Research & reports

Norma Angélica ÁLVAREZ-TORRES, Omar VELARDE-ANAYA, Mario Balvanedo RODRÍGUEZ-ARENAS, Sara TORRES-ÁLVAREZ · Journal of Technology and Innovation · Global

This project developed a low-cost automated greenhouse prototype, installable on rooftops or gardens, with an electronic control system and user interface for use by children, youth, and adults at the "Manitas que hablan" institution. Through surveys, experiments, and observation, the study demonstrated the feasibility of collaborative work in developing a prototype for seed germination and crop harvesting. It also highlighted the importance of supporting the social sector by promoting urban gardens for the integration of children and young people.

Valerio Morabito · TECHNE - Journal of Technology for Architecture and Environment · Global

This text explores the relationship between ecology and landscape architecture, and urban agriculture and vertical farm experiments through the lens of circular economy and recycling. Urban agriculture plays ecological, social, cultural, and aesthetic roles, evolving into new architectural experiments with vertical farms. Finally, it describes a building envelope patent developed by APS spin-off UNIRC for organizing vertical farms in unfinished buildings.

Fernando Almeida, Nuno Miranda, Bruno Vieira · Advances in environmental engineering and green technologies book series · Global

This chapter presents a mobile application designed for farmers to manage municipal urban gardens. The app provides information on crop status, products to grow, and required maintenance, aiming to simplify the production process. It also seeks to enhance the sustainability of urban agriculture activities across economic, social, and logistical dimensions.

Maria Elena Peralta-Culcay, Hugo Alberto Cedillo-Tapia, Alfonso Suárez-Tapia · Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) · Ecuador (Cuenca)

This research characterized the technological use among small (500-1000 m2) and medium (1000-3000 m2) peri-urban horticultural producers in San Joaquín, Baños, and Sayausí, Cuenca, Ecuador, using a survey. The survey found that most production is sold in local markets, following an ancestral system with some additional technology. The identified technological efficiency was at a medium level (3 on a scale of 1 to 5), indicating a technological deficit.

Ilham Eka Putra, Wiwin Styorini · ABEC Indonesia · Global

This research developed a Smart Farming Robot (SF-BOT) for urban agriculture, designed for automated watering, seed planting, and plant monitoring using IoT applications. SF-BOT utilizes soil moisture sensors with Arduino and Raspberry Pi, offering real-time monitoring and video streaming via a web server interface. The DHT sensor achieved 98.69% accuracy, and the magnetic sensor achieved 100% accuracy.

Per-Anders Langendahl · Frontiers in Sustainable Cities · Global

This paper investigates the politics of smart farming expectations in urban environments, conducting exploratory case study research on early smart farming initiatives in Sweden. It explores the politics of knowledge claims at the project level and their performativity in envisioning more sustainable urban futures. The findings suggest that smart farming at the level of individual projects gives the appearance of change, but at the same time, it produces more of the same.

L.A. Zhuravleva, A. Aldiab · SCIENTIFIC LIFE · Global

This article discusses innovative directions in urban farming and presents the development of an installation for growing agricultural crops at home with an automatic control system based on the Arduino platform. The control system measures illumination, temperature, air humidity, soil moisture, and water level using sensors, automatically maintaining optimal microclimate parameters. The conducted studies demonstrated the efficiency and effectiveness of this experimental installation.

Mosen Farhangi, Sara Farhangi, Paulien C. H. van de Vlasakker, G.J. Carsjens · Land · Iran

An exploratory case study of Rafsanjan county, Kerman province, Iran—where agriculture, one of the sectors most vulnerable to water scarcity and climate change, is losing pistachio orchards to water shortages—analyzed the actor network behind the rise of high-tech urban agriculture and examined the role of technology in supporting citizen participation in local urban planning. Against a backdrop where modernizing irrigation and transferring water from other regions had failed to succeed, data gathered through observation, document study, and in-depth interviews with farmers, planners, researchers, and policymakers showed that governmental planning bodies such as the Agricultural Research, Education and Extension Organization (AREEO) and the 10-year greenhouse development plan were the most influential actors in the transition, reconfiguring relationships with the private sector, knowledge institutes, and farmers in ways that strengthened participatory decision-making in local urban planning.

M. N. Erokhin, D. M. Skorokhodov, A N Skorokhodova, ALEKSANDR A. ANISIMOV, Roman Potemkin · Agroinženeriâ · Global

This review discusses modern modular plant-cultivation devices for city farming, identifying technological factors, plant parameters, ambient temperature, air humidity and lighting as the main variables governing crop growth under intensive cultivation systems that avoid plant-protection chemicals. It argues that separately developing cultivation technology and equipment for each crop's agrotechnical requirements, and standardizing modular unit design and manufacturing, would reduce design work, shorten design time, improve equipment quality and reliability, and lower production costs when modules are manufactured in series. No experimental data are presented.

Sérgio Manuel Serra da Cruz, Anja Steglich, Pedro Vieira Cruz, Ana Claudia Macedo Vieira · · Global

A book chapter, noting that the world's largest cities continue to grow amid urbanization processes that differ in complexity between developed and developing countries, argues that well-managed urban spaces can offer opportunities for economic and social development. It investigates current challenges and opportunities in urban agriculture (UA) and discusses whether adopting urban computing (UC) and information and communications technologies (ICT) can help urban dwellers, farmers and planners advance UA in global north and global south countries such as Germany and Brazil, also touching on new joint-research possibilities raised at the 8th Brazil-Germany Frontiers of Science and Technology Symposium (BRAGFOST).

