Research & reports

Jean-Louis Yengué · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · Cameroon

Focusing on the Cameroonian capital Yaoundé and one of its valleys, the Ekozoa, this study examines the forms taken by urban residents' cultivation of food and horticultural crops and its place within the urban fabric. Despite its illegality, this agriculture proved essential to the survival strategies of the poorest households, improving their nutrition and economic base, and it also played an environmental role through waste recycling and greening the city. At the same time it raised numerous problems related to pollution and public health. The solution proposed by the authorities is to bring these areas under control as non-buildable zones, incorporating them into a green network that is more ornamental than productive.

Rosângela Aparecida de Medeiros Hespanhol, Antônio Nivaldo Hespanhol · Revista Campo-Território · Cuba

In Cuba, political and economic factors have made urban cultivation an important alternative for easing food supply and food security problems. Examining cases of organopónicos (organic urban farms) in the cities of Camagüey and Cienfuegos, the article shows that urban agriculture, structured on agroecological principles, is an important food-producing and job-generating activity that is closely integrated with the city's economy, ecology, and physical planning.

Jill L. Edmondson, Dylan Z. Childs, Miriam C. Dobson, Kevin J. Gaston, Philip H. Warren, Jonathan R. Leake · The Science of The Total Environment · United Kingdom

Combining citizen science data on self-provisioning crop yields with field-mapping and GIS analysis of allotments, this study estimated city-scale fruit and vegetable production from urban allotments in Leicester, UK. The average area of individual allotment plots under cultivation was 52%, and citywide allotment production was estimated at more than 1,200 t of fruit and vegetables plus 200 t of potatoes per year, equivalent to feeding over 8,500 people; using the 13% of plots that are completely uncultivated could raise this to over 1,400 t, feeding around 10,000 people, though this production may not be located where the need for fresh produce access is greatest. Allotment land peaked at 475 ha in the 1950s compared with 97 ha currently, a decline estimated to correspond to a fall from more than 45,000 to under 10,000 people fed per year.

Suzanne Stapleton · Journal of Agricultural & Food Information · Global

An article introduces the "4/5 paradox" in global food production: 80% of food is produced by family farmers, while at the same time 80% of the world's hungry and malnourished people are family farmers and their children. It concerns Urgenci, the international network of Community Supported Agriculture, though the available abstract is truncated and gives no further detail.

Alice A. Oluoko-Odingo · Journal of Climate Change and Sustainability · Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper examines gender mainstreaming in adaptation to weather and climate extremes, centered on peri-urban farming in Sub-Saharan Africa. Although women provide most agricultural labour, they remain poor and among the most vulnerable to weather and climate extremes because of inequalities in ownership of and decision-making over land, assets and cash; even in well-planned African cities, developmental and environmental challenges continue to perpetuate inequality, discrimination and underdevelopment, with low-income communities living in risky areas without access to key services and facing heightened vulnerability. Combining literature review with fieldwork in peri-urban Nairobi (Machakos and Kajiado Counties), Kenya, the paper discusses how gender mainstreaming in peri-urban farming could support Sustainable Development Goals 5 and 13, while noting the research gap on gender mainstreaming in peri-urban farming as itself a problem the field has yet to address.

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.

Jeltsje de Kraker, Katarzyna Kujawa-Roeleveld, Marcelo Villena, C.P. Pabon Pereira · Sustainability · Global

A case study of Peñalolén, Santiago, Chile, examining the potential for decentralized recovery of nutrient-rich residual urban waste flows — organic matter, nitrogen and phosphorus — using technical and socio-economic criteria. Kitchen waste, garden residues and urine were treated as system inputs, with urban agriculture, municipal green space and peri-urban agriculture as destinations for recovered nutrients; the technologies studied were anaerobic digestion, vermicomposting, composting, and urine storage with struvite precipitation. Material flow analysis compared the inputs and outputs of the traditional centralized waste management system against household- and municipality-level decentralized valorization scenarios. The findings show that decentralized valorization of kitchen and garden waste reduces landfill fees and waste-transport costs compared with the current centralized system.

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.

