Research & reports

Kwaku Obosu-Mensah · · Ghana (Accra)

This study examined the general characteristics of urban farmers in Accra, Ghana. It showed that people of all socio-economic statuses are involved in urban agriculture. Farmers were found to be reluctant to approach government officials, and the most important reason for urban farmers to quit farming was sickness or death.

Isabel de Felipe · LA Referencia (Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas) · Global

This paper describes urban agriculture as an activity gaining new support but facing difficulties due to inadequate governance. The research identified eight instruments for sustainable urban agriculture, including food security and economic development. It concludes that each city requires specific governance to achieve synergies.

Alec Thornton, Kristen Lyons, Scott Sharpe · · Australia

This chapter examines how urban spaces in Australia are being transformed for community gardens through social movements and community interventions for the expansion of urban agriculture. It focuses on community gardeners as part of active social movements, exploring the urban context driven by the challenges of urbanization. The study applies Lefebvre's framework on the social production of space and discusses findings from qualitative interview data collected from two city case studies.

Lya Porto, Emmanuel Raufflet, Mário Aquino Alves · · Global

This paper constructs a typology of Urban Agriculture Public Action by analyzing literature from various cities in the Global North and South. The typology is based on a cross-analysis of institutional structures and service delivery to urban agriculture, identifying four main types: "Marginal," "Emerging," "Societal," and "State."

Kate Wright · Cultural Studies Review · Australia (New South Wales)

A postdoctoral project involving collaboratively planting and maintaining a community garden on land that was once part of the East Armidale Aboriginal Reserve in New South Wales, Australia, began in 2014. This research offers a personal narrative of involvement in an anti-colonial multispecies research project within the confines of a neoliberal university, interrogating the potential and limitations of anti-colonial projects undertaken from colonial subject positions predicated on social and environmental privilege.

Timothy Beatley, Cecil Konijnendijk van den Bosch · Oxford University Press eBooks · Global

This chapter examines the role of urban landscapes in public health, addressing environmental health concerns arising from urbanization, such as physical inactivity. It promotes a socioecological approach, providing examples of how urban landscapes, including urban agriculture and community gardening, contribute to improved public health. The chapter introduces concepts like green urbanism and biophilic urbanism, offering suggestions for planning health-promoting urban landscapes.

Danielle Sinnett, Gemma Jerome, Nick Smith, Sarah Burgess, Roger Mortlock · International Journal of Sustainable Development and Planning · Global

This paper presents an emerging benchmark for green infrastructure (GI) developed through literature review and stakeholder engagement, addressing uncertainty in GI design, delivery, and maintenance. The benchmark offers flexible standards for assessing GI policy, planning, design, delivery, and long-term management across various spatial scales. Preliminary testing on two mixed-use developments found the benchmark performed well, rewarding high-quality GI without demanding exemplary levels.

Chih Hsuan LI, Kazuo ASAHIRO · Landscape Research Japan Online · Global

A study of the community-supported agriculture (CSA) cooperative in Shan-Gou village, Yi-Lan County, Taiwan, which by 2016 accounted for 26% of Taiwan's 91 CSA farms. The study analyses the cooperative's comprehensive operations through interviews with CSA farm owners on cooperative management features and a financial report analysis of cooperative salary, funding sources, and the proportion of production expenditure. Results show the Shan-Gou CSA cooperative's annual salary was 1,057,000 NT$/ha, compared with an average of 690,000 NT$/ha for conventional modern agriculture in Yi-Lan County; Shan-Gou village has 24 CSA farmers with total farmland of 75.2 ha, and Shan-Gou CSA farmers' average farmland (3.5 ha) is larger than the average for Yi-Lan County's organic rice farmers (2.5 ha). Based on a 5 ha farmland premise, estimated annual income was 3,450,000 NT$ for a modern farmer versus 5,285,000 NT$ for a Shan-Gou CSA farmer, indicating higher income for Shan-Gou CSA farmers than for conventional modern farming. By December 2016, 35 farmers had relocated to Shan-Gou village, Yi-Lan County.

