Research & reports

Devin C O'Mara · Fordham Research Commons (Fordham University) · United States (New York City)

This 2019 paper examines the potential of urban agriculture to increase food security and education for underprivileged children in New York City, United States. Chapter 1 addresses the issue of food insecurity among children, considering information on the number of children lacking access to healthy, fresh food. Chapter 2 traces the history of urban agriculture in New York City, from one person's rooftop to a broader sustainability movement. Chapter 3 examines the potential outcomes of integrating urban agriculture into social justice efforts for underprivileged children, covering food security, education, and physical and mental health. Chapter 4 analyzes how incorporating urban agriculture into future sustainable infrastructure could benefit everyone, not only children. Drawing on the preceding chapters, Chapter 5 offers recommendations for creating greater access to urban agriculture for children.

Shawna Holmes · Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l alimentation · Canada

Interviews with school food environment staff across Canada examined how provincial nutrition regulation changes affected food procurement. While the regulations opened opportunities to improve nutrient content and involve local producers or school gardens, some schools struggled to procure nutritionally compliant food because of higher costs of transporting produce to rural, remote or northern communities and logistical problems such as spoilage. Regulations improved food environments in some schools, but others still require more support.

Giliarde Souza Brito, Hélder dos Anjos Augusto, Eduardo Magalhães Ribeiro · DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · Brazil

A qualitative study set out to identify agricultural practices in the urban area of Montes Claros, Minas Gerais, Brazil, and to analyze the flows of agricultural products, biodiversity and agricultural knowledge circulating in networks linking migrants' municipalities of origin to their destination. The results show a continuous dialogue with places of origin coupled with food cultivation in urban spaces.

Annelise Caetano Fraga Fernandez, Almir Cezar Baptista Filho · Cidades, comunidades e território/Cidades comunidades e territórios · Brazil

This article describes the obstacles to applying Brazil's family-farming public policy in urban settings. It shows that a set of representations associated with rural agriculture has shaped the classification criteria used by rural technical-assistance (ATER) staff, and that this in practice limits how the policy can be applied in urban areas. It states that the mobilization of social movements linked to urban agriculture, specifically in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, led to the construction of an initiative, but the available abstract breaks off at that point.

Zoë Plakias, Iryna Demko, Ani L. Katchova · Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems · United States

Using the 2015 Local Food Marketing Practices Survey, collected by the USDA in 2016, and binomial and multinomial logit regressions, this study examined which farm and farmer characteristics predict participation in direct marketing channels and the choice of particular channel combinations among US farmers. It found evidence of product-specific barriers to participation in certain channels: livestock producers were less likely than other farmers to sell directly to retailers, while vegetable farmers were less likely to sell to intermediaries. Beginning farmers were more likely than established farmers to sell directly to retailers but less likely to sell to intermediaries.

Antonella Samoggia, Chiara Perazzolo, Piroska Kocsis, Margherita Del Prete · Sustainability · United States

Drawing on data from 35 Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farmers based in the United States and Hungary, this study used one-way ANOVA, chi-square tests, principal component analysis, and multiple multivariate linear regressions to examine how farmers perceive the benefits and drawbacks of managing a CSA farm, and whether that perception differs across the two countries. US and Hungarian farmers held broadly similar positive perceptions of CSA management, particularly regarding food quality, nutritional value, environmental benefits, and community benefits, while the main differences between the two groups centered on economic, financial, and management perceptions. The study concludes that CSA success depends on the ability to involve members, that farmers' management skills need to develop to sustain communication and community-engagement practices, and that the central concern for CSA is ensuring farmers and labor receive fair income and a living wage, requiring a better balance between monetary and non-monetary benefits.

Cláudia Bomfá Caldas, Carina Almeida Souza, Grace Kelly Silva Jesus, Indira Taina Mata Silva, Karolina Vitoria Santos, Stefany Lima, Viviane de Oliveira Batista Souza · · Brazil

A study using bibliographic and documentary research examined the community garden program "New Paths and Knowledge," run through a partnership between the municipality of Diadema, Brazil, and Universidade Metodista as part of the Rondon Project (Projeto Rondon), assessing it against the principles of corporate governance, sustainability and social responsibility. The aim was to determine whether the school- and university-based garden program met these principles and how it built partnerships between government and educational institutions.

