Research & reports

Hannah Hemmelgarn, John F. Munsell · Urban Agriculture & Regional Food Systems · Global

This exploratory synthesis examines functions beyond food production that urban agroforestry systems — urban forest gardens (UFGs) — can serve, focusing on their capacity to include diverse, biologically important, and culturally relevant non-timber forest species with medicinal properties, decorative and landscaping uses, and craft raw materials. Reviewing literature on the social and ecological aspects of designing "beyond-food" specialty crops in UFGs, the study identifies a need for collaborative, participatory, and culturally relevant decision-making that addresses access inequities, potential contamination from urban pollutants, and continued gaps in education and awareness of UFG multifunctionality. It argues these spaces can serve as a biological and cultural repository for otherwise overlooked species, but notes that case studies showing contextual implementation details are still needed to establish specific cultural and health-sovereignty benefits.

Carolina Baldini, Mariana Edith Marasas, Andrea Alejandra Drozd · Journal of Environmental Planning and Management · Colombia

A land-cover change study (Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 2021) applied a supervised classification of Landsat satellite imagery from 1986, 1996, 2005, and 2015 to Argentina's largest peri-urban horticultural region in South America. Between 1986 and 2015, open-field horticulture extent decreased by 51.47%, while greenhouse area increased by 2652.83%, high-density urbanization expanded by 111.58%, and low-density urbanization increased only between 1986 and 2005—expansion that came at the expense of natural grassland, herbaceous parks, and livestock land. The authors conclude this reflects a regional process of urban growth and productive intensification that has caused losses of open-field horticultural areas and produced a non-equitable distribution of remaining semi-natural areas, and they call for territorial planning that prioritizes ecologically resilient, semi-natural land cover.

David M. Lapola, Belen Paez, Sandra Costa, Roberto Donato da Silva Júnior, Daniela M. Peluso, Paulo Moutinho, Maíra C. G. Padgurschi, Denilson Baniwa, Sônia Bridi, Nadino Calapucha, Zienhe Castro, Fander Falconí, James Junior, Mapulu Kamayurá, Eduardo Kohn, Anderson Mattos, Pedro Meloni Nassar, Laurent Troost, Manari Ushigua, Robert B. Wallace, Marko Zangas · UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) eBooks · Global

This book chapter offers a brief, non-authoritative overview of the physical and cultural relations between rural (forest) and urban areas across the Amazon region. It identifies improvement points including economic incentives to draw healthcare professionals to rural areas, peri-urban agricultural belts to strengthen urban food security, expanded access to urban green space, and investment in a "smart cities, smart forests" concept, and states that mobilising human, financial and institutional resources to restore cultural, spiritual and affective bonds between urban and forest inhabitants is perhaps most important.

Nora Gavare · Landscape architecture and art · Europe

In Sigulda, Latvia, the community garden "AUDZ," open to everyone, was created as a local, small-scale response to 21st-century problems including the depletion of natural resources, air pollution, rising industrial production, waste and an aging society. Designer Nora Gavare took part in an ERASMUS+ international training mobility visit on "Development of urban environment" in Hong Kong, where she gained insight into overpopulation, rapid urban growth at the expense of natural habitat, and rising food product demand. Photo mapping of Sigulda's public environment across different periods led to the conclusion that, given the town's rapidly growing population, fostering a sense of community and education processes is needed because opportunities for interaction among different social groups are lacking.

Erin Anzalone · Digital Commons - USU (Utah State University) · United States

This paper outlines plans for a subsidized Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program at Sugar Grove Farm, part of the Indian Creek Nature Center (ICNC) in Linn County, Iowa, using agroecology and restorative agriculture to grow food crops and make affordable produce available to low-income households, describing the intended logistics and reasoning for the program, which the paper states was set to launch in 2018. It does not report outcomes.

Johan Colding, Stephan Barthel, Robert Ljung, Felix Eriksson, Stefan Sjöberg · Social Inclusion · Global

A conceptual paper drawing on the authors' prior research on urban commons to examine their role in climate-proofing activities. It distinguishes three types of environmentally oriented urban commons: "urban green commons" such as allotment and community gardens, which the authors say contribute to environmental learning that supports climate-change mitigation and adaptation; "coworking spaces," framed as reducing commuting and domestic transportation through a sharing economy; and "community climate commons," where local communities pool resources to create shared low-carbon assets. The paper closes by identifying determinants for scaling up such commons, without presenting original empirical data.

Pedada Sindhusha · Journal of Food & Nutritional Disorders · India

As India's urban population grows, demand for food and food expenditure are rising while farmland is being converted to residential, commercial or industrial use. The paper argues that rooftop vegetable farming is a feasible option to address these pressures and the contamination risks of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, by shortening food transport distances, raising food-production awareness, and supporting nutrition, health and economic status. It states that rooftop vegetable farming can supply quality, hygienic vegetables, lower household vegetable spending, improve air quality and absorb carbon, and reduce climate change effects. No data or survey results are presented.

