Research & reports

Muhammad Asadullah, Shahbaz Nasir Khan, Hafiz M. Safdar, Rana Ammar Aslam, Imran Shaukat · Earth Sciences Pakistan · Global

A review paper on aquaponics, a closed-loop system combining hydroponics and aquaculture, framed as a sustainable-technology response to soil, air and water pollution, global warming, food shortages and droughts. It notes that many studies have focused on small-scale farming for education and indoor decoration rather than commercial urban-scale food production, and highlights how trickling biofilters and plant uptake of aquaculture wastewater improve water and nutrient use efficiency. The paper identifies the central sustainability challenge as balancing optimal organism growth and maximum production output against minimizing effluent discharge to the environment.

Lily Kiminami, Shinichi Furuzawa, Akira Kiminami · Studies in Regional Science · Global

This study examines the relationship between the multi-functionality of urban agriculture (MFUA) as a city amenity and creative classes (CCs) in Tokyo and Shanghai, two global cities in Asia. Drawing on existing research on creative classes, multi-functional agriculture, social capital and social business, the authors built a model and tested it using structural equation modeling (SEM) on an original questionnaire survey of residents in both cities. Alongside creative classes defined by traditional creative occupations, the study also examined creative classes based on creative thinking, their orientation toward multi-functional agriculture, and their relationship to social capital.

Suzanne Mallick, Philip Marsh, Dave Kendal · Figshare · Australia

This report presents the first phase of a research project examining how a community garden project at the Melville St student accommodation could benefit the health and wellbeing of students and the broader community, as part of the University of Tasmania's shift in focus from Sandy Bay to the Hobart CBD. Before the garden was installed, the team collected qualitative, quantitative and observational data through interviews, focus groups, observational studies of public space use and an online survey, intended to inform future management of the site; a second phase collecting post-installation data was planned for late 2020, subject to COVID-19 restrictions.

Leyna Karina Tovar-Seijas · Prohominum · Venezuela

A proposed action plan for using a school garden as a didactic strategy in agriculture education at Escuela Básica Bolivariana GC 8 "Piloncito" in Venezuela. A quantitative, non-experimental, descriptive field study surveyed a population of 14 teachers, with a sample of 5, using direct observation and a questionnaire. Only 60% of teachers reported sometimes using didactic strategies that encourage students to take responsibility for their own learning, while 40% did not use such strategies.

Camille T. Dungy · Ecotone · Global

An essay by poet Camille T. Dungy arguing that every politically engaged person should have a garden, recommending that those without access to land join or organize a community garden, or grow plants in containers in whatever space is available. The essay contends that a garden's constancy and the patience required for it to grow are key to sustaining political engagement, concluding that a garden is never wasted space.

Jessica Ann Diehl · Sustainability · Australia

Semi-structured interviews with 15 commercial urban farmers in Sydney, Australia, guided by questions based on the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework, examined how farmers access tangible and intangible resources through social networks within the urban food system. Three patterns emerged: urban-local, rural-local, and urban-global networks used in pursuit of sustainable livelihoods. The study concludes that land is only one driver, among many, of the sustainability of the local food system.

Lili Pâquet · Green Letters · Australia

A literary analysis examines Australian author Lili Wilkinson's 2015 young adult romance novel Green Valentine, in which two teenage protagonists rebel against their local council through guerrilla gardening. The article argues that this illegal activity functions as a political protest standing in for the protagonists' voices, silenced in public debate about the environmental future despite being too young to vote, and concludes that the novel's rhetoric of gardening underscores the importance of community and political action in stopping capitalist production of spaces that impair the environmental future.

Illana C. Livstrom, Gillian Roehrig, Amy Rex Smith · International Journal of Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement · Global

A single-case study examined Grounding Roots, an urban agricultural internship program that brings together youth interns, undergraduates and community elder mentors in intergenerational garden groups, asking how community-based education through internships can support youth marginalized in traditional educational settings. The program was found to support youth in multidimensional learning and identity development within community-based spaces that connect learning to their communities and lives, particularly for youth with marginalized identities, through elements including recognizing and leveraging youths' existing assets, building confidence, leadership identities and diverse relationships, and connecting participants with the broader community, underscoring the value of intergenerational mentoring, diverse learning communities and work-based learning.

Mabu Masiala Bode, Apollinaire Biloso Moyene, Charles Kinkela Savy · International journal of innovation and applied studies · Democratic Republic of Congo

A study examined the nature of production in peri-urban agricultural concessions in the commune of Mont-Ngafula, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, based on the concept of production systems and questionnaire surveys. The surveyed concessions carry out several types of plant and animal production, and fruit arboriculture is the most important crop type in terms of area occupied and visibility. Its development is linked to the capacity to rapidly develop land and occupy it long-term, the necessary and sufficient conditions for obtaining and keeping the long-term occupation contract, the only land title the Congolese state legally recognizes for agricultural concession users. The paper proposes an innovative fruit agroforestry approach based on participatory domestication of fruit trees with high nutritional and commercial value mixed with food crops and animal production, aimed at increasing food supply in Kinshasa's markets and professionalizing fruit arboriculture.

