Research & reports

Jiménez Forero, John Alejandro · · Colombia

In the Loma Linda neighborhood of comuna 4, Altos de Cazucá, in the municipality of Soacha, Cundinamarca, Colombia, this project ran from February 2016 to March 2017, involving a vulnerable local community in seedling production to establish urban agriculture. Using organic inputs, knowledge exchange among participants, and native plants valued for their nutritional content, the project produced vegetable crops according to available costs, physical and human resources, and available space. Participants are reported to have reduced their spending on purchased vegetables by producing and consuming fresh produce themselves, while also generating additional income for the community. About 50 families took part, organized into 26 productive units, contributing to the community's food security.

Silvia Iveth Moreno Gaytán, Mercedes A. Jiménez Velázquez, Martín Hernández Juárez · Revista española de estudios agrosociales y pesqueros/Revista española de estudios agrosociales y pesqueros · Mexico

A qualitative social-research case study, conducted 2014-2017 in the eastern Metropolitan Zone of the Valle de México, examined how the organization Union de Colonos e Inquilinos Solicitantes de Vivienda Libertad practices urban agriculture in the CANANEA housing complex as part of popular-neighborhood strategies for food sovereignty. The case study concludes that agroecological, fair-trade urban agriculture generates food-sovereignty dynamics at the city scale that challenge conventional production, consumption and trade models.

Francisco Javier Vélez Zabala, Viviana Yulieth Hidalgo Zapata, Mónica Andrea Martínez Martina, Ana María Soto González, Maria Velez, Juan Diego López Vargas · WSEAS TRANSACTIONS ON ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT · Global

This conceptual paper presents urban agriculture as a strategy to improve quality of life in vulnerable urban communities formed by rural-to-urban migration, particularly in developing countries. It covers urban agriculture's concepts, origins and evolution, draws on experiences from countries that have implemented it, and discusses the social, economic and environmental factors that influence its development, without reporting original empirical data.

Jamie Matthews, Akhtar-Khavari Afshin · Journal of Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University · Global

This paper argues that as land values rise with increasing population density, legally established practice has pushed agriculture out of the urban environment, leaving cities dependent on regional and industrial agriculture, with urban agriculture practiced mainly in developing countries as a defense against hunger and malnutrition or as poverty alleviation. It contends that urban agriculture can contribute to environmental recovery in the Anthropocene, on the premise that existing conservation and protection strategies should not be assumed to be sufficient on their own, without presenting empirical measurements.

Luana do Carmo Araujo de Oliveira, Cristiana Guimarães Alves, Bruno Martins Dala Paula · Revista da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais · Brazil

A Brazilian essay reflects on the role of urban agriculture (AU) in the use and occupation of urban space and its connection to migration processes. It frames AU as a multifunctional practice integrating ecological, social, cultural and political aspects, and discusses its sociopolitical, symbolic and cultural dimensions — its capacity to promote rights and social cohesion, community bonds, expression of traditional practices, and resistance to the dominant socioeconomic lifestyle model — in relation to cultural identity and new territorialities in migration experiences.

Kate Cairns · Children & Society · United States

Drawing on ethnographic research with a youth urban agriculture program in Camden, New Jersey (USA), a paper explores the interdependency of food relations through young people's accounts of food insecurity. It shows how young people articulate food insecurity experiences through the lens of maternal foodwork, describing efforts to support mothers struggling to provide amid poverty. By depicting how these teens share foodwork with their mothers, the paper challenges common conceptions of generational feeding relations and reveals the inadequacy of individualizing approaches that assume an autonomous food consumer.

Licia María Lilli · Revista de la Escuela de Antropología · Argentina

A paper examines the participation of a group of urban gardeners (huerteros/huerteras) in the process of building the civil association "Red de Huerteros y Huerteras de Rosario" in Rosario, Argentina, an associative form linked to social policies formulated under the Municipality of Rosario's Urban Agriculture Program. Using a relational anthropological approach, it focuses on the demands and resignifications of the social actors involved in the web of political relations, asking how these experiences enable a place for collective practices within a field of forces.

Andrew Koval · Educational Media Reviews Online · United States

Review of the 2011 documentary "Urban Roots" (dir. Mark MacInnis, 93 min), which follows Detroit's shift toward urban agriculture after the decline of its auto industry. The film covers food justice, party stores, food deserts, conflicts with local government and zoning rules, and the social stigma linking farming to slavery within the African American community. The review recommends it for academic and school libraries supporting students in agriculture, city planning and economics.

Nolwazi Z. Khumalo, Sibanda, M., Khumalo, N., Sibanda, M. · AgEcon Search (University of Minnesota, USA) · South Africa

A survey of 208 stratified-random-sampled households (109 farming, 99 non-farming) in Tongaat, eThekwini Municipality, South Africa. Using the Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS), 54% of farming households consumed more than six food groups versus 40% of non-farming households. Using the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS), about 72% of farming households reported rarely or never worrying about food shortages, versus about 61% of non-farming households. Farming households showed better food access and dietary diversity outcomes than non-farming households.