Nazli Uludere Aragon, Michelle Stuhlmacher, Jordan P. Smith, Nicholas Clinton, Matei Georgescu · Environmental Research Letters · United States (Phoenix)

This city-scale study analyzed how urban agriculture (UA) could contribute to Phoenix's 2050 Sustainability Goals, eliminating food deserts, providing green open space, and reducing building energy use and CO2 emissions, for the fifth-largest US city by population. Examining three UA deployment surfaces (undeveloped vacant lots, flat rooftops, building facades), it found existing building stock provides 71% of available UA space in the study area; estimated total UA food supply is 183,000 tons per year, enough to provide local produce in all existing Phoenix food deserts and meet 90% of current annual fresh-produce consumption based on national per-capita patterns. UA would also add green open space, reducing by 60% the number of block groups underserved by public parks, and rooftop UA deployment could reduce building energy use and potentially displace more than 50,000 tons of CO2 per year.

Jillian Mickens · Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) · United States

A planning proposal for building a local food system in North Central North Carolina, United States, to increase food self-reliance. It notes there is no single accepted definition of "local food": the 2008 US Food, Conservation, and Energy Act treats products transported less than 400 miles from origin as locally or regionally produced, the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle defines local as traveling less than 100 miles, Whole Foods defines it as within 7 hours' drive of a store, and Walmart defines it as grown and sold within the same state. It reports that US direct-to-consumer local food sales reached $1.2 billion in 2007, the number of farmers' markets grew from 1,755 in 1994 to 5,274 in 2009, community-supported agriculture (CSA) organizations grew from 2 in 1986 to 1,144 in 2005, and farm-to-school programs grew from 2 in 1996 to more than 2,095 in 2009.

Giliarde de Souza Brito, Hélder Dos Anjos Augusto, A Ribeiro · LA Referencia (Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas) · Brazil

This qualitative study focused on agricultural practices in the urban area of Montes Claros, Minas Gerais, Brazil, with the main objective of identifying the flow of agricultural products, agricultural biodiversity, and knowledge circulating through networks linking migrants' municipalities of origin to their destination. Results are presented through ongoing dialogue with local sources, connected to the practice of growing food within city spaces.

Micajah Daniels, Courtney Coughenour · Digital Scholarship - UNLV (University of Nevada Reno) · United States

This project uses Black Feminist Health Studies as an interdisciplinary approach to analyze the holistic impacts of community gardens on nutrition behaviors. It demonstrates, through a Socio-Ecological Wellness Wheel, that the implementation of green spaces such as community gardens correlates with both benefits and unintended negative consequences, including green gentrification, and proposes this audit tool as a way to empirically measure garden quality and the nutrition environment affecting fruit and vegetable consumption among food-insecure populations.

Francisco Magalhães Araújo dos Santos, Eduardo Borges Chaves, Geane Andrade Carreiro, Marília S. Lima, Ewerton Gasparetto Silva, Cristovam Alves de Lima · · Brazil

This report describes a university extension activity at the community garden run by the Pastoral da Crianca (Children's Pastoral) in Uruçuí, Piauí state, Brazil — an organization active in the municipality for over 20 years, assisting more than 200 vulnerable children, with its garden managed by 14 members. Lacking a rational irrigation system and relying only on manual watering cans, the garden required heavy labor and imprecise water application and had not reached its maximum productive potential. After community sensitization and a topographic survey to size the system, a localized microsprinkler irrigation system was installed, with the executing team maintaining the garden through bed cleaning, weeding and irrigation management. Following installation, evaluation by the members managing the garden found reduced physical labor, decreased production losses during dry periods, and higher product quality that translated into increased earnings channeled back to those assisted by the Pastoral da Crianca, along with greater environmental awareness through more efficient water use.