Blesilda M. Calub, Leila S. Africa, Bessie M. Burgos · · Global

A chapter on the School-Plus-Home Gardens Project (S+HGP) in the Philippines, which promotes greater parent engagement in home and school gardening to sustain nutritional gains under the Department of Education's nationwide School Garden Program and School-Based Feeding Program (SBFP). At the end of a 3-month feeding period, 62% of severely wasted and 70% of wasted child beneficiaries reached normal nutritional status; however, 9 of 14 surveyed schools had repeat beneficiaries from the previous year's SBFP (36–38%), and 14% had been repeat beneficiaries for three consecutive years, due to lack of food at home during the rest of the year, severe illness, and parents' attitudes and values. Factors contributing to successful parent engagement included regular parent-teacher consultations, a participatory development approach, training, parent-child cooking contests using garden produce, and collaboration with local government units.

Irmane Mze Ali, Mohd Wajdi Mohd Feham, Yahia Siddique, Abdul Rahman Ahmad Dahlan · · Malaysia

As part of Malaysia's "University-of-the-Future" (UotF) concept, this paper designs an approach to improving the wellbeing of low-income (B40) youth by normalizing an urban farming programme and expanding economic opportunity through digital entrepreneurship, using a literature review together with a Business Model Canvas (BMC), a Value Proposition Design Canvas (VPC), and surveys of participants for feedback. It reports using these tools to formulate both an initial and a validated version of the BMC and VPC.

João Flávio Bomfim Gomes, Renata da Silva Brant Gomes, Alex Oliveira de Souza · Horticultura Brasileira · Global

A review-style introduction on the multifunctionality of urban horticulture. It cites United Nations (2015) projections that 66.36% of the world population will be urban by 2050, up from 53.60% in 2014, and an FAO 2015 report estimating about 795 million people worldwide facing food insecurity. It states that FAO (2015) puts global urban agriculture practice at 800 million people, and frames the practice as multifunctional - supplying food, supporting biodiversity, improving land and water use, and raising income and quality of life for urban farmers - without presenting original empirical data.

Kim Viborg Andersen, Jakob Ohme, Camilla Bjarnøe, Mats Joe Bordacconi, Erik Albæk, Claes H. de Vreese · · Global

This book chapter examines how participation in local communities varies by generation, finding that local community participation is highest among older generations and lowest among the youngest. Political news exposure has a positive effect on this type of participation, particularly among Baby Boomers, mediated through political interest and efficacy. Citizens engage with their local communities in various ways, including through local organizations such as an urban gardening community or by attending local meetings. Using the authors' Engagement-Participation-Information-Generation (EPIG) model, the chapter tests whether the positive effect of political news exposure on local community political participation is mediated through three dimensions of political engagement — interest, knowledge and efficacy — and concludes that the EPIG model is useful for understanding local political participation.

Laine Young, Alison Blay‐Palmer · · Global

The abstract provided for this record consists only of a repetition of the title, indicating the piece addresses urban agriculture and local communities in relation to encouraging engagement, building cohesion, and linking to global agreements, but no further content is given.

Louis Amprako, Kathrin Stenchly, Martin Wiehle, George Nyarko, Andreas Buerkert · Insects · Ghana

In 36 fields around Tamale in Ghana's Northern Region, researchers used 72-hour pitfall and pan trap sampling to examine how different irrigation water sources shaped arthropod communities in urban and peri-urban agricultural systems. Among 14,226 specimens spanning 13 orders, 103 families, 264 genera, and 329 taxa, analyzed with non-metric multidimensional scaling and redundancy analysis, arthropods grouped by irrigation source, with dipterans -- notably the disease-vector eye gnat Hippelates pusio -- dominant under wastewater irrigation, three alien ant species indicating community shifts from invasive species, and seven ant species forming mutualistic relationships with aphids flagging a future risk of aphid pest outbreaks.

Marcela Patricia Galindo Toloza, Brandon Steven García Rodríguez · · Colombia (Bogotá)

This project proposal addresses the San Germán neighborhood in Bogotá, Colombia — located between the Usme and San Cristóbal localities on the upper slopes of the Entre Nubes ecological district park in the city's southeast, an area designated as protected land since 2000 under the city's land-use plan (POT). The Integral Improvement Plan (PMI) aims to provide an architectural, urban, and environmental solution to the neighborhood's problems by structuring an alternative for recovering the existing urban fabric in relation to the informal settlement that developed there over time, through rehabilitation and landscape regeneration. The PMI is designed to minimize the physical, environmental, and legal impacts caused by informal occupation, which has degraded residents' quality of life and disarticulated the neighborhood's urban structure from the wider city. It implements an "Ecobarrio" (eco-neighborhood) strategy incorporating design for different modes of mobility, prioritizing bike paths and pedestrian trails, applying integral-improvement treatment to existing construction where possible, recovering disused areas, and designating a zone for urban agriculture — elements intended to work together to regenerate the sustainability and livability of the San Germán community.

