Research & reports

Svetla Stoeva · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · Europe

Stakeholder roles, collaborative mechanisms, and power dynamics were analyzed across 14 urban agriculture case studies in Europe. Public authorities, civil society organizations, NGOs, private businesses, and practitioners were identified as key stakeholders. Effective collaboration depends on inclusivity, shared responsibility, flexibility, and social cohesion, but challenges include power imbalances where public authorities and businesses dominate marginalized stakeholders.

Javier Rodrigo-Ilarri, Claudia P. Romero-Hernández, Sergio Salazar-Galán, María-Elena Rodrigo-Clavero · Sustainability · Spain (Valencia)

This article analyzes the impact of urban sprawl on the Valencia Plain aquifer system from 1990 to 2018 using the Weighted Environmental Index (WEI). Results show urban surfaces expanded by 70% and rainfed agricultural areas declined by over 59%, leading to a 9.2% reduction in environmental value (WEI decreased from 44.80 to 40.68). These changes threaten ecosystem sustainability and reduce the capacity to deliver ecosystem services.

Ágnes Gagyi · Local Environment · Europe

This paper investigated urban gardening in an East European capital, focusing on institutional resources. The study found a clear relationship between a shortfall of institutional resources and the limited, conflictual promotion of urban gardens as sustainability tools. It argues that gardens' contradictions stem from the privatization of public functions, which has depleted institutions capable of implementing gardens as sustainability tools, instead outsourcing costs to garden communities.

Orsini, Francesco, D'Aprile, Andrea, Pennisi, Giuseppina, Prandi, Riccardo, Morelli, Agata, d'Ostuni, Michele, Martin, Michael, de Brun Skantz, Natalie · AMS Acta (University of Bologna) · Europe

The UrbanFarm Student Challenge, established in 2019, promotes innovation and sustainability in urban agriculture by engaging European university students in co-designing urban agricultural systems. The 2025 edition focused on transforming an underutilized lot at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, which presented challenges like isolation and low ecological value. Student teams developed design proposals integrating productive landscapes with multifunctional public uses, aiming to activate the space for food production, education, and community interaction.

Sara Sama Acedo, David Berná Serna, Patricia Homs Ramírez de la Piscina · Scientific Repository of Open Access of Portugal (RCAAP) · Spain (Madrid)

A study analyzed the challenge faced by community urban gardens in Madrid, Spain, in remaining transformative spaces amidst an ecossocial crisis. These gardens are initiatives situated between community and public institutional management, with their expansion and institutionalization involving practices and relationships among diverse agents. The study points out the difficulty for these gardens to maintain their transformative role—updating community ties, reciprocity, and mutual care, and reformulating relationships with "nature" in the city and food supply—without being absorbed by market logics or marginalized into welfare or community volunteering spaces.

Noelia Fernández-Salido, Alfonso Gallego‐Valadés, Carlos Serra-Castells, Jorge Garcés Ferrer · Agriculture · Spain (Valencia)

This qualitative study in Valencia, Spain, explored the role of urban allotment gardens in producing social capital. Fifteen in-depth interviews were conducted with key informants involved in urban garden projects. Findings indicate that urban gardens act as relational infrastructures, fostering intergenerational learning and inclusive participation. However, exclusionary attitudes and fragmented governance were found to limit their potential.

F. A. Abd El Hamid · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · United Kingdom (Glasgow)

This paper presents the complete operational blueprint for the EArTh System, a community-led model designed to establish food sovereignty in post-industrial areas. The system integrates a decaying digital currency, democratic assemblies, and urban agriculture to create a parallel 'commons' for essential goods. Detailed as a pilot implementation for Glasgow East, UK, the document outlines its currency mechanics, legal structure, governance, and launch strategy.

Kirsty Lohman, Ruth Pearce · Community Development Journal · United Kingdom (Durham)

This article describes a community garden in Durham, United Kingdom, maintained by volunteers working to retain common access to green space. The garden is located on a disused bowling green, against a backdrop of a struggle over land, ownership, and community use. The council had reportedly failed to maintain the land for many years, and much of the surrounding area is owned by Durham University. The community association aims to obtain control of the land through an adverse possession claim to prevent it from being sold off by the council.

Marina Abrão Ballak Dias · Revista Andaluza de Antropología · France (Paris)

This article explored how different conceptions of human-nature relationships shaped practices in two community gardens in Paris's Goutte d’Or neighborhood. Conceptions grounded in a human–nature divide prevailed, leading to a conservationist approach. Practices stemming from this perspective were found to be in constant tension with garden goals like increasing urban biodiversity and human socialization.

Sara Sama Acedo, David Berná Serna, Patricia Homs Ramírez de la Piscina · Etnografica · Spain (Madrid)

This paper analyzes the case of community urban gardens in Madrid integrated into the Municipal Program of Community Urban Gardens. These initiatives are situated in the interstices between community management and public institutional management, generating new demands on the management of urban green commons and enabling forms of shared governance. The study reveals that these gardens face the challenge of maintaining themselves as transformative spaces without being absorbed by commercial logics or marginalized into welfare-oriented or community volunteer spaces.

