Research & reports

Magdalena Dickson Mwimbe, Jonathan S. Mbwambo, Halima Omari Mangi · East African Journal of Agriculture and Biotechnology · Tanzania

This study assessed factors influencing household food security among 90 urban vegetable producers in Ilala Municipality, Dar es Salaam, using a cross-sectional design and structured questionnaires. Results showed 63.3% of households were food secure, with significant associations found between food security and land ownership, farming experience, and spinach production. Household size, market access, irrigation use, and farming experience were identified as significant predictors of food security.

Deborah Dutta, Miwa Aoki Takeuchi · Journal of Intercultural Studies · Global

This paper explores immigrant growers' sense of belonging at a community urban farm, moving beyond human-centered integration models. Using ethnographic and participatory methods, it highlights how growers' relationships with crops demonstrate agency and socio-ecological adaptations, arguing that belonging emerges through placemaking relationships with the land and the multispecies community.

Supriya Dadaso Dighe · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · New Zealand

This study provides an eco-critical analysis of Eleanor Catton’s novel "Birnam Wood," exploring the entanglement of environmental activism, capitalist expansion, and identity formation. While the novel depicts conflicts between activist collectivism and corporate techno-capitalism through guerrilla gardening and land commodification, the study argues that its allegorical structure and reliance on familiar ideological binaries may constrain its capacity to generate radically new ecological insight. The research ultimately raises questions about the limits of literary representation in envisioning transformative environmental futures.

Rana Sukarieh · · Global

This chapter examines two solidarity economy initiatives in Lebanon — Nohye El Ard, a community garden in Saida, South Lebanon, and Dekkan El Mazraa, an experimental solidarity grocery — as case studies of how communities responded to the country's overlapping political, economic and social crises, arguing that this polycrisis has generated new prefigurative initiatives that form communities of resistance.

Mohammed El-Hajj · Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems · Global

This conceptual paper proposes the Urban Agriculture Digital Twin (UA-DT), a four-layer cyber-physical framework combining IoT sensing, cloud infrastructure and hybrid mechanistic/AI models for real-time monitoring and city-scale food-system simulation, with logical feasibility demonstrated through an illustrative software simulation (Eclipse Ditto, Azure IoT, Python) for a community rooftop garden. The paper cites benchmark ranges — 20–40% water savings, 15–25% fertilizer reduction, up to 30% post-harvest loss reduction, and 3–7 day early-warning lead time — as literature-derived projections that a fully validated UA-DT deployment would be expected to approach, explicitly noting these are not empirical findings of this study.

Tomoki Fujii, Christoph Waibel, Xinyi Du, Zhongming Shi · CABI climate change series. · Global

A book chapter reviewing Singapore's changing urban agriculture landscape and recent progress toward its "30-by-30" goal of 30% food self-sufficiency by 2030, discussing land constraints, high production costs, and resource limitations. It examines building-integrated agriculture (BIA)—using rooftops, façades and balconies for food production—as a potential way to raise self-sufficiency through simulation, but concludes that practical issues including regulatory concerns and infrastructure limitations must be addressed before BIA can be implemented at scale.

Brenda B. Lin, Shalene Jha, Heidi Liere, Stacy M. Philpott · Frontiers in Sustainable Cities · Global

Drawing on a long-term, multidisciplinary research program conducted since 2013 on urban community gardens in the California Central Coast, this paper uses that program as a lens to explore how community gardens may function as a form of green infrastructure within increasingly compact urban development, while grounded in a specific regional context.

Rattan Lal · · Global

A book chapter addresses rising food and nutritional insecurity from rapid urbanization in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and elsewhere, noting that 55% of the world population currently lives in cities, projected to reach 70% by 2050. It states that as much as 10-20% of food consumed could be grown within city limits, but that careful planning is needed to reduce risks from soil contamination, plastic pollution, and reuse of grey/black water and city-waste compost. It identifies rooftop gardens, multistory glass buildings, and soil-less methods such as aquaculture, hydroponics and aeroponics as modern forms of urban agriculture, and discusses barriers including land tenure and research priorities for scaling up.

Daniel Etim Jacob, Imaobong Daniel Jacob, Koko Sunday Daniel, Pius Agaji Oko · Sustainable Food Connect · Global

A paper arguing that recreational planning in the Global South is constrained by Western models prioritizing ornamental aesthetics over local socio-ecological crises, producing metabolically inefficient and exclusionary landscapes, and proposing an "Agro-Blue Commons" (ABC) framework integrating food production, sustainable water management and communal leisure. The framework was tested through a qualitative meta-synthesis of four prototype cases in Lagos, Mumbai, Rajasthan and Nairobi, purposively sampled to represent diverse biomes and climate-vulnerable informal settlement types, evaluated with a Multi-Criteria Assessment focused on metabolic circularity, governance polycentricity and socio-spatial accessibility. Results show that integrating food, water and leisure together with polycentric stewardship increases urban resilience and reduces resource dependency, while the paper states that systemic change requires addressing institutional inertia and insecure land tenure to prevent speculative displacement of marginalized communities.

Patrick Sobotka · reposiTUm (TU Wien) · Austria

Set against growing urban populations, housing shortages, and ecological and social challenges, this TU Wien thesis is a design study exploring housing that supports urban agriculture through integrated vertical farming. Its aim was to develop a hybrid housing concept combining sustainable timber construction with vertical farming, using a modular timber structure intended to offer ecological benefits, short construction times, and the ability to add stories later without sealing new land. The project centers on compact apartments for young adults, students, and couples, drawing on literature review of sustainability, timber construction and vertical farming, plus analysis of selected reference projects, to produce a design concept. No quantitative evaluation results are reported.

Eduardo Antonio CastroNemocon · Institutional Repository of the National University Open and Distance UNAD (Universidad Nacional Abierta y a Distancia) · Colombia (Bogotá)

Focused on the UPZ 96 Lourdes area of the Santa Fe Tercera locality in Bogota, Colombia, this paper reports on an initiative that treats urban agriculture as a tool for building sustainable food systems. From an environmental standpoint, it advances a process of training and knowledge exchange using an agroecological approach in private spaces, generating self-supply and self-consumption of agricultural products and using household spaces to plant and harvest organic food free of fungicides that compromise food safety, aiming to prevent declines in quality of life and health problems for consumers. Drawing on a political ecology perspective, the initiative seeks policy directions and direct social action to improve the quality of food consumed in daily diets, prioritizing responsible environmental management and the practice and production of organic agricultural food in urban spaces — promoting healthy eating habits while culturally preserving knowledge exchange and ancestral planting, harvesting and consumption practices in a country whose historical character has been agricultural, and aiming to guarantee food sovereignty.

Kelly Johanna Molano Betin, Leo Danny Valencia Pinto · Ibero Ciencias - Revista Científica y Académica - ISSN 3072-7197 · Colombia

A mixed-methods, non-experimental descriptive study tested a school-based agroecology pedagogical strategy to strengthen food security at Institución Educativa Técnico General José Joaquín García, Sede 10 Peñolcitos, in Casabianca, Tolima, Colombia. Following a quantitative diagnostic questionnaire, a teaching sequence combining conceptual training, an agroecological school garden, and a healthy cooking workshop was implemented; students showed favorable preconceptions about agroecology, food security, and the garden but specific gaps in understanding its full scope beyond production, and the training activities narrowed those gaps.

Sasha Gillies-Lekakis, Heidi Zogbaum · International Journal of Cuban Studies · Cuba

Cuban historiography is typically divided into pre-1959 and post-1959 periods, but land-use practices show continuity across both. Two hundred years of export-oriented sugar planting left Cuba dependent on food imports, first from the United States and later the Soviet Union. After 1991, Cuba had to find ways to feed itself on land depleted by two centuries of monoculture. The introduction of permaculture — first developed in Australia and suited to urban agriculture — helped Cubans address some of these food supply problems, making Cuba a world leader in permaculture practice.

Nur Choiro Siregar · Acceleration · Malaysia

Using a qualitative literature review of 24 scientific journal articles, this study examines the role of urban farming in strengthening family food resilience in Malaysia by integrating Islamic values, guided by Islamic principles and prior empirical findings. It reports that incorporating Islamic values into urban farming — aligned with concepts such as khalifah fil ard (stewardship), ishlah (improvement), and tawazun (balance) — is associated with greater fresh food availability, reduced household expenses, and increased environmental awareness. It notes that limited urban land availability drives reliance on imported food, and that limited technical knowledge further constrains effective use of small household spaces for urban farming.

Dawan Arkini Challam · Asian Research Journal of Agriculture · Global

A low-cost vertical farming system was built from 90 mm PVC pipes arranged in a three-tier frame, using soil as the primary growing medium, to grow strawberries (Fragaria × ananassa) under a semi-controlled microclimate created by 50% shade netting during the vegetative stage. Shading reduced transpiration stress and improved moisture retention, promoting leaf development, and removing the shade at the onset of flowering increased floral initiation and the number of flowers per plant, attributed to improved light availability. This stage-specific light management raised leaf, flower and fruit counts and yield by combining features of open-field and protected cultivation, though the abstract does not report the number of plants tested or whether the trial was replicated.

Esther Reyna Molina, María Xóchitl Astudillo Miller, Yanik I. Maldonado-Astudillo, Ricardo Salazar · Discover Sustainability · Global

A systematic review using PRISMA 2020 methodology examined social innovation and sustainable entrepreneurship practices in the agri-food sector as responses to socio-environmental resilience challenges facing small-scale rural producers and local food systems. It characterized these practices, evaluated their impacts across sustainability dimensions, and identified success factors and barriers. Studies on social innovation predominated over those on sustainable entrepreneurship, with experiences distributed across Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. The initiatives analyzed included social agriculture, community gardens, inclusive agribusiness models, women's cooperatives and regenerative agroecological projects, with overall positive effects reported for social inclusion, community empowerment, market access, income diversification and improved environmental practices. Facilitating factors included cross-sector collaborative governance, local leadership and the capacity to combine heterogeneous resources; barriers included poorly adapted regulatory frameworks, dependency on external funding, and tensions between economic and socio-environmental objectives. The review concludes that hybrid practices combining social innovation and sustainable entrepreneurship contribute significantly to rural producers' socio-environmental resilience when embedded in favorable institutional environments and supported by public policy and legal frameworks.

Birhanu MW, Negussie ZT · The Scientific World Journal · エチオピア

A PRISMA-based review synthesising peer-reviewed articles published between 2015 and 2025 on the status, challenges and opportunities of home and urban vegetable gardening in Ethiopia. It frames urban and home-based gardening as a practical response to food insecurity, malnutrition and environmental degradation in rapidly urbanising areas where the search for better opportunities has driven rising unemployment and limited access to nutritious, affordable food. The barriers it identifies — limited access to land and clean water, gendered barriers to women, limited technical knowledge, inadequate extension services and weak institutional support — all hinder production and sustainability. It further notes that widespread irrigation with untreated wastewater poses significant health and environmental risks through heavy-metal contamination and soil-transmitted infectious disease. Opportunities such as using vacant urban lots, promoting vertical gardening and supporting local seed production remain untapped; government support for urban gardening has grown recently but its implementation remains inconsistent. The review also identifies a significant geographical gap within the existing literature.

Liz Ignowski, John Luis Lagdameo, Liel Gonzalez, Arma Bertuso, Pepijn Schreinemachers · Urban Agriculture & Regional Food Systems 11(1) · Philippines (Quezon City, Metro Manila)

A quantitative survey of 300 urban food producers in Quezon City, one of the 17 cities of Metro Manila, examining who practises urban agriculture, the methods and technologies used, the challenges met and the benefits gained. Production is mainly small-scale and subsistence-oriented, with commercialisation limited except among those with access to agricultural land. Self-produced food does increase access to fruit and vegetables, but participation reflects economic vulnerability rather than food sufficiency, and both scale and commercialisation depend strongly on land access — a structural barrier in dense cities. The authors conclude that urban agriculture in Quezon City acts as a safety net rather than an income source, while also providing enjoyment and stress relief, and that urban food-security policy should be realistic about the limited role of urban food production.

Paul Emile Tchinda, Thi-Thanh-Hiên Pham · Canadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes 70(3) · Cameroon (one large and one medium-sized city)

Urban agriculture appears in many sustainability agendas yet has been ignored in the public policies of many African countries. Combining multi-scale mapping (city and neighbourhood) with semi-structured interviews in one large and one medium-sized Cameroonian city, this study tests how well those techniques characterise urban agriculture for local decision-making. Mapping from 5-metre SPOT satellite imagery gives a general grasp of the spatial distribution of practices, but crop types, emerging entrepreneurial practices and the temporality of crops are invisible to it and surface only through field mapping and interviews. Echoing critical remote-sensing scholarship, the authors propose a methodological framework for profiling urban agriculture and argue that the choice of research method shapes our understanding of it, so it should be made with each city's specific characteristics in mind.

· Wikipedia (English) · Cuba

According to English Wikipedia, organoponicos emerged as urban farming in Cuba during the 'Special Period' after the 1989 Soviet collapse cut off chemical inputs, responding to a food crisis in which daily per-capita calorie intake fell from 2,900 in 1989 to 1,800 by 1995. As of 2009 over 35,000 hectares were in use in Havana alone, producing 280 grams of fruit and vegetables per resident per day, with the Havana workforce growing from 9,000 in 1999 to 23,000 in 2001 and over 44,000 by 2006.

· Wikipedia · Cuba

This Wikipedia article covers Cuba's 'Special Period' economic crisis following the Soviet Union's collapse. Oil imports fell to about 10% of pre-1990 levels, GDP shrank 35%, and imports and exports both fell over 80%. Agricultural production fell 47%, construction fell 75%, and manufacturing capacity fell 90%, driving the need for agricultural transformation.

· Wikipedia · Cuba

This Wikipedia article on Cuban agriculture states the Soviets provided 63% of Cuba's food imports and 90% of its petroleum before 1990; after the collapse, agricultural production fell 54% between 1989 and 1994. By 2002, 35,000 acres (140 km2) of urban gardens produced 3.4 million metric tons of food, 90% of Havana's fresh produce came from local urban farms, and by 2003 more than 200,000 Cubans worked in the expanding urban agriculture sector. More recently, cooperatives and family farmers manage about 69% of Cuba's agricultural land.

· Wikipedia · Cuba

This Wikipedia article on the Cuban economy states Cuban GDP declined at least 35% between 1989 and 1993 due to the Soviet collapse and loss of Eastern Bloc trade. Liberalized agricultural markets, letting state and private farms sell above-quota production at free-market prices, were introduced in October 1994. Reforms from 2011 onward expanded usufruct leasing of fallow state land to residents, with more than 150,000 farmers registered by 2012 leasing land from the government to grow surplus produce.

· Wikipedia (スペイン語) · Cuba

This Spanish-language Wikipedia article on Cuba's 'Special Period' states GDP contracted 36% between 1990 and 1993 following the Soviet collapse, and daily caloric intake fell from 2,845 kcal in 1989 to 1,863 kcal in 1994, below the recommended minimum of 2,100-2,300 kcal. Loss of access to Soviet oil drove a shift to permaculture and organic agriculture (the rise of organopónicos) with help from international technicians. Recovery began in 1994, with GDP reaching 1990 levels again by 2007.

Global Network of Lighthouse Farms (Wageningen University & Research) · Global Network of Lighthouse Farms (Wageningen University & Research) · Cuba

This profile of Organopónico Vivero Alamar from Wageningen University's Global Network of Lighthouse Farms describes a UBPC (Basic Unit of Cooperative Production) founded in 1997 by 5 cooperative members, starting as an 800 sqm manually irrigated tree nursery. It has since grown to 10.14 ha with 150 cooperative members, 42 of them women, including nurseries, a 0.45 ha greenhouse, a rustic lab for breeding entomopathogens, a mycorrhizal fungi propagation center, and small-scale fruit and vegetable processing facilities. The page notes the farm has had to close due to COVID-19-related economic hardship and wildfires.