Ioannis Manikas, George Malindretos, Konstadinos Abeliotis · Journal of International Food & Agribusiness Marketing · Global

An essay that states urban food production is exposed to high levels of urban-generated contaminants, and argues that urban floriculture - an intensive form of agriculture with income per unit area far higher than other agricultural branches - can offer a more sustainable and socially acceptable alternative to urban food production. It states floriculture may also reduce the carbon footprint of cut-flower transport and provide higher-quality seasonal product, and examines urban floriculture as an approach for mitigating the negative impacts of global floriculture supply chains.

Lucy Rose Wright, Ross Fraser Young · Manchester University Press eBooks · Global

A chapter introducing the concept of political gardening. It begins by situating the re-evaluation of "everyday space" within neoliberal processes of privatization, devolution and entrepreneurialism, then connects the rise of academic interest in urban gardening with the movement's political dimension. Drawing on Rawls' theory of social justice, it conflates political gardening with injustice, uses case studies to unpack that process of addressing injustice across six iterative stages, and arrives at a definition of political gardening as both a term and a process through which participants become "democratized" citizens.

Hans Schildermans, Joke Vandenabeele, Joris Vlieghe · Teoría de la Educación Revista Interuniversitaria · Global

This theoretical article proposes "study practices" as a response to Bruno Latour's question of "where to land" amid socio-ecological transformation. It analyzes the urban farming initiative Torekes as a study practice, identifying educational dynamics of composition, problematization, and attention, and contrasts this reading with sociological and political analyses that frame the initiative as aimed at social cohesion or political subjectification. The piece is a conceptual/theoretical discussion rather than an empirical study, arguing that study practices, by enabling the creation of a common world, may offer a way of living together on a damaged planet.

Michael Martin, Elvira Molin · Sustainability · Sweden

This study assessed the environmental impacts of urban vertical hydroponic farming through a life-cycle perspective, applied to a case-study vertical hydroponic farm in Stockholm, Sweden, comparing current performance with potential improvement scenarios. Results showed that growing medium, pots, electricity demand, and transportation of raw materials and product deliveries were the important contributors to environmental impact in this system. Replacing plastic pots with paper pots was found capable of producing large reductions in GHG emissions, acidification impacts, and abiotic resource depletion, and replacing conventional gardening soil with coir as the growing medium also led to large impact reductions. However, the study states that further reducing the system's impacts will require more resource-efficient steps specifically to address impacts from electricity demand, an issue not resolved by the pot and growing-medium substitutions, and identifies potential for more symbiotic exchanges using urban wastes and by-products.

Magdalena Grochulska-Salak · Practice, progress, and proficiency in sustainability · Global

This book chapter, a conceptual rather than empirical piece, defines urban farming as building development for producing plants to meet local community needs and discusses shaping urban farms to preserve the environmental balance of urban spaces alongside the coexistence of architecture and greenery. It argues that technologies such as hydroponic and aeroponic production integrated into buildings can complement a city's functional and spatial structure in connection with public spaces and green systems, positioning the urban farm as an element of sustainable urban development.

Ana Nadal, Daniel Rodríguez-Cadena, Oriol Pons, Eva Cuerva, Alejandro Josa, Joan Rieradevall · Urban forestry & urban greening · Global

This study assessed the feasibility of implementing rooftop greenhouses (RTGs) in the social housing neighborhood "La Comuna Santa Clara de San Millán" in Quito, Ecuador. Standard assessment methods were adapted for a social neighborhood in three steps: characterization based on criteria, determination of available roof surface, and estimation of production, self-sufficiency, and self-supply. The results showed that 33.2% (7.70 ha) of the neighborhood's rooftops had short-term feasibility for installing rooftop greenhouses, with the potential to produce 1,579,140 kg of tomatoes and 56,720 kg of lettuce per year.

Alana Mann · · Global

This book chapter surveys urban planning initiatives from across the world that engage multiple stakeholders in co-creating diverse "foodscapes" to address food sovereignty, food justice, and food security, examining them as both political and strategic acts. Some of the examples draw on notions of the informal city, while others engage struggles for land justice that cross rural/urban boundaries. The survey of international food-policy instruments and practices is not exhaustive; the chapter's aim is instead to surface the tensions, contestations, and possible bridges involved in transforming urban food environments through voice, participation, and re-learning the city.

