Research & reports

Schram-Bijkerk He, Dirven-van Breemen Em, Otte Pf · Rivm (National Institute for Public Health and the Environment) · Europe

This report identifies self-reported local and shared success factors for introducing green space and urban agriculture in several European cities to mitigate climate change effects. Key factors include national legislation promoting nature conservation, strong cooperation between local authorities and the public, and incorporating minimum green space requirements into zoning plans and housing projects. Urban agriculture has been adopted as part of green policy in cities like Manchester, Lyon, and Paris to ensure a supply of healthy food.

Michael Koch, Martin Köhler · · Germany (Hamburg)

This paper discusses how new types of open spaces, beyond officially designated ones, are gaining focus in urban planning discussions in Hamburg, Germany, particularly concerning urban densification and new partnerships for maintaining urban open spaces. These spaces, including traffic junctions, railway embankments, industrial fallow land, and private gardens, serve as venues for trends like urban gardening and urban explorations. The study, presented in four volumes for Hamburg, explores the actual and potential contributions of these spaces to the open space provision for the entire urban population, not just in inner-city areas or by young urban milieus.

Paula Nahmías, Yvon Le · Environnement urbain · France

This paper attempts to define "urban agriculture" given the diversity of its forms and representations. Based on field observations in Brittany, France, it concludes that beyond its proximity to the city, the urban character of agriculture is defined by its functionalities and its integration into the agglomeration project.

Beste Karakaya, Tuğba Kiper · DergiPark (Istanbul University) · Turkey (Edirne)

This study conducted physical, cultural, and current situation analyses of 10 elementary school playgrounds in the city center of Edirne. The current situation of these elementary school gardens was determined according to landscape design principles, and proposals were made to solve existing problems.

Veguita de Graná · · Spain (Granada)

Rosa Felix explored urban gardens in metropolitan Granada, Spain, in 2013, linking them to employment opportunities. She noted that such experiences have a long history in many countries. Felix concluded that urban gardens would be successful if public administrations supported their creation.

Isabelle Anguelovski · City and Community · Spain (Barcelona), United States (Boston), Cuba

The role of place attachment in environmental mobilization among local activists improving degraded spaces, such as urban farms and community gardens, was investigated in three marginalized neighborhoods in Barcelona, Spain; Boston, USA; and Havana, Cuba. Activists in all three locations used environmental projects to express grief over community loss, fear of erasure, and emotional connection to their neighborhoods. They aimed to construct "safe havens" and remake places for residents to address environmental trauma.

Marco Luca Stanchieri · X Jornadas de Sociología · Spain (Barcelona)

This paper explores the concept of "urban voids" in contemporary cities, focusing on abandoned plots resulting from unfulfilled urban reform projects. It argues that despite being defined as "voids," these spaces are sites of active human social practices, serving for common appropriation, self-management, conflict, and negotiation, fostering neighborhood cohesion and community action. Based on ethnographic data from Barcelona, the paper aims to expose the misleading nature of urbanistic language that defines socially vibrant spaces as "voids," questioning the social exclusion mechanisms supported by such definitions.

Tim Cook · · United Kingdom (Yorkshire)

The gardening charity RHS Yorkshire in Bloom launched a £100,000 fund to offer more support for community gardeners. For the first time, people across Yorkshire and the Humber can apply for these funds.

Giovanni Attili · IRIS Research product catalog (Sapienza University of Rome) · Italy (Rome)

This study focused on community gardens in Rome, Italy, which largely result from informal appropriation practices. While these gardens can enhance environmental and social quality of life, they require institutional support and present a crucial challenge for urban planning. The study highlights the need to explore tensions between social practices and institutional powers, and questions how public policy can legitimize these self-guiding societal expressions.

Ruud Abma, U. Kirchholtes, J.E. Jansma, M.P. Vijn · Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) · Europe

Urban agriculture is a subject of societal interest, seen as a promising contributor to sustainable urban development. It offers alternatives for agricultural professionals, accessible locations for urban residents to relax and learn, and often improves the physical and social environment of neighborhoods.

Paz Sastre Domínguez · Revista de Estudios de Juventud · Spain

A Spanish essay reconsidering the industrial revolutions through the growth of advertising and design, examining social practices that apply New Institutional Economics organizational models—originating from the free-software movement—to material goods such as food, DIY 3D printers, open wear, open design, urban gardens, DIY biology, DIY drones, open-source hardware, non-GMO seeds, waste, bartering, social currencies and Bitcoin. It frames these projects as new forms of social contract, moral machines floating outside the state and market, but draws a parallel with current generic-drug monopolies to argue the post-patent world may not turn out as imagined.

Michael Koch, Martin Köhler · · Germany

Against the backdrop of debates on densifying German cities to meet housing demand and searching for new partnerships between citizens, businesses and municipalities, a study focuses on "new open spaces" beyond officially recorded green and open areas — traffic junctions, rail embankments, industrial brownfields, parking lots, streets, sidewalks, private gardens, schoolyards, corporate green areas, delivery zones, courtyards, rubble sites, quays, allotment gardens, dikes, drainage channels, retention basins, bridges, building setback areas, and driveways. These spaces host trends such as urban gardening, urban exploration and parkour, and across four volumes on Hamburg the study examines their actual and potential contribution to open-space provision for the whole urban population, not only the inner city or young urban milieus.

Sylvie Lardon, Salma Loudiyi · OpenEdition (OpenEdition) · France

Set against the mid-21st-century demographic challenge, in which urban growth projections toward 2050 raise alarms over cities' food security, food sovereignty, and the sustainability of increasingly fragile territorial food systems, a French essay questions our capacity to think through change and devise new modes of action. The available abstract is truncated at this point and provides no further detail.