Dorota Rancew-Sikora, Anna Horolets, Joanna Krukowska · Environmental Sociology · Poland

This article investigates how community gardening ideals are materialized and abandoned, applying Hannah Arendt’s distinction between types of work. Based on empirical analysis of narratives and observations in 12 gardens across Poland, the research demonstrates obstacles to democratic sustainability transitions. It proposes a processual concept of "slippage" to understand mechanisms by which departures from ideals occur in community gardens.

Sara Mahdizadeh, Yun Gao · Local Environment · United Kingdom

This qualitative study, based on 16 semi-structured interviews, examined motivations and barriers to participation in community gardens in Huddersfield, UK. Key motivations included social interaction, mental well-being, and skill development. Reported barriers were declining volunteer numbers, physical workload, limited institutional support, and accessibility challenges.

Mar Loren-Méndez, Celia Chacón-Carretón, Pablo Manuel Millán Millán · ACE Arquitectura Ciudad y Entorno · Spain (Málaga)

This study examines the urban dimension of agricultural heritage, specifically urban orchards, in cities where agrarian activity is deeply intertwined with their origin and evolution. Using Nerja, Málaga, Spain, as a case study, the research highlights that accelerated urban transformation in recent decades has led to a rupture, undermining agrarian logic by abandoning historical growth practices. The study emphasizes the fundamental role of agrarian activity in built environments and advocates for the protection of urban orchards.

Chris Blythe, Veronica Barry · · United Kingdom

This chapter examines urban farming and growing in the United Kingdom, advocating for a broader definition beyond purely productive practices to include social, political, and environmental interpretations. It explores how physical spaces in four Birmingham examples foster social interaction, drawing on practitioner experience, literature, and user perspectives. The aim is to provide insights into the value of these spaces as social landscapes for urban policy.

Leonie Guerrero Lara, Baldur Kapusta, Jessica Duncan, Giuseppe Feola · International Journal of Politics Culture and Society · Germany

This article analyzes the German Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) network's political advocacy efforts between 2018 and 2022 to strengthen the movement and induce change in the industrial agri-food system. The study found that the network's organizational structure, or lack thereof, influences advocacy strategies, resources, and group dynamics. It concludes that advocates should consider their movement's organizational structure in relation to advocacy, including tensions around member participation and the visibility of advocacy work.

Sara Rizzo, Giulia Lucertini, Alessandra Bònoli, Maria Elena Bini, Roberta Guzzinati, Luca Settanni, Francesca Cappellaro · Environmental Engineering and Management Journal · Europe

A study of six experimental case studies in the metropolitan city of Bologna, Italy, describing urban community gardens (UCGs) as examples of co-production in Nature-Based Solutions (NBS), focused on the design and development of circular strategies for water reuse. It situates Bologna as a context where urban horticulture has long served as local welfare and is now evolving to host solutions supporting environmental resilience, and reports the implementation of social innovation pathways, community building and citizen engagement enabled through co-design activities using open innovation approaches, particularly Urban Living Labs (ULLs), which facilitated the development and testing of locally adapted, do-it-yourself solutions. The analysis concludes that the implemented solutions had significant social and economic impact, demonstrating UCGs' effectiveness as NBS in strengthening communities, contributing to the 2030 Agenda SDGs, and validating the outcomes of the participatory co-production approach.

Vebjørn Egner Stafseng, Anna Marie Nicolaysen, Geir Lieblein · · United Kingdom

This education-research chapter presents findings from participatory visioning workshops that agroecology students conducted with urban agriculture initiatives in Oslo, Norway, in 2018 and 2019, analyzing the students' resulting reports. Key vision characteristics were categorized into social, nature and governance themes; common challenges included difficulties in collaboration, lack of funds and time, and initiative-specific constraints, while strong political support and rising interest in urban agriculture emerged as supporting forces, with proposed actions grouped into ecology, food, education, organization, social and municipality categories.

Stokman, Antje, Khokhlova, Viktoria, Peters, Lasse, König, Bettina, Lange, Doris, Bürig, Lara, Esche, Finn, Feldmann, Falko, Quambusch, Mona · DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · Germany

A German report on an urban agriculture innovation district being developed in Hamburg as part of the Horner Geest landscape axis and the urban development of the new Gartenstadt Öjendorf. An interdisciplinary research team from HafenCity University (landscape planning), the Julius Kühn Institute (horticultural sciences), and the University of Kassel (agricultural economics and sustainability research) is developing scenarios for a productive horticultural park and testing them on a test and demonstration site. The project aims to establish innovative forms of urban agriculture that increase the presence and perception of farming in urban space and promote direct interaction between city residents and professional agricultural actors; this report covers the project on the occasion of its first scenario workshop.