H N Vidya · Iconic Research and Engineering Journals · Asia

This is a discursive paper arguing for the need to raise awareness of women's empowerment through home gardening as a means of household food security. It presents home gardening as a form of urban agriculture offering self-sufficiency from home-grown produce, increased self-confidence, and household food security, while noting that expanding home gardens in metro cities is constrained by water supply shortfalls, insufficient garden space, deficient sunlight, and competing land use as apartments and shared housing outnumber individual homes. No specific study population, sample size or data-based results are presented.

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.

Vanessa Daufenback, L. A. Z. Machado, Cláudia Maria Bógus · Revista Ingesta · Global

A systematic review using the Scielo database to examine the relationship between urban agriculture (UA) and food and nutrition security (SAN) in Latin America. A search for "agricultura urbana" returned 156 articles; screening by title and keywords narrowed this to 32, and excluding non-Latin-American studies left 26 articles connecting UA and SAN to some degree. Only 5 of these made a direct link between SAN and UA; the rest addressed only some dimension of the concept, and the review found no concrete, agreed definition of UA across the literature. Few studies treated the urban farmer or production scale as central to promoting SAN, despite UA's role in food-sovereignty practices such as seed exchange and preserving planting traditions. Most of the reviewed studies pointed to significant problems, including contamination of crops by heavy metals, difficulty achieving environmental, social and economic sustainability — particularly for farmers who end up working in other sectors — and a lack of technical assistance.

JTC Corporation · JTC Corporation · Singapore

Published by JTC on 27 Feb 2019, this article describes urban farming company Comcrop, whose founder Allan Lim started his first community farm in Bukit Panjang in 2011, later ran a rooftop farm at *SCAPE, and then built a 36,000-square-foot facility with six greenhouses at a JTC site in Woodlands. The Woodlands farm grows leafy vegetables such as pak choy, lettuce and mizuna at high output; CEO Peter Barber states the first greenhouse alone can produce 40 to 50kg a day. Barber envisions placing farms in every neighbourhood in Singapore to employ locals and supply supermarkets, while Lim stresses the need to build agricultural research capability in Singapore.

Luisa María Alviar Gómez · Semana · Colombia

An article on Agroarte, a Medellín Comuna 13 collective combining art, hip hop, memory and agriculture, founded in 2011 by seven women heads of household as a form of resistance following the violence of Operación Orión (2002). The group once grew 70% of the food for seven families on a 1.5-hectare farm before being displaced by conflict in 2012. It now works around three themes — social fabric, intergenerational exchange, and reclaiming territory — has produced over 300 songs, and has staged its 'Cuerpos Gramaticales' performance 16 times in Colombia and twice in Spain (Barcelona and Guernica).

Martina Artmann, Katharina Sartison · Sustainability · Global

A systemic literature review of 166 academic articles focusing on the Global North examined urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) as a nature-based solution. The review found that UPA contributes to ten key societal challenges of urbanization, including climate change, food security, and public health, by providing social, economic, and environmental co-benefits. The study developed an integrative assessment framework for evaluating UPA implementation and impact efficiency, which should be tested using edible cities as an example.

Nicholas Clinton, Michelle Stuhlmacher, Albie Miles, Nazli Uludere Aragon, Melissa Wagner, Matei Georgescu, Chris Herwig, Peng Gong · Earth s Future · Global

This study developed a quantitative framework to assess global aggregate ecosystem services from urban agriculture (UA) using global datasets in Google Earth Engine. Existing urban vegetation provides an estimated $33 billion annually in ecosystem services. An intensive UA adoption scenario projects potential annual food production of 100–180 million tonnes, energy savings of 14–15 billion kilowatt hours, nitrogen sequestration of 100,000–170,000 tonnes, and avoided storm water runoff of 45–57 billion cubic meters. Under this intensive scenario, the value of ecosystem services could reach $80–160 billion annually, with significant country-to-country variability.