Deisy Carolina Benavides Agudelo, Gustavo Adolfo Mojica Peñaloza · P P D Q Boletín · Colombia

This paper reports a pedagogical practice conducted with 11th-grade students at the Escuela Normal Superior Distrital María Montessori (ENSDMM) in Colombia, from the second half of 2019 to the first half of 2020, as part of Practice I and II of the chemistry degree program at Universidad Pedagógica Nacional. Conducted in a virtual learning context, the practice examined how students understood the process of seeding, harvesting and the chemical composition of the food they consume, framed through organic chemistry functional groups, urban agriculture and food sovereignty. The paper sets out the objectives, theoretical framework, problem statement and methodology, then presents an analysis of the resulting products and conclusions on the scope and limitations of the pedagogical practice's objective, without reporting specific figures or effect sizes.

Ferne Edwards, R Gerritsen, G Wesser · · Global

This chapter examines how food practices enter, move through, settle into, disrupt, and redesign cities—as community gardens and foraging sites, health food stores and farmers' markets, freegan and vegan forms of protest and dietary reform, shared tables, and food trucks and new forms of food delivery—arguing that people's engagement with food shapes the form and feel of the city through tactile, affective, and embodied relationships between people, place, and products. It reviews the "sensory turn" in the social sciences and research methodologies that go beyond the written word, and closes with a summary of the edited volume's sections addressing migration, memory, home, inclusion, politics, and care.

Carolina Neto Henriques, Teresa Costa Pinto, Pedro Costa, Teresa Marat-Mendes · Portuguese National Funding Agency for Science, Research and Technology (RCAAP Project by FCT) · Europe

A study of initiatives transforming the food system at both municipal and civil-society level in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA), Portugal, aimed to characterize these initiatives, examine how they are proposing new food planning agendas, and draw lessons for future planning policy. Its method compared a scenario from a 2014 questionnaire of planning officials with the discourses of 80 public- and civil-society-sector initiatives surveyed in 2019, using an analytical framework grounded in the FAO and RUAF (Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security) recommendations.

Singapore Food Agency · Singapore Food Agency (SFA) · Singapore

The SFA's CEO explains Singapore's food security strategy despite importing over 90% of food from about 170 countries and having only 1% of land for farming. Under the "30 by 30" goal, funds such as the Agriculture Productivity Fund, research grants, and the 30x30 Express Grant support farm technology upgrades, with nine urban farm sites on multi-storey carpark rooftops projected to produce about 1,600 tonnes of vegetables annually.

Beatriz Salazar · CEPES (Centro Peruano de Estudios Sociales) · Peru

A CEPES article describing biohuertos run by communal kitchens (ollas comunes) in metropolitan Lima, a practice underway for roughly a decade under the legal framework of Ordinance 1629 (enacted 2012). It cites implementation across 12 districts without giving specific garden or participant counts, and concludes that such urban agriculture initiatives should be incorporated into Local Climate Change Plans and funded under regulations for the country's food emergency law.

Martin Daniel Florez Camelo · Observatorio Ambiental de Bogotá · Colombia

The Bogotá Environmental Observatory reported on 4 October 2021 on "Bogotá es mi huerta," a digital co-creation platform jointly launched by the Bogotá Botanical Garden (JBB) and the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI). The article states the city has more than 20,000 urban farmers and over 4,000 gardens, with surplus-producing gardens generating about 1,778 kilograms of vegetables, herbs and fruit per month. Since 2004, the Botanical Garden's urban agriculture program has cumulatively trained 71,286 people, provided technical assistance to 55,426 gardeners, and supported 25,022 gardens.

Manuela Alves da Cunha, Lidice Almeida Arlego Paraguassú, José Geraldo de Aquino Assis, Arthur Benjamin de Paula Carvalho Silva, Ryzia de Cassia Vieira Cardoso · Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine · Brazil (Salvador)

A city-wide mapping of active food gardens in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, followed by site visits and interviews with gardeners. Only 18 active food gardens could be located in the whole municipality; 17 took part (8 communal, 9 private). Gardeners averaged 55.76 years old and were 52.9% male overall, but women made up 87.5% of communal-garden gardeners and had higher education levels. For 52.9% of respondents the garden was their main source of income; 82.4% ate the produce, 70.6% also sold it and 47.1% donated. Fifty-nine neglected and underutilized species (NUS) were recorded, with 76.5% of respondents reporting they eat 19 of them. The gardens supply affordable food and food diversity without government support — but the very small absolute number of active gardens in a city of this size is equally part of the finding.

Giuseppe Pulighe, Flavio Lupia · Sustainability · Global

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the fragility of large cities to global risks and the importance of food availability. Border closures and movement restrictions increased food losses and export costs, particularly for perishable goods. This paper suggests fostering urban agriculture in developed countries with practices like vertical farming, hydroponics, and rooftop greenhouses to mitigate uncertainties from global systemic risks.