V.V. Erokhova, Viacheslav Vasenev · RUDN Journal of Agronomy and Animal Industries · Global

Literature on ecosystem services in the context of land-use change driven by urbanization is reviewed, and a methodology for assessing soil characteristics from an ecosystem-services perspective is proposed, illustrated with the example of the village of Ryzhovo in TiNAO, Moscow. Principles are set out for choosing sites for urban agriculture facilities based on preserving and improving soil characteristics, applying general ecosystem-service assessment methods both citywide and to land proposed for urban farming development.

Sonam Wangyel Wang, Woo‐Kyun Lee, Jeong‐Gyu Kim · Urban Studies and Public Administration · Global

Focused on Thimphu, a high-altitude city in Bhutan, this study assesses baseline social and environmental conditions, challenges and barriers to climate adaptation and identifies opportunities for ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA). It finds that the city's poorly planned infrastructure causes congestion — with associated increases in carbon emissions and driver conflict — and that flooding of sewage systems exposes residents to infection risk. Much of the urban poor living in informal settlements lack adequate access to basic facilities and so turn to surrounding natural resources, depleting the environment and eroding ecosystem services, including protection against natural hazards such as flash floods, landslides and forest fires, with disproportionate effects on vulnerable groups. The study recommends integrating EbA interventions — urban agriculture, agroforestry, greening projects, resettlement of informal settlements, education on coping strategies, and institutional, technical and individual capacity building — into climate adaptation strategies and development plans, and calls for the city authority to secure adequate funding and build capacity to plan and implement EbA.

Son Truong, Tonia Gray, Danielle Tracey, Kumara Ward · Discovery Research Portal (University of Dundee) · Australia

This study revisits the "Community Greening" partnership established in 1999 between the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney and Housing New South Wales, extending from a 2004 program evaluation report to reconsider community gardening within the changing urban and peri-urban landscape of metropolitan NSW. The program has reached almost 100,000 participants since 2000 and established 627 community and youth-led community gardens across NSW; using a pre- and post-test design, this study tracked six new garden sites established in 2017, aiming to examine whether community gardening is associated with an elevated sense of community, health and wellbeing in low-income communities, and how new gardeners' experiences relate to self-reported wellbeing and engagement.

Jamie Matthews, Akhtar-Khavari Afshin · Journal of Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University · Global

This paper argues that as land values rise with increasing population density, legally established practice has pushed agriculture out of the urban environment, leaving cities dependent on regional and industrial agriculture, with urban agriculture practiced mainly in developing countries as a defense against hunger and malnutrition or as poverty alleviation. It contends that urban agriculture can contribute to environmental recovery in the Anthropocene, on the premise that existing conservation and protection strategies should not be assumed to be sufficient on their own, without presenting empirical measurements.

Licia María Lilli · Revista de la Escuela de Antropología · Argentina

A paper examines the participation of a group of urban gardeners (huerteros/huerteras) in the process of building the civil association "Red de Huerteros y Huerteras de Rosario" in Rosario, Argentina, an associative form linked to social policies formulated under the Municipality of Rosario's Urban Agriculture Program. Using a relational anthropological approach, it focuses on the demands and resignifications of the social actors involved in the web of political relations, asking how these experiences enable a place for collective practices within a field of forces.

Kwaku Obosu-Mensah · · Ghana

A policy-recommendation text on urban agriculture in Ghana and other sub-Saharan African countries (2018) states that private landowners will more readily allow others to cultivate their land if given incentives, that Ghanaian urban residents rarely resettle in rural areas, and that even an attractive government relocation package failed to draw redundant urban residents back to rural areas. Because sub-Saharan farming divides labor by gender — men earning cash income, women farming for subsistence — most people running commercial urban farms are expected to be men. Where urban cultivation is small-scale and open-space-based, government should focus on the problems of open-space cultivators and provide conditions that raise yields, but should avoid paternalism by not granting urban farmers preferential treatment over rural farmers.