Marco Focacci, Christina Schäffer, Isabella De Meo, Alessandro Paletto, Fabio Salbitano · Urban forestry & urban greening · Europe

A study of urban forest gardens—multilayered, mainly perennial edible intercropping systems—in Sweden, aimed at a national inventory, identifying the drivers behind their establishment, and understanding their contribution to urban sustainability policies. The researchers identified 30 forest gardens across 10 cities and conducted site visits and stakeholder interviews, finding three main origin types: grassroots movements, schools, and municipal officials, each informed and trained by "knowledge hubs" (associations, education centres and professionals). Social network analysis showed knowledge hubs were pivotal to establishment and information circulation, while few connections existed among other actors. Stakeholders rated cultural ecosystem services—education, community building, recreation and aesthetic value (8.7/10)—higher than regulating services such as biodiversity and climate regulation (7.9/10) and provisioning services (6.5/10). Interviews also identified legal burdens on land management and use, financial sustainability challenges for both bottom-up and top-down forest gardens, and a lack of skilled labor.

Sebastian Eiter, Wendy Fjellstad, Loes van Schaik · Landscape and Urban Planning · Europe

Drawing on case examples from five European cities, a 2025 study identified the challenges involved in monitoring the sustainability of urban agriculture, from selecting indicators and gathering data to using the results. Urban agriculture is often positioned as a tool to increase the economic, social and environmental sustainability of cities and city food systems, yet sustainability is difficult to measure, fueling debate about how sustainable urban agriculture truly is and leaving a lack of incentive to promote it or protect existing initiatives threatened by development pressure on urban land. Comparing the five cities revealed large differences in what topics were monitored, who was responsible, who gathered data and when, what data was recorded and how it was stored, and how findings were disseminated or published. Based on these findings, the study recommends stronger involvement of existing interest groups and educational institutions in monitoring, along with promotion of convenient tools for citizen-science data collection and long-term data storage.

Yu Huan, Steffen Nijhuis, Nico Tillie · Journal of Cleaner Production · Europe

Using Rotterdam as a case study, researchers combined machine-learning suitability modeling (XGBoost with SHAP), deep-learning land-use simulation, and monetary ecosystem-service valuation to compare three scenarios for 2030 and 2050: business-as-usual, suitability-based autonomous transformation, and a suitability-based landscape-approach transformation. Suitability-guided scenarios outperformed business-as-usual, with the landscape-approach scenario producing the most stable multi-decadal outcomes for regulating and cultural services, but provisioning services could plateau or decline when ecological protection constraints limited intensive production.

Małgorzata SIEMIONEK-RUSKAŃ, Małgorzata Siemionek · Journal of Environmental Management and Tourism · Europe

This study examines the integration of environmental priorities into participatory budgeting (PB) processes in selected European cities in Poland, Spain, and Portugal, using a qualitative case-study approach supported by literature review and document analysis. Case studies from Warsaw and Gdańsk (Poland), Barcelona and Valencia (Spain), and Lisbon and Porto (Portugal) were analyzed, drawing on academic sources, municipal budget reports, and environmental planning documents to examine how PB in each city has funded projects addressing green infrastructure, waste management, energy efficiency, sustainable transport, and climate adaptation. The study finds that participatory budgeting in these cities has funded projects including community gardens, green roofs, riverbank restoration, and bicycle infrastructure.

Christos Ioannides, Alexandra Tsatsou, Daniel Mamais, Simos Malamis, Georgios Tsimiklis, Dimitra Tsiakou, Z. Tsiropoulos, Mariarina Michailidou, Apostolos Tzourtziotis, Christina Karaberi, Orestis Raptis, Constantinos Noutsopoulos · Urban Water Journal · Europe

This study presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a city-wide pilot of circular urban agriculture across 31 locations in Trikala, Greece. The pilots included rainwater harvesting, precision irrigation, composting, and an online monitoring platform. Assessed through a mixed-methods approach using 20 environmental, economic, and social indicators, the system showed stable technical performance and effectiveness in reducing resource consumption.

Pengxuan Xie, José M. Mogollón, Jan Willem Erisman, Valerio Barbarossa · Sustainable Cities and Society · Europe

This study models spatial and temporal crop rotations on Amsterdam's rooftops using planting-structure optimization for crop rotation planning, to assess how much of the city's dietary demand for specific crop groups could be met by productive green roofs. Using average productive green roof crop yields and climatic variability from 2003-2021, it estimates Amsterdam's potential productive green roofs could achieve urban food self-sufficiency of 52% for selected crops (41-54% accounting for climatic and spatial variability), rising to 71% (50-71%) when the planting structure is optimized. Lettuce-broccoli occupies the largest productive green roof area, at roughly 100 hectares, and six vegetable types were found to match well with Amsterdam's dietary requirements.

Ylva Wallinder · Local Environment · Europe

A study of Gothenburg, Sweden, examines the city council's shift over the past decade from associational (collective) urban gardening toward entrepreneurial gardening on municipal land, promoted through a scheme called "from garden box to hectare" that draws residents into entrepreneurial training while taking municipal gardening classes. Analyzing the consequences of this commodification of urban sustainability projects, the study finds that socio-economic resources and social relations both limit and strengthen entrepreneurial gardening practices and participants' quality of life, and that perceived competition among gardeners has turned urban gardening into a lonely, precarious, and individualized activity compared with the formalized associational gardening the municipality previously promoted. The finding points to a mismatch between the local government's sustainability visions and gardeners' actual experience.