Heather McIlvaine-Newsad, Rob Porter · Journal of Park and Recreation Administration · United States

This study describes how the creation of community gardens in four distinct communities in Puerto Rico led to a wide variety of socially just benefits, including recreation and food production, for participants. Ethnographic research conducted in Puerto Rico from 2016 to 2019 examined the role of community gardens before and after Hurricane Maria. The authors conclude that while these gardens may have been established for one purpose, that purpose evolved over time to meet the multiple needs and desires of participants. The main reason for creating the gardens was a desire to grow vegetables in a manner emulating the practices of Taino and Jibaro ancestors, with replicating a sustainable, environmentally friendly way of farming serving both as a statement about wanting to live in harmony with the land and a political statement about Puerto Rico's status in relation to the United States. Participants learned agroecology practices while creating spaces for leisure and social activities, and over time other forms of environmental and cultural education were incorporated; gardening together, people engaged in causes such as building renewable energy, strengthening intergenerational social bonds, and environmental and social activism. The bonds formed in these spaces prior to the hurricane produced knowledge, labor and infrastructure that helped these communities navigate the effects of Hurricane Maria.

Angel Chen, David Natcher · Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l alimentation · Canada

An inventory and mapping exercise catalogued community gardens and greenhouses across northern Canada, covering Labrador, Nunavik, Nunavut, Yukon and the Northwest Territories. The work forms part of a circumpolar research project supported by the Arctic Council's Sustainable Development Working Group and is described as an initial stage toward determining the extent to which these gardens and greenhouses, as local food procurement strategies, meet the food needs of northern residents.

Emma Puryear · DigitalCommons - CalPoly (California State Polytechnic University) · United States

This design thesis proposes Emma Puryear's "Museum of the Natural World," a project located between the East and West Villages intended to reconnect residents with the natural world both aesthetically and in content, functioning as a community cultural center that promotes environmentalism and revitalizes Paradise Park through an outdoor eco-exhibit and community garden. It is a design proposal rather than a report of built outcomes or measured data.

Adriana Rodrigues Moreira, Rodrigues, Ana Beatriz Nizer, Poiani, Jaqueline Oliveira, Santos, Luciana Beatriz dos, França, Maria Gabriela de Lima · LA Referencia (Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas) · Brazil

This case study documents the introduction of a school garden at a municipal early childhood education center (CMEI) in São José dos Pinhais, Brazil, tracing the process from soil preparation and fertilizing, through measuring planting beds and selecting crops, to harvest by students and teachers. Data came from field research, literature review, interviews, photographic records, and site visits. The main result was construction of the garden, from site maintenance to seedling planting, carried out by staff with student help. The study concludes the garden raised environmental awareness and supplemented meals at the institution, but this is a descriptive case report without a comparison group or quantitative outcome measures.

Laura Beth Kelly, Virginia Ángeles-Wann, John Wann-Ángeles, Margarita Jimenez‐Silva · NABE Journal of Research and Practice · United States

This article describes an out-of-school STEA2M (science, technology, engineering, arts, agriculture, and math) program at the Orchard Community Learning Center, an urban farm in south Phoenix, Arizona. Run as a bilingual, project-based program, it draws on the community cultural wealth framework (aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistant capital) to integrate students' and families' backgrounds into the curriculum through culturally sustaining pedagogy. The article presents the urban-farm setting as a context for hands-on STEA2M learning tailored to student interests, but reports no quantitative measurement of learning outcomes.

トシオ キクチ, Toshio Kikuchi, 俊夫 菊地 · Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · Canada

Focusing on community gardens in Metro Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, particularly in the city of Richmond, this study (2019) sought to clarify how urban agriculture's development is accompanied by the "commodification of rural space." It finds that Metro Vancouver's urban agriculture differs from suburban agriculture in that community gardens prioritize maintaining green and leisure space within the urban environment over agricultural production for food supply. The study concludes that community gardens function as a node connecting "urbanity" and "rurality," existing in the metropolitan periphery through a commodification of rural character for urban leisure use — that is, their role as green/leisure space for urban residents takes precedence over their function as actual food production.