Muhammad Mumtaz Khan, Muhammad Tahir Akram, Rhonda Janke, Rashad Qadri, Abdullah M. Al‐Sadi, Aitazaz A. Farooque · Sustainability · Global

This study reviews contemporary urban horticulture, illustrating traditional and innovative developments, as a response to global concerns about food supply and environmental protection in urban settings, exacerbated by factors like population growth and the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights how current urban cropping systems can be enhanced with modern techniques like vertical gardening and hydroponics. These methods are presented as eco-friendly, energy-saving, and capable of ensuring consistent fresh food supplies and more sustainable agriculture.

Panagiota Kotsila, Isabelle Anguelovski, Francesc Baró, Johannes Langemeyer, Filka Sekulova, James J. Connolly · Environment and Planning E Nature and Space · Spain (Barcelona)

This paper analyzes nature-based solutions (NBS) as discursive tools that create an inviting space for nature's neoliberalization processes, examining two city-initiated projects in Barcelona, Spain: the Passeig de Sant Joan green corridor and the Espai Germanetes community garden. The study found that urban nature can serve elite economic players at the expense of widespread socio-ecological benefits. It also noted that outcomes regarding neoliberalism and its contestation were very distinct between the two projects due to different forms of governance.

Nur Huzeima Mohd Hussain, Nur Hayati Hashim, Asmat Ismail · Malaysian Journal of Sustainable Environment · Global

This paper conceptually reviews the ideas, issues, and imperatives of implementing urban farming on rooftops, investigating an alternative for urban dwellers to achieve resilience. It uses comparative analysis of established texts and secondary data from cases in Singapore, Japan, USA, and Thailand. The study aims to localize the concept of rooftop urban farming and establish a conceptual discourse for its implementation in Malaysia.

Carola Grebitus, Lauren Chenarides, Rebecca Logsdon Muenich, Alex Mahalov · Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems · United States

This research investigates consumers' perception and acceptance of urban agriculture through a qualitative, exploratory field study with 19 residents from a major metropolitan area in the southwest U.S. The concept mapping procedure was used, and data were analyzed using content and semantic network analysis. Consumers' perceptions of urban farming related to environment, society, economy, and food attributes. The study found a much higher number of positive associations than negative, signaling that consumers would likely accept farming in close proximity, though individual perceptions varied greatly.

Julia Davies, Corrie Hannah, Zack Guido, Andrew Zimmer, Laura E. McCann, Jane Battersby, Tom Evans · Food Policy · Sub-Saharan Africa

This study investigated the association between urban agriculture (UA) and household food security in smaller African cities and towns, using survey data from 2,687 low- and low-middle income households in 18 urban areas with populations of less than 200,000 across Zambia and Kenya. The analysis found that 33% of households in the sample engaged in UA, but there was limited statistical significance in the relationship between UA and household food security. Key barriers identified were settlement formality, property rights, and distance from food retailers.

Phoebe Lickwar, Roxi Thoren · · Denmark

The Nærum Allotment Gardens in Denmark are publicly owned and privately leased and managed. A national Allotment Garden Association provides gardeners with a forum to counter the inherent vulnerability of these allotments to land use change. This structure indicates a persistent vulnerability of the gardens to changes in land use.

Karto Wijaya, Asep Yudi Permana, Syarip Hidayat, Heru Wibowo · Jurnal Arsitektur ARCADE · Indonesia (Bandung)

Bojongsoang Village in Bandung Regency, Indonesia, faces a loss of green space due to urbanization, rendering productive land unproductive. This study aims to determine an Eco Village model in the Paralon village area, utilizing urban farming and eco-architecture concepts, to support the development of sustainable cities by optimizing available land and space, including vertical planes. The abstract does not present specific findings or results from the implementation of such a model.

Rahmi Achmad, Muh Jamil, R M Rukka, Sitti Bulkis, Rahmadanih Rahmadanih, A Amrullah · Jurnal Sosial Ekonomi Pertanian · Indonesia (Makassar)

This study in Makassar City, Indonesia, aimed to understand the existence of rice farming land, identify strength and weakness factors for farmers, and determine priority strategies for maintaining rice farming land. Informants included farmer group heads and government representatives. Using qualitative descriptive analysis and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), the study found that rice farming land physically covers 2,636 hectares. Key strength factors included agricultural products for family food and income, while weakness factors included land ownership, unproductive land, and limited government support. The priority strategy identified was enhancing agricultural production facilities and infrastructure.

Larissa Maas, Rosane Malvestiti, Leila Amaral Gontijo · Cadernos de Saúde Pública · Brazil

This study assessed the main difficulties faced by seven urban organic farmers in two Brazilian cities without policies encouraging urban farming, through semi-structured interviews conducted from July to December 2018. The research revealed challenges such as a lack of trained labor, inadequate machinery and equipment for small areas, and insufficient financing, indicating that the absence of policies hinders the development of urban organic farming.

Paule Olivia Akotto, Dorothée Boccanfuso, Marie-Ève Yergeau · Cahiers de recherche · Global

This exploratory review synthesizes 35 reports and articles published between 1980 and 2019 to assess the potential of urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) to build resilience against poverty, food insecurity, and environmental challenges in developing countries. The review found that UPA creates one job for every 50 to 100 individuals, but these jobs are generally seasonal, and market access remains a significant constraint for farmers.