Chhaya Kolavalli · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · Global

This is a review of the book Just Green Enough: Urban Development and Environmental Gentrification, framed against the fact that cities account for more than 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. It presents the book as a guide to strategies for equitable green urban development — including the promotion and support of urban food systems — as part of climate mitigation and adaptation. The book primarily addresses problems from environmental hazards in the built environment, with several chapters specifically covering urban food production and distribution, offering strategies the review describes as readily applicable to urban planners, activists and community members working in urban food systems.

İşık Sezen · ATLAS JOURNAL · Global

A review essay compiling the views of architects and urban planners on urban agriculture, examining its relationship to urban sustainability, surveying urban agriculture in various world cities, and focusing on the allotment garden as one form of urban agriculture. No empirical data or survey method is presented.

Christian Isendahl, Stephan Barthel · · Global

A book chapter draws on insights from pre-Columbian Maya cities, medieval Constantinople, and wartime London, applying them to the contemporary mega-region of the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta. It demonstrates the potential for integrating archaeological and historical research with investigations of contemporary conditions to inform urban planning. Despite fundamental differences across eras, it argues urban and peri-urban food production continues to play a key role for food security and city resilience, and that the long-term record shows maintaining a diversity of food systems — including localized ones — and institutional flexibility at multiple scales is essential to addressing food security challenges.

Djokić V., Ristić Trajković J., Furundžić D., Krstić V., Stojiljković D. · Urban Forestry & Urban Greening · セルビア・ベオグラード

An examination of informal (uninstitutionalised) gardening in Belgrade, read within the dwelling culture of the socialist and post-socialist periods. It treats the urban garden not as a product of policy but as lived space shaped by residents' everyday practice.

World Future Council · World Future Council (futurepolicy.org) · Ecuador

A policy case study on Quito's AGRUPAR participatory urban agriculture programme in Ecuador. Over 16 years it reached 73,936 people directly and 113,774 indirectly, produces over 960,000 kg of food annually, and 84% of its 21,746 trained participants were women. The programme received the Future Policy Silver Award in 2018.

Herrera F. · Cuadernos de Desarrollo Rural · Venezuela

A multidimensional diagnosis of thirteen urban agricultural production units in Caracas, drawing together economic, social and ecological factors to set out what determines food sovereignty and sustainability. It credits the units' organisational strengths while naming limited access to seed and thin crop diversity as constraints, and records how the city's units — starting with Organopónico Bolívar I, opened in 2003 — came into being and changed hands.

Tornaghi C. · Antipode 49(3):781-801 · Global

Critically theorizes the neoliberal 'food-disabling city' that deprives citizens of food agency, redefining urban food justice and arguing for an urban agriculture politics grounded in empowerment and food sovereignty.

Horst M., McClintock N., Hoey L. · Journal of the American Planning Association 83(3):277-295 · Global

Multidisciplinary literature review questioning who benefits and who does not from urban agriculture, suggesting ways urban planners can structure urban agriculture in support of food justice.

Partalidou M., Anthopoulou T. · Sociologia Ruralis, 57(2), 211–228 · Greece (Thermi, Northern Greece)

Using Maslow's hierarchy of needs and fieldwork in a municipal allotment garden in northern Greece, the study constructs a typology of gardeners and finds that participation evolves from satisfying basic subsistence needs during economic crisis toward self-actualization and placemaking.

Anthopoulou T., Nikolaidou S., Partalidou M., Petrou M. · In: Soulard CT., Perrin C., Valette E. (eds) Toward Sustainable Relations Between Agriculture and the City. Springer, Cham, pp. 181–199 · Greece

Drawing on fieldwork at three municipal allotment gardens in Greece, the chapter examines the institutional and political context of their rapid proliferation during the economic crisis and identifies governance challenges facing local authorities and urban gardening communities.

Guzman C. · Sustainable Landscape Planning in Selected Urban Regions (Springer, Tokyo) · Philippines (Metro Manila)

This book chapter reviews urban agriculture initiatives, practices, and impacts in the Philippines, using Metro Manila vegetable production and peri-urban jasmine cultivation as case studies. It highlights employment and income benefits while identifying land-use competition and lack of clear policy as major threats to continued urban farming.