Research & reports

Heather Mackay Niittylä · · Ghana

This thesis mapped and investigated the form and function of urban agriculture in two intermediate-sized cities in Ghana. It examined the contribution to farming households' food security.

Hermann Pohlmann · Palíndromo · Global

This abstract considers the possibility of transforming the space depicted by 19th-century landscape painters in a plastic-social way, making it a global work of art that can be experienced. It aims not for a space to escape urban centers, but to achieve a true global work of art.

Patrick F. Banga · · Zimbabwe

Unsanctioned urban agricultural activities in Emakhandeni High Density Suburb of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, negatively impact biodiversity. Researchers interviewed 100 people and conducted field visits, finding that the majority of cultivators operate outside existing laws and guidelines. This leads to progressive land degradation, massive deforestation, soil erosion, dried wetlands, lowered water table, and compromised groundwater quality due to pesticides and inorganic fertilizers.

Lauren Sara Wasserman · The Open Repository - Binghamton (Binghamton University) · Global

This research study examined how Hazon could better promote its comprehensive programming to its Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) site communities. As of 2012, Hazon had 58 CSA site locations, each with coordinators acting as liaisons. The study aimed to explore ways for Hazon to improve its program promotion.

С Н Кириллов, Ю. С. Половинкина · CyberLeninK (CyberLeninka) · Russia

This article presents the results of an environmental assessment of Volgograd's public green spaces. Integrated environmental assessment coefficients were calculated for the main green areas, and recommendations for optimizing urban gardening were provided.

Jorge Cotter, Maria J. Cotter, Pedro Oliveira, Pedro Cunha, Jorge Polónia · Journal of Hypertension · Portugal

A 6-month study in northern Portugal evaluated the impact of three interventions on salt intake and blood pressure in 155 children aged 10-12. Interventions included a control, theoretical lessons on high salt intake, and theoretical lessons combined with practical school garden activities (planting, collecting herbs for salt substitution). Only the practical group showed a significant reduction in salt intake (1.1 g/day), with 50.9% of children reducing intake by at least 1g/day, suggesting that combined theoretical and practical education is more effective.

Xavier Fontich Vicens, Mariona Espinet Blanch, Germán Llerena del Castillo · · Global

This record concerns writing in a school agroecology project and the recovery of an urban garden. It is based on the publication's abstract, as part of a monograph titled "Teaching and Learning Scientific Discourse."

Coen van Vreden, Paul Versteeg · · Global

This document details the process and achievement of objectives for the Green Prototype Platform (GPP) module, including a concise description of urban farming based on research from the first block. The research from block 1 significantly aided in creating the sketch design, which is the second final product. An article on urban farming characteristics, co-authored for a lecture carousel, is appended as a valuable addition to this document.

Carol Posthumus · SABI Magazine - Tydskrif · Global

Discussions about providing nutritious food for a growing population often include agricultural growth, focusing on both the quantity and quality of food produced. An emphasis is also placed on the growth of smallholder farmers, particularly women farmers, as a solution for future food provision.

Ivan Sarjanović · Geoadria · Croatia

An online questionnaire was administered to 46 group members and 5 farmers to investigate the functioning of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) groups in Croatia and the socio-economic characteristics of their members and collaborating farmers. The survey confirmed that CSA group members are younger, highly educated individuals living in large cities or urbanized regions (Zagreb, Kvarner, Istria), driven by eco-social motives such as ecological consciousness, healthy food, and cooperation. Farmers collaborating with CSA groups practice ecological agriculture on farms smaller than the Croatian average, and they cooperate due to easier product sales and the positive effect on their income and local community involvement.

Sumita Ghosh · · Global

This paper aims to measure and compare the morphologies and spatial dimensions of three typologies of small local food production spaces—urban small farms, community gardens, and home gardens—in two low-density suburban residential neighborhood case studies in Sydney and Miami. Miami's integrated form-based zoning code, "The Transect," provides design and planning guidelines for six zones from urban to natural areas. Results indicate that morphological analysis can significantly assist in the design and planning of built environments and the formulation of planning policy.

Andrew Flachs · Journal of Ecological Anthropology · Global

This paper demonstrates that ethnographers can gain a more effective qualitative understanding of community gardens by volunteering as gardeners. Volunteering helps researchers access various aspects of the garden community. It also offers an anthropological perspective on the common idea that many individuals join community gardens solely for economic benefits.

LI Xiao-shuan · Anhui nongye kexue · Global

Urban agriculture development patterns at home and abroad were studied, combined with actual cases, to discuss future urban agriculture development patterns. This study aims to provide a reference for the planning of modern urban agriculture parks.

Stefano Pascucci, Alessia Lombardi, Luigi Cembalo, Domenico Dentoni · Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) · Global

This paper discusses the concept of the food community network (FCN) — an organizational model in which consumers and farmers use membership-based contracts to pool resources and assign decision and property rights for credence food transactions, combining democratic and communitarian elements with few market or bureaucratic elements — and applies new institutional economics and organizational science arguments to case studies of community-supported agriculture reported elsewhere, finding a wide variety of FCN organizational forms.

Fran Tonkiss · City · 欧州

Engages austerity urbanism through temporary designs and provisional uses of vacant urban space in European cities, questioning orthodox development timescales, planned uses and value capture. Provides a theoretical frame for interim vacant-lot gardening such as Sakanoen’s for-sale-site allotments.

Ramón Isidro Cieza, Claudia Cecilia Flores, Lía Nora Tamagno, María Margarita Bonicatto, Natalia Agustina Gargoloff, María Luz Blandi, María J. Lermanó · Americanae (AECID Library) · Argentina (Buenos Aires)

The potential of urban and peri-urban agriculture (AUP) is increasingly recognized in cities across Latin America and the Caribbean, according to this 2013 piece on Argentina, because large quantities of food are produced in urban peripheries.

Melvin Delgado · · Global

Only the table of contents is available for this book, which is structured in two parts: the first covering a social justice framework, the extent of the national obesity crisis, health, lack of access to healthy foods, limited places and spaces for physical exercise, food industry practices, and challenges in measuring overweight and obesity; the second covering community-led health promotion approaches, including health promotion, youth-focused interventions, community garden interventions, community-based food initiatives, and implications for social work practice and research.

Daniel Zetterberg · · Sweden

A design proposal for a mixed residential and office building situated above a subway station at the northern end of a park in Stockholm, Sweden. It is composed mainly of apartments of 70-120 square meters, with a central stairwell shared by residents and offices leading to shared functions such as a laundry room, gym, and party/meeting room. The roof functions as the building's garden, with the rooftop garden intended to let the building occupy a smaller footprint within the park; the ground floor holds space for small businesses and a garage.

Julián Briz Escribano, Isabel de Felipe Boente · · Global

This piece reports on a conference on commercialization and food value chains as a tool for socioeconomic development and urban agriculture, held in Bolivia by the Institute for Rural Development for South America (IPDRS), the CIDES-UMSA graduate development studies program, and Agronomes et Veterinaires Sans Frontieres Bolivia. Invited speakers Julian Briz Escribano and Isabel de Felipe, researchers at the Technical University of Madrid, have published three books of methodological and case studies on food value chains with contributions from 80 authors across 60 countries.

Rob Porter, Heather McIlvaine-Newsad · Leisure/Loisir ·

This ethnography examines the origins and growth of a rural community garden through the lenses of food security, leisure and social capital within an environmental justice framework. Community residents, including low-income populations, people with disabilities and senior citizens, came together with support from local leaders to grow healthy produce out of concerns over produce cost and commercial growing practices; participants entered mainly for food security but came to recognize leisure benefits such as socializing, and the external social networks that facilitated the garden also generated internal social capital, including increased gardening knowledge and shared skills.

Afton Halloran, Jakob Magid · Geografisk Tidsskrift-Danish Journal of Geography · Global

Using participatory action research, this comparative study examined stakeholder interactions and the barriers to conserving existing urban agriculture and pursuing future initiatives in two cities: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Copenhagen, Denmark. It found that urban agriculture is often left out of urban policy and lacks comprehensive, formalized regulatory tools, and that municipal recognition and institutional support are important components in increasing the sustainability of urban agriculture initiatives, with local and central governments playing a role in legitimizing and institutionalizing urban agriculture through facilitating multi-stakeholder processes, policy development, and land conservation and allocation.

Jimmy Álvarez Díaz, Christian Gómez, Fabián Andrés Monsalve Herrera, Monika Cristina Echavarria Pedraza · ELEMENTOS · Colombia (Bogotá)

As part of the Bogota Botanical Garden's (JBB) Urban Agriculture Project in Colombia, a small-scale closed composting device was redesigned and optimized. The research proceeded in three phases: a diagnostic assessment of the existing prototype's dimensions and handling of organic materials to evaluate product quality and identify improvements, construction of a redesigned device, and experimentation to verify its efficiency. Oxygen, pH, humidity and temperature — the factors controlling an aerobic composting process — were tracked throughout, with improvements made to the device's size, ventilation mode, thermal insulation and ease of turning to increase small-scale composting efficiency.

Sylvester Jatta · Munich Personal RePEc Archive (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) · Global

A paper using a newly compiled dataset combining comparable, nationally representative household survey data from 15 developing or transition countries to analyze, in comparative international perspective, the importance of urban agriculture for the urban poor and food insecure. The potential for urban agriculture to play a substantial role in reducing urban poverty and food insecurity should not be overemphasized, the study finds, as its share of income and of overall agricultural production is often quite limited. At the same time, its role should not be too easily dismissed either: particularly across much of Africa, agriculture provides a substantial share of income for the urban poor and constitutes an important livelihood source for the households that rely on it. The study finds fairly consistent statistical evidence of an association between engagement in urban agriculture and dietary adequacy indicators.

Adriana Allen, Alexandre Apsan Frediani · City · Ghana

Drawing on a four-year research collaboration between the Development Planning Unit (DPU), the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), People's Dialogue, and the Ghana Federation of the Urban Poor, this paper examines the trajectories of female and male farmers working under different and rapidly changing land tenure systems across the Accra-Ashaiman corridor in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area, Ghana. It argues that urban agriculture can be interpreted not merely as gardening for beautification, subsistence, or therapy, but as a means through which marginalized groups actively claim spaces of daily sociability and political voice in the city.

Michiel Korthals · Wageningen Academic Publishers eBooks · Global

A conceptual essay (Wageningen Academic Publishers, 2013) contrasts the "productionist paradigm" in agriculture—criticized for reducing biodiversity, increasing erosion, harming animal welfare, depleting resources and widening rich-poor gaps despite feeding the world—with an "agrosystem" approach rooted in local farming practices, including variants such as agrarianism (farmer-led) and urban gardening (consumer-led). The paper proposes a revised, pluralist agrosystem framework built on negotiation and cooperation between farmers and consumers, redefining justice as fair recognition of diverse farming and food styles rather than fair distribution of outputs alone.