Micheline Nilsen · Journal of the American Planning Association · United States (New York City)

This entry is a bibliographic citation for a review of the work "Participatory Design and Self-Building in Shared Urban Open Spaces: Community Gardens and Casitas in New York City," published in the Journal of the American Planning Association, vol. 85, no. 4, pp. 592–593. No further content of the review is given in the available record.

Blakely Brown, Laura Dybdal, Curtis W. Noonan, Maja Pedersen, Martin Parker, Mary Corcoran · Health Promotion Practice · United States

On an American Indian reservation, a community-based participatory research approach applying a social-ecological model identified the factors that promote or hinder community gardens and the use of locally grown food, and tested the feasibility of a group gardening program for Native American adults. Interviews with nine key stakeholders identified knowledge/experience, self-efficacy, Elders, traditional ways, community values, generational gaps and local tribal policy as influencing factors. In a feasibility study with 20 Native American adults with prediabetes or diabetes, Profile of Mood States scores showed consistently more positive change among group gardening participants than among a comparison group.

Mary Anne Martin · Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l alimentation · Canada

This article revisits a case study of Durham Integrated Growers (DIG), an umbrella organization supporting urban agriculture in Durham Region, Ontario, Canada, through feminist theoretical framings of knowledge, work, power, care, and community. It states that community-based food initiatives, which strive to provide alternatives to dominant food production practices, are often constrained by limited access to financial, labour, time, and political resources, and notes that the feminization of urban agriculture initiatives in Canada -- despite parallels to what has traditionally been dubbed "women's work" -- has received little attention in the academic literature. Prior research on DIG revealed themes involving the need for community expertise to be recognized, the role of public policy, the effects of relying on unpaid labour, and the centrality of building community.

Camila Bevilaqua · Revista do Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro · Brazil

A study focused on the experiences and trajectories of three people from different indigenous groups living in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in a building from the "Minha Casa, Minha Vida" public housing program known as the "Vertical Village." Based on fieldwork begun in 2016, the research centers on a community garden the interlocutors created in partnership with the Rio de Janeiro City Hall in a set of favelas in the city center; the garden emerges as a space of resistance and a form of political action toward the city and its inhabitants. Drawing on the work of Gow, Battaglia, and Strathern, the paper outlines relations to planting found in other indigenous contexts, arguing that the act of planting forms a mesh of relations connecting family and cultural knowledges, bound up with the formation of bodies through food and particular ways of inhabiting space.

Josiane Santos da Silva, Marta Cristina Marjotta-Maistro · Nucleus · Brazil

Using a case-study approach with secondary data from official sources (including IBGE) and scientific literature, this study built a socioeconomic diagnosis of Marituba, a municipality in Pará state, Brazil, to inform public policy for urban and peri-urban agriculture (AUP). Findings show precarious infrastructure development relative to Belém, particularly in security and basic sanitation, but relatively better education and health indicators, contributing to a medium Municipal Human Development Index among Brazilian municipalities; agriculture in Marituba is diversified and mainly vegetable production, characterized as family-run and urban/peri-urban, conducted near the urban center.

Nancy Hoalst‐Pullen · Southeastern geographer · United States

This is a review of "The Community Food Forest Handbook: How to Plan, Organize and Nurture Edible Gathering Places," edited by Catherine Bukowski and John Munsell (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018, 242 pp.). The book, based on observations, interviews and meetings from around twenty community food forest projects, is described as a scholarly guide explaining the social factors affecting the planning, installation and maintenance of community-scale food forests. The review notes the book's framework of "ingredients" — including function (purpose) and elements — for defining what does and does not constitute a community food forest.

Heidi Liere, Monika Egerer, Stacy M. Philpott · Journal of Urban Ecology · United States (California)

Ladybird beetles (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae) were collected from 19 community gardens across three counties of the California Central Coast during June to September of 2014 and 2015. Of the 19 species collected, only three were non-native to California (three specimens could not be identified to species). Similarity in species composition between gardens was not related to geographic distance, indicating no dispersal limitation among these mobile beetles. Instead, three landscape-level and seven garden-scale variables correlated with changes in community composition, and garden management practices such as ground cover altered the taxonomic and functional makeup of the ladybird beetle community.