Alexander Wezel, Julia Goette, Elisabeth Lagneaux, Gloria Passuello, Erica Reisman, Christophe Rodier, Grégoire Turpin · Sustainability · Europe

A study mapping the development of agroecology in Europe through a literature review, interviews, conference participation and internet search. It finds that agroecological research and higher education are concentrated more in western and northern Europe, though farm schools and farmer-to-farmer training exist in other regions too. Bottom-up initiatives and national or continental networks and movements are increasing, with food sovereignty and access to land and seeds as major themes. Except for France, the study states there are very few concrete agroecology policies in Europe.

Amy J. Williams · VCU Scholars Compass (Virginia Commonwealth University) · United States

This project proposes a grocery store and garden design for a food desert neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia, US, where grocery chains avoid low-income areas and where about 49 million people nationally experience food insecurity (citing Whittle et al., 2015). Its methods combine case studies of community gardens, farms, and markets with resident interviews and a literature review; drawing on that literature, it reports that autonomy over a garden keeps participants invested in their community, that convenience stores are prevalent in the studied neighborhood, and that marketing of nutritious foods is less common than for packaged foods though point-of-sale kiosks show promise for marketing fresh produce to children.

Monica M. White · University of North Carolina Press eBooks · United States

Using historical methods to analyze extensive archival records, this chapter examines Freedom Farms Cooperative, a 680-acre agricultural cooperative that activist Fannie Lou Hamer started in 1969 in Sunflower County, Mississippi, which included a pig bank, a Head Start program, community gardens, a commercial kitchen, a garment factory, a sewing cooperative, a tool bank, and low-income affordable housing as strategies to support African Americans who had been fired and evicted for exercising the right to vote. Freedom Farm offered sharecroppers and tenant farmers education, retraining, health care, and disaster relief for those who wanted to remain in the Mississippi Delta, and the chapter presents it as a historical model of collective and shared ownership for rebuilding communities around food production.

Obadia Kyetuza Bishoge, Shaldon Leparan Suntu · Journal of Food Nutrition and Agriculture · Tanzania

A study in Ubungo Municipality, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, used non-random and purposive sampling to survey 240 smallholder farmers and 16 local government officers via observation, questionnaires, interviews, and document review, analyzed with SPSS, to examine how urban horticulture of vegetables and ornamental flowers could reduce poverty. Production of these crops made a significant positive contribution to food availability and accessibility, nutrition, and income used to improve access to services such as water, electricity, health, and education.

FX Andy Sutrisno, Bakti Setiawan · Jurnal Perencanaan Pembangunan The Indonesian Journal of Development Planning · Indonesia

This case study of Surakarta, Indonesia's sustainable agricultural land protection policy -- focusing on conservation within the urban environment -- used field observations, stakeholder interviews, and secondary data to analyze the local government's policy and how urban farmers and landowners perceive it. It found that the policy is not well understood by the farmers and landowners directly affected, that the local government itself views urban agricultural land mainly from an economic standpoint and is less supportive of conservation, and that farmers and landowners, while believing the policy is essential, reject it because designation requires relinquishing some land rights and the incentives offered are not economically sufficient to compensate them.

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

A research project examining the association between food insecurity, community gardens, and property value in Southern Nevada, United States. It set out five research questions—where community gardens are located, what agencies are doing with gardens to address food insecurity, perceived supports and barriers to using gardening for food insecurity, whether housing values changed after community gardens were established (using existing public data), and stakeholders' perceptions of property-value changes—and conducted interviews with key community garden stakeholders. The abstract does not report specific numerical findings from these inquiries.

Hok Bun Ku, Yan Hairong · · China

China's food-security crisis, caused by unsustainable development, has diminished the country's farmland through large-scale land acquisitions, ecological restoration projects, agricultural structural adjustments, natural disasters, and pollution, among other factors. This chapter argues that local producers and consumers are not passively waiting for government policy changes but, organized by green social workers, are actively searching for alternatives to achieve self-sufficiency and food security through a new initiative called the "rural–urban alliance." Framed within the social economy perspective advocated by green social work as a way to rethink economic development and consider alternatives to capitalism, the rural–urban alliance and community-supported agriculture (CSA) are positioned as a potential new route for China's sustainable development that could change the pathway of economic development forms that cause inequality and undermine livelihoods. This is a proposed, forward-looking argument, however; the abstract does not report empirical evidence that CSA or the rural–urban alliance have actually mitigated the food-security crisis.