Joanne Dolley · Geographical Research · Global

This study argues that community gardens can function as "third places" that facilitate informal interactions among neighborhood residents. When community gardens serve as third places alongside their placemaking features, they help connect new residents to a place, easing challenges associated with population mobility, such as social isolation.

Francesca Grazioli, Muhabbat Turdieva, Chris J. Kettle · · Global

A book chapter (2020) discusses how school gardens can engage children in documenting the diversity of socioeconomically important tree species around their school and community, and highlights the role schools can play in ex situ conservation of tree genetic resources through school arboreta, seed orchards, and nurseries. It presents case studies and a proposed framework for incorporating this into school curricula, without reporting quantitative outcomes.

A Shumba, N Dunjana, B. Nyamasoka, P. Nyamugafata, Simon Madyiwa, J. Nyamangara · South African Journal of Plant and Soil · Zimbabwe

In Harare, Zimbabwe, an experiment on sandy and red clay soils tested combinations of cattle manure plus mineral nitrogen fertilizer, 0 or 5 t/ha of mulch, and reduced (RT) or conventional (CT) tillage, assessing effects on soil organic carbon (SOC), aggregate stability, bulk density, steady-state infiltration rate (SSIR) and maize yield over two cropping seasons. Reduced tillage improved SOC and aggregate stability by at least 6% over conventional tillage in the 0-5 cm depth (p < 0.01); cattle manure plus mineral fertilizer increased SOC and aggregate stability by at least 13% and SSIR by at least 17% over mineral fertilizer alone, while mulching improved SSIR by at least 8% and reduced tillage improved it by 27% in both soils. Maize yields increased significantly under mineral fertilizer in both soils (at least 3.7-fold, p < 0.05), and principal component analysis showed yield could be predicted from bulk density in sandy soil and from aggregate stability and SSIR in red clay soil.

Lexi Earl, Pat Thomson · · Global

This chapter explores historical aspects of the current school-gardening movement, showing how gardens were taken up in educational theory by Comenius, Rousseau, Froebel, Pestalozzi, and Montessori, and examining how ideas for children's gardening developed in the late 19th century and how children were viewed as beings to be "cultivated." It discusses how the garden emerged as a further space where children could be civilised -- moulded and shaped into particular kinds of beings -- and analyzes early US school gardens of the 20th century. It analyzes texts produced about and for "children's gardening," focusing on how garden writers sought to encourage gardening and an interest in the natural world.

Lexi Earl, Pat Thomson · · Global

A book chapter examining the discourses encountered in school gardens and how the framing of gardening as "the solution" is entangled in different discursive assemblages. It also attends to the silences of gardening "talk"—what is left out of current conversations about children's gardening—asking what is excluded from a school garden, what goes unsaid in garden spaces, and how this shapes (or fails to shape) a school's identity and its relationships with outsiders and parents. The chapter is a conceptual discussion and does not present empirical findings or data.

K. Michelle Glowa, Antonio Roman-Alcalá · · Global

A chapter examining the politics that shape land-access strategies and dynamics in urban agriculture (UA) through five heuristic categories—Civic, Ecological, Heritage-based, Justice-driven, and Market-oriented. These categories are used to trace how different lineages of urban agroecology intersect to produce existing UA land politics, agroecological dynamics, and their interrelations. The chapter surveys various UA projects and instances, tracing their histories of land access, land politics, and agroecology across different lineages of practice. It notes that while Civic UA tends to comply with land-use normalization, all garden projects retain the potential to destabilize the meaning of land and its agricultural use, and that the Civic field is hegemonic in land politics but not exclusively so. Justice-driven projects, the chapter finds, often arise from long-term patterns of marginalization in urban contexts and operate on principles grounded in participants' lived experiences and analyses of injustice.

Tudor Traian Bojan, Oana Pusco · · Global

A comparative article examines two approaches to urban agriculture: Havana, Cuba, and New York City. In Havana, the article describes urban agriculture as implemented out of necessity, with the state creating the institutional premises for it and a high degree of population mobilization treated as essential for food security. In New York, implementation is described as occurring over a longer period with resident and community involvement and local-authority support, with areas of potential for urban agriculture identified across neighborhoods. The article characterizes both cases as successful implementations that have become a permanent or temporary layer of each city's cultural and green fabric.

Cepic S., Tomicevic-Dubljevic J., Zivojinovic I. · Urban Forestry & Urban Greening · セルビア・ベオグラード

A study of the demand for collective urban gardens in Belgrade, a city with little allotment tradition, and of what prospective gardeners want. It reports that existing garden members are mostly aged 30–50, employed and highly educated, and that health and socialisation are the main motivations, while economic factors are not raised as relevant.

Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment, Singapore · Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment, Singapore · Singapore

In a written reply to a 4 November 2020 parliamentary question, Minister Grace Fu stated that SFA and HDB awarded the first tender for nine multi-storey carpark rooftop sites in September 2020 to operators proposing high-productivity systems, projected to collectively produce up to 1,600 tonnes of vegetables annually. She noted local produce travels shorter distances and lasts longer, and cited community benefits such as employment and increased awareness of local produce.