Giovanni Delnevo, Roberto Girau, Chiara Ceccarini, Catia Prandi · IEEE Internet of Things Journal · Global

This study combines Social Internet of Things sensing (solar radiation, humidity, air temperature, soil moisture) and communication, crowdsourced image collection and classification, and deep learning for plant disease detection, engaging farmers and community garden owners and experts, to build a system that predicts whether a plant will develop a disease with a given degree of precision. It presents the architecture, deep learning model, and a responsive web app, reporting experimental evaluations and usability/engagement tests alongside limitations and future work.

Sanyam Arora, Luv Sethi, Shruti Agarwal, Vimal Kumar · · Global

This book chapter describes how Internet of Things (IoT) sensors can monitor temperature, water, humidity and other parameters to increase food production quality and quantity while reducing manual labor and saving time and resources for urban gardeners. It presents no original data, measurements, or study population.

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.

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.

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.

Meredith T. Niles, Molly E. Brown · Oxford University Press eBooks · Global

This chapter defines the expanding concept of food security, which now includes social and cultural issues beyond simply providing enough food, and introduces its four pillars: availability, access, utilization, and stability. It also explores urban agriculture and the use of satellite information and Internet-connected devices for farm management.

Ranka Junge, Nadine Antenen, Morris Villarroel, Tjaša Griessler Bulc, Andrej Ovca, Sarah Milliken · Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften digital collection (Zurich University of Applied Sciences) · Global

The Aquaponics Textbook for Higher Education accompanies the Aqu@teach Aquaponics Curriculum, intended for tertiary level teachers introducing basic aquaponics to students. The curriculum comprises 150 hours of student workload (5 ECTS) and is divided into 15 modules, covering topics such as aquaponic technology, aquaculture, hydroponics, and urban agriculture.

Fatin Natasya Shuhaimi, Nursuriati Jamil, Raseeda Hamzah · Bulletin of Electrical Engineering and Informatics · Global

This study proposed and evaluated two Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart farming system designs for personal use in residential apartments, focusing on humidity and temperature monitoring. After comparing sensor readings (DHT 11 and DHT 22) over three days against actual environmental values, and assessing implementation costs and power consumption, the findings regarding accuracy and costs were inconclusive.

ایوب محمدیان, جلیل حیدری دهوئی, علیرضا قربانی · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · Global

This research identified applications of IoT in smart agriculture by examining 168 selected academic documents (from 480, 2010-2017) using a meta-synthesis approach. Documents were categorized into eight agricultural areas, including urban agriculture, and clustered into six analytics domains such as monitoring and control. The study determined the effect coefficient of elements using the Shannon entropy method, addressing technical uses of IoT in each sector.

Jacob Wood, Caroline Wong, Swathi Paturi · eTropic electronic journal of studies in the tropics · Singapore

This research examines urban farming, specifically vertical farming methods, in Singapore. Despite substantial public and private investment in R&D for high-tech, high-yielding vertical farms, Singapore faces a highly constrained urban environment where land scarcity is exacerbated by a complex regulatory land use framework.

J. R. da Costa, J. R. de Alencar, Patrizia Costa, V. S. Hammes, D. de C. Victoria, K. R. E. de Jesus, Henrique Nery Cipriani, C. C. de A. Buschinelli, F. F. Calegario, Géraldo Stachetti Rodrigues, L. A. Magalhães, C. R. Marmo, A. C. Lira-Guedes, Manuel Correia Guedes, L. A. Forato · · Global

This paper enumerates a wide range of concepts and systems related to strategic territorial intelligence, participatory community-level planning, farm management planning, territorial management, and urban and peri-urban farming. It includes agricultural and hydrological models, mapping of agricultural areas, spatial data integration, environmental management plans, integrated waste management, and pest control recommendations for urban gardens. Strategic management decision support systems, such as technological innovation impact evaluation systems, agrometeorological monitoring systems, and georeferenced data collection software, are also presented.

Fernando Almeida, Nuno Miranda, Bruno Vieira · International Journal of Environmental Sustainability and Green Technologies · Global

This study proposed the development of a mobile device application to facilitate the management and monitoring of urban farming production. The application can be used by less experienced farmers by providing information on optimal seasonal products based on soil characteristics and climate. The developed application demonstrated potential to increase crop visibility, enhance efficiency across the value chain, provide real-time business and financial data access, allow user profile customization, improve marketing process efficiency, and reduce transport costs.

F. Feldmann, Ute Vogler · Journal of Plant Diseases and Protection · Global

Ten key challenges for plant protection in cities were identified, each belonging to a specific field of action of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) in urban horticulture, according to Directive 2009/128/EC. These challenges include appropriate plant selection, microbiome engineering, nutrient recycling, smart digital solutions, diversification of vegetation, avoidance of pesticide side effects on beneficials, biorational efficacy assessment, effective pest diagnosis, efficient outbreak control, and holistic approaches.

Rasmuna Mazwan Muhammad, Nik Rozana Nik Mohamed Masdek, Mohd Tarmizi Haimid, Siti Zahrah Ponari, Zulhazmi Sayuti · · Malaysia

This study in Malaysia investigated the effectiveness of urban farming in reducing household expenses among the urban poor, who spend 50-70% of their income on food. Using questionnaires, FGDs, and interviews, it found that urban farming, particularly aquaponics, led to a significant average reduction of RM66 per month in household expenses. The study concluded that urban farming benefits the community by supplying nutritious vegetables, improving housing aesthetics, and reducing costs.

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.