Illana C. Livstrom, Amy Smith, Mary Rogers, Karl Hackansan · Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies · Global

A qualitative case study of "Grounding Roots," a community-based collaborative educational program that aims to build food, environmental, and cognitive justice through sustainable urban agriculture and horticulture via intergenerational communities of practice. Drawing on Linda Tuhiwai Smith's framework of decolonizing methodologies, the study examined both the ways a Community-University partnership engaged in decolonizing work through research and practice, and the ways the same partnership served to preserve colonizing practices, using deductive coding grounded in decolonizing-practice theory. Identified decolonizing practices included implementing a program of worth to the community and youth, building from community-led agendas, and prioritizing community healing and transformation over academic research agendas. Identified colonizing practices included inequitable power hierarchies within the leadership team and in garden groups, deficit-oriented talk about minoritized youth, and the devalorization of youth voice. The study concludes that researchers doing community-based work need to examine the white supremacist roots embedded in their own practices, embrace decolonizing and humanizing approaches, engage in community-driven agendas that prioritize process over product, facilitate distributed leadership in collaboration with community members, and produce work of genuine value together with the community.

Carolyn Steel · · Global

This essay introduces the concept of "sitopia" — a society consciously shaped by food as a tool — and argues that in cities with large amounts of vacant land and low-income residents, such as Baltimore, Detroit and New Orleans in the United States, urban farming could help green the city and revitalize neighborhoods. It states urban food production is likely to meet only a small proportion of a community's total food needs, while noting that local food production can still improve environmental quality and social ties and encourage sustainable local economic development.

Christian Isendahl, Stephan Barthel · · Global

A book chapter draws on insights from pre-Columbian Maya cities, medieval Constantinople, and wartime London, applying them to the contemporary mega-region of the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta. It demonstrates the potential for integrating archaeological and historical research with investigations of contemporary conditions to inform urban planning. Despite fundamental differences across eras, it argues urban and peri-urban food production continues to play a key role for food security and city resilience, and that the long-term record shows maintaining a diversity of food systems — including localized ones — and institutional flexibility at multiple scales is essential to addressing food security challenges.

Abiodun Olusola Omotayo, Ijatuyi Enioluwa Jonathan, Olorunfemi Oluwasogo David, Agboola Peter Temitope · Acta Universitatis Danubius. OEconomica · South Africa

A structured-questionnaire survey of urban agricultural households in Limpopo Province, South Africa, analyzed food security using descriptive and inferential statistics. Respondents were predominantly male with an average age of 46, mainly relying on public tap water, and households had an average monthly income of R2,668.75 against average monthly food spending of R1,284.75 — food costs consuming nearly half of household income. The study suggested interest-free credit for small-scale farmers to improve access to risk-management technologies.

Helen Traill · London School of Economics and Political Science Research Online (London School of Economics and Political Science) · United Kingdom

A doctoral thesis examined two community growing projects in Glasgow, United Kingdom, using multi-sited ethnography and in-depth interviews to analyze how "community" is constructed in local processes of exclusion and urban land development. It found that, despite hopes that community gardens could serve as sources of renewal and collective resistance to neoliberal urban capitalism, communal growing does not constitute a systematic alternative, and it identified the selective reproduction of class and social exclusion within the growing spaces studied.

J. T. Roane · AAIHS (African American Intellectual History Society) — Black Perspectives · Cuba

Published on AAIHS's Black Perspectives blog on January 4, 2018, this article by J. T. Roane describes the Organopónico Vivero Alamar as 'founded in 1997 on ten and a half hectares of land,' framing Cuban urban agriculture as a response to food shortages and oil scarcity during the post-Soviet 'Special Period.' The author reports the average laborer age at the farm visited was 56, with the tour guide noting difficulty attracting younger workers. It describes methods including worm beds converting livestock waste to compost, strategic plant biodiversity for insect regulation, and integration of plants used in Santería practice, and positions Cuban organopónicos as an alternative to fossil-fuel-dependent U.S. agribusiness.

World Future Council · World Future Council (futurepolicy.org) · Ecuador

A policy case study on Quito's AGRUPAR participatory urban agriculture programme in Ecuador. Over 16 years it reached 73,936 people directly and 113,774 indirectly, produces over 960,000 kg of food annually, and 84% of its 21,746 trained participants were women. The programme received the Future Policy Silver Award in 2018.

Herrera F. · Cuadernos de Desarrollo Rural · Venezuela

A multidimensional diagnosis of thirteen urban agricultural production units in Caracas, drawing together economic, social and ecological factors to set out what determines food sovereignty and sustainability. It credits the units' organisational strengths while naming limited access to seed and thin crop diversity as constraints, and records how the city's units — starting with Organopónico Bolívar I, opened in 2003 — came into being and changed hands.

Fanny Carlet, Joseph Schilling, Megan Heckert · Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems · United States

This article investigates the current state of research and practice regarding urban agriculture as a strategy for regenerating shrinking U.S. cities. It examines how repurposing vacant land for food production can address urban blight and food insecurity. The study highlights key findings and provides observations for public officials and practitioners on leveraging this research to enhance urban agriculture for vacant land treatment.