Rebecca Bramall · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · United Kingdom

An essay (United Kingdom) centered on a 2007 allotment project - a "victory garden" set up in St James's Park, London, by the Imperial War Museum London with the Royal Parks - that traces connections between the Second World War "Dig for Victory" campaign and contemporary discourses of sustainability and austerity. Focusing on urban agricultural projects, it considers how austerity discourse might shape British consumers' understanding of agricultural systems and the formation of consuming subjects.

Monique Poulot · Bulletin de l Association de géographes français · France

Drawing on examples from the Île-de-France region and elsewhere in France, this piece discusses urban and peri-urban agriculture. It frames urban and peri-urban agriculture — once considered marginal and destined to disappear — as now an issue for both the sustainable city and sustainable agriculture, noting that most visions of the post-carbon 'city of tomorrow' describe a city made up of a concentration of compact urbanized zones alongside landscape fragments, each serving specific urban functions.

Manuel Ângelo Rodrigues, Diana Peixinho, Sílvia Nobre, Paula Sara Teixeira de Oliveira, Margarida Arrobas · · Europe

Noting that, in developing countries and in developed countries during periods of economic depression, creating land for urban agriculture has served as a politically significant instrument to strengthen food security and ease poverty and unemployment, and that more recent urban agriculture projects in developed-country cities aim to enhance social activity and quality of life, this paper reports on the "social gardens" project run by the Polytechnic Institute of Bragança (IPB), Portugal, since 2011. It reports on some practices with high agroecological significance adopted by the gardeners, namely organic fertilization, composting, mulching, intercropping, and shelter systems.

Vesna Popović, Jelena Živanović Miljković · Institute of Agricultural Economics eBooks · Europe

A study analyzing trends in community gardening in Europe, with particular focus on Belgrade, Serbia, in relation to permaculture design principles. It notes that while intensive urban agriculture carries ecological risks related to soil, water, air, climate, biodiversity, and landscape, citizens seeking healthy food and closer contact with nature are turning toward extensive, often organic, forms of urban agriculture such as community gardening based on permaculture design, and it discusses the role of such gardening in smart-city development and its establishment potential in Belgrade.

Malin Arvidson, Fergus Lyon, Stephen McKay, Domenico Moro · Voluntary Sector Review, Vol.4 No.1, pp.3-18 (Policy Press) · United Kingdom

A paper analysing how social return on investment (SROI) is used in the United Kingdom to conceptualise, measure and communicate the achievements of social enterprises and charities. It examines the quantification of benefits, the valuing of volunteering, and the ways judgement and discretion are exercised within an SROI exercise. It identifies a particular tension between the participatory element in designing each exercise and the use of its results for competitive funding, and proposes a research agenda on the contexts in which that discretion is applied. Abstract only was consulted.

Marit Rosol · Antipode · Germany (Berlin)

Documents how Berlin's municipal policy of promoting community gardening was an attempt to outsource public green-space maintenance to unpaid volunteers under 'roll-back'/'roll-out' neoliberalism. Based on empirical research, it shows the outsourcing strategy largely FAILED (volunteers could not sustain provision) while opening space for other private interests.

Susan B. Johnson · International Journal of Inclusive Education · United Kingdom

This paper argues that a reconceptualized approach to school gardening in the UK could promote inclusive education for sustainable development. It examines the potential for children aged 5-14 to develop ecological knowledge, action competence, and environmental engagement skills through gardening. The paper suggests a curriculum framework and provides a bean crop exemplar, but it does not present empirical findings or results from an implemented program.

David Tijero · Aldiri: arkitektura eta abar · Spain (Bilbao)

This article criticizes the municipal administration's attitude towards informal allotments on the outskirts of Bilbao. It analyzes the consequences of green space reclamation plans executed in recent years and advocates for policies promoting both formal and informal urban agriculture.

I. Karabozhilova, Barbara Wieland, Silvia Alonso, Laura Salonen, Barbara Häsler · British Poultry Science · United Kingdom (London)

A 2010 questionnaire survey of 30 backyard chicken flock-keepers in the Greater London Urban Area found that while chickens generally had conditions for natural behaviors, most owners did not comply with regulations on catering waste feeding. Disease prevention measures were rare, and a lack of avian and zoonotic disease knowledge among owners was observed, indicating implications for disease control.

Kate Metcalf, Julia Minnear, Tabitha Kleinert, Victoria Tedder · Local Economy The Journal of the Local Economy Policy Unit · United Kingdom (East London)

This practitioner's perspective discusses how the Women’s Environmental Network organizes support and training for community gardens in East London. It considers how these efforts contribute to local resilience against economic and cultural pressures and create greater access to green spaces.

J. McLean · · United Kingdom

This research focused on the re-imagining of identity through volunteer work at Spitalfields Community Farm in Tower Hamlets, London. It specifically investigated how Bangladeshi-Londoni diaspora volunteers contributed to creating this urban rural space and how, through their imagining of this space, they consciously sought to remember their homeland while establishing a new sense of identity in London.

Chiara Tornaghi · · United Kingdom

This academic-activist research on grassroots urban agriculture initiatives, focusing on four projects in Leeds, UK, found that local and regional institutions have limited ability to respond to these new demands. Planning traditions constrain institutions, failing to create flexible public spaces. Consequently, short-term solutions are found in "loose spaces" or ad-hoc negotiations, but these remain emergency or residual practices, highlighting challenges for urban public space management.