Research & reports

Greg Keeffe · Research Portal (Queen's University Belfast) · United Kingdom

This chapter focuses on developing sustainable growing infrastructure at two scales: a large-scale city-wide fuel-productive landscape using algae arrays in Liverpool and a hyper-localized neighborhood food production system in Salford, UK, utilizing a closed-cycle aquaponic system. The author proposes a three-part model for urban agriculture implementation—hardware, software, and interface—concluding that urban agriculture should be viewed as a process rather than a static design, with benefits extending beyond physical outputs like energy and food.

Jeanne Pourias, Éric Duchemin, Christine Aubry · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · Canada (Montreal); France (Paris)

This paper investigates the food function of collective gardens (CGs) in Paris, France, and Montreal, Canada, where their numbers have rapidly increased. Researchers conducted interviews, quantified production, and monitored plots to understand the quantities and types of fruits and vegetables produced, their destination, and space use. The results indicate a wide diversity of practices concerning CGs' food function, which should be considered alongside their multifunctionality.

Charlotte Flink, Jenny Persson · · Europe

This thesis examines whether Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), as an alternative food production model, can promote sustainable urban and rural development in Sweden, using a Triple Bottom Line (economic, environmental, social) framework across two parts: a literature review and a quantitative participant survey at the CSA farm Stackvallen. The literature review indicated CSA operations can contribute to sustainable societal development through economic stimulus and environmentally sound food supply, while the participant survey found respondents rated the social aspects low and valued the health and environmental aspects more highly.

Massimiliano Agovino, Antonio Garofalo, Angela Mariani · RIVISTA DI STUDI SULLA SOSTENIBILITA · Italy

This paper assessed and compared the urban environmental quality performance of Italian provinces using the Legambiente Index and the Local Moran Transition Probability Matrix. The results revealed a persistent dualism between Northern and Southern Italy and a lack of positive environmental spillover among neighboring provinces. The study suggests that Southern Italy should prioritize improving sustainable food sourcing for urban development.

Yvon Le · · France

This lecture focuses on five geographical questions concerning the rural-urban interface. It was shown that major food industries are not necessarily located in main cities, leading to a frequent disconnection between agricultural and regional centralities, and that the disconnection between cities and agricultural surroundings is challenged by farmers through short food supply chains. Access to the countryside by city dwellers is a major issue for social interaction, and urban agriculture opens new opportunities for urban planning.

E.J. Veen, P.H.M. Derkzen, A.J. de Visser · Food and Foodways · Netherlands

This article compares food acquisition habits among participants in four Dutch urban food-growing initiatives: two allotments and two Alternative Food Networks (AFNs). Allotment gardeners integrate gardening into daily routines and easily use harvests, while AFN members, who primarily engage in shopping, struggle to regularly consume urban-grown food due to competition with supermarkets. The study concludes that involvement in shopping versus growing significantly impacts urban-grown food consumption, indicating a limited effect of motivations to change the food system when confronted with everyday routines.

Hillary J. Shaw · · United Kingdom (Birmingham)

This chapter describes four stages by which people have become divorced from the origins of human food: industrialization, globalization, supermarketization, