources and adopting a participatory approach to future decision-making.

Fatiha Hakimi, Mohamed Brech · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · Morocco

This study assessed the practices, potentials, and constraints of peri-urban agriculture (PUA) in Rabat Metropolis, Morocco, using field observation, interviews, and surveys with 50 randomly selected farmers. While PUA contributes to economic development, employment, and food supply, the study found significant legal constraints, including the absence of regulating laws and the obligation for some farmers to pay housing taxes. Technical constraints such as insufficient workforce, high labor costs, difficult access to irrigation water, and lack of training also hinder PUA growth.

Maximilian Manderscheid, Valentin Fiala, Bernhard Freyer · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · Global

This report D4.3 describes the status quo analysis and documentation of Edible City Solutions (ECS). Over 300 ECS were identified in Berlin and Montevideo, and online research was conducted in Carthage and Lomé, after which a total of 84 ECS were documented in detail using a mixed-method approach (online survey, interviews, workshops, etc.). Most documented ECS take the form of urban gardening and focus on social benefits like providing education and fostering social cohesion, but the report does not detail specific challenges or limitations regarding governance.

Kristin Reynolds · Environmental Justice · Global

This chapter explores the intersection of food systems, agriculture, and environmental justice within social movements, activism, and scholarship. It reviews historical instances of these intersections, including indigenous peoples' movements, farmworker organizing, urban agriculture, and consumer solidarity campaigns. The chapter also discusses recent developments and future concerns connecting environmental justice, food, and agriculture with issues like climate change, gentrification, and Black Agrarianism.

Madara Dobele, Andra Zvirbule · Rural Sustainability Research · Global

This study aimed to identify the historical development stages of the concept of urban agriculture and its main research tendencies. Using monographic and descriptive analysis, it revealed that the concept has evolved from an initial stage associated with technical solutions for urban planning to provide food, to current diverse directions including the analysis of agriculture's role in urban areas and its place in sustainable development. Researchers adapting definitions to local characteristics creates a risk of limited possibilities for quantitative comparisons between studies.

Nevin Cohen · · Global

This paper discusses the evolving role of urban agriculture within municipal planning. It examines the shift from planning specifically for urban agriculture to utilizing urban agriculture as a tool for broader planning objectives.

Lili Pâquet · Green Letters · Australia

A literary analysis examines Australian author Lili Wilkinson's 2015 young adult romance novel Green Valentine, in which two teenage protagonists rebel against their local council through guerrilla gardening. The article argues that this illegal activity functions as a political protest standing in for the protagonists' voices, silenced in public debate about the environmental future despite being too young to vote, and concludes that the novel's rhetoric of gardening underscores the importance of community and political action in stopping capitalist production of spaces that impair the environmental future.

Mabu Masiala Bode, Apollinaire Biloso Moyene, Charles Kinkela Savy · International journal of innovation and applied studies · Democratic Republic of Congo

A study examined the nature of production in peri-urban agricultural concessions in the commune of Mont-Ngafula, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, based on the concept of production systems and questionnaire surveys. The surveyed concessions carry out several types of plant and animal production, and fruit arboriculture is the most important crop type in terms of area occupied and visibility. Its development is linked to the capacity to rapidly develop land and occupy it long-term, the necessary and sufficient conditions for obtaining and keeping the long-term occupation contract, the only land title the Congolese state legally recognizes for agricultural concession users. The paper proposes an innovative fruit agroforestry approach based on participatory domestication of fruit trees with high nutritional and commercial value mixed with food crops and animal production, aimed at increasing food supply in Kinshasa's markets and professionalizing fruit arboriculture.

Marcela Patricia Galindo Toloza, Brandon Steven García Rodríguez · · Colombia (Bogotá)

This project proposal addresses the San Germán neighborhood in Bogotá, Colombia — located between the Usme and San Cristóbal localities on the upper slopes of the Entre Nubes ecological district park in the city's southeast, an area designated as protected land since 2000 under the city's land-use plan (POT). The Integral Improvement Plan (PMI) aims to provide an architectural, urban, and environmental solution to the neighborhood's problems by structuring an alternative for recovering the existing urban fabric in relation to the informal settlement that developed there over time, through rehabilitation and landscape regeneration. The PMI is designed to minimize the physical, environmental, and legal impacts caused by informal occupation, which has degraded residents' quality of life and disarticulated the neighborhood's urban structure from the wider city. It implements an "Ecobarrio" (eco-neighborhood) strategy incorporating design for different modes of mobility, prioritizing bike paths and pedestrian trails, applying integral-improvement treatment to existing construction where possible, recovering disused areas, and designating a zone for urban agriculture — elements intended to work together to regenerate the sustainability and livability of the San Germán community.

Joshua P Newell, Anu Ramaswami · Environmental Research Letters · Global

An editorial (2020, no specific region) introduces a focus issue on the food-energy-water (FEW) nexus in urban areas, noting that with most of the world's population now living in cities, cities drive global flows of food, energy, and water. The eight papers in the issue are described as interdisciplinary, multiscalar, and cross-sectoral, examining how FEW interactions affect the health of cities and their inhabitants as well as the distant people and places from which resources originate, covering topics including a review of existing urban FEW research and promising approaches, urban agriculture and energy-water dynamics, conventional agriculture and FEW dynamics, and the energy "foodprint" of the American diet. The editorial identifies four areas needing further research: ecosystem services tied to urban agriculture, resource recovery in the urban FEW nexus, equity/social actors/governance of the FEW nexus, and the food-energy-water-health nexus.

Lisandro Esteban Martínez · Estudios socioterritoriales · Global

A team from Argentina's National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) conducted a territorial foresight exercise for the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Region (RMBA), focusing on food production and consumption and the metropolitan territory in which they are embedded. Defining the area as a metropolitan agri-food system (SAM), the team constructed multiple plausible future scenarios, drawing on more than a decade of INTA work on urban and peri-urban agriculture in the region to characterize the dynamics of this complex system.

K. Michelle Glowa, Antonio Roman-Alcalá · · Global

A chapter examining the politics that shape land-access strategies and dynamics in urban agriculture (UA) through five heuristic categories—Civic, Ecological, Heritage-based, Justice-driven, and Market-oriented. These categories are used to trace how different lineages of urban agroecology intersect to produce existing UA land politics, agroecological dynamics, and their interrelations. The chapter surveys various UA projects and instances, tracing their histories of land access, land politics, and agroecology across different lineages of practice. It notes that while Civic UA tends to comply with land-use normalization, all garden projects retain the potential to destabilize the meaning of land and its agricultural use, and that the Civic field is hegemonic in land politics but not exclusively so. Justice-driven projects, the chapter finds, often arise from long-term patterns of marginalization in urban contexts and operate on principles grounded in participants' lived experiences and analyses of injustice.

Kheir Al‐Kodmany · · Global

A book chapter arguing that cities will need internal food production to meet demand from growing urban populations and to avoid congestion, pollution and unaffordable food prices, and examining vertical farming — using hydroponics, aeroponics and aquaponics — as an approach suited to urban settings where land is limited and expensive. After reviewing these technologies and project prototypes, the chapter closes by stating that economic feasibility, building codes and regulations, and a lack of expertise remain major obstacles to implementing the vertical farm.

Tudor Traian Bojan, Oana Pusco · · Global

A comparative article examines two approaches to urban agriculture: Havana, Cuba, and New York City. In Havana, the article describes urban agriculture as implemented out of necessity, with the state creating the institutional premises for it and a high degree of population mobilization treated as essential for food security. In New York, implementation is described as occurring over a longer period with resident and community involvement and local-authority support, with areas of potential for urban agriculture identified across neighborhoods. The article characterizes both cases as successful implementations that have become a permanent or temporary layer of each city's cultural and green fabric.

Alexey Valerevich Vasilchikov · Eurasian Law Journal · Russia

A study of urban agglomeration development trends in the regions of the Russian Federation, drawing on analyses from various Russian sociological research schools, examines the differentiation between cities — including million-plus cities — competing for natural, demographic, financial, and investment resources. It finds that large agglomerations act as monopolists that in many cases hinder the successful development of medium-sized and especially small Russian cities, further worsening inequality in living standards and quality of life across localities throughout the Russian Federation.

Helena Kahiluoto · Food Security · Global

An essay written during the pandemic argues for food system resilience, proposing that co-designing contrasting future narratives and developing tools to build adaptive capacity strengthens preparedness for shocks. It contends that supplier-buyer diversity matters most in market-led global food chains, while farm and crop diversity matters more in publicly protected regions, in responding to variability in weather, price and policy. During events such as international conflict or a pandemic, diverse food sourcing -- from local producer-consumer cooperatives to community-supported and urban agriculture -- could help secure food for citizens. The piece presents no empirical data or case analysis.

Cepic S., Tomicevic-Dubljevic J., Zivojinovic I. · Urban Forestry & Urban Greening · セルビア・ベオグラード

A study of the demand for collective urban gardens in Belgrade, a city with little allotment tradition, and of what prospective gardeners want. It reports that existing garden members are mostly aged 30–50, employed and highly educated, and that health and socialisation are the main motivations, while economic factors are not raised as relevant.

Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment, Singapore · Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment, Singapore · Singapore

In a written reply to a 4 November 2020 parliamentary question, Minister Grace Fu stated that SFA and HDB awarded the first tender for nine multi-storey carpark rooftop sites in September 2020 to operators proposing high-productivity systems, projected to collectively produce up to 1,600 tonnes of vegetables annually. She noted local produce travels shorter distances and lasts longer, and cited community benefits such as employment and increased awareness of local produce.

Mothership.SG · Mothership.SG · Singapore

This article reports that a tender for rooftop space on nine HDB multi-storey carparks in Singapore opened on 12 May 2020, closed on 16 June 2020, and results were announced on 30 September 2020. Nine sites (five standalone plus two clusters of two) were awarded to six operators; the article states the nine farming systems can potentially produce around 1,600 tonnes (1,600,000kg) of vegetables per year. The Singapore Food Agency (SFA) and Housing Development Board (HDB) were involved, and the project is framed as part of the '30 by 30' strategy to produce 30 per cent of Singapore's food locally by 2030.

Presidencia de la Nación (Argentina) · Argentina.gob.ar (Presidencia de la Nación / INTA) · Argentina

An official Argentine government article on ProHuerta, a self-provisioning garden program. Launched on August 3, 1990 by resolution of INTA's governing board, it has since reached more than 4 million beneficiaries and supported 637,847 gardens (97% household gardens, 1,826 community gardens, and 13,000 school gardens). It reports 9,192 volunteer promoters (67% women), and cites a nutritional evaluation finding a typical household garden covers about 72% of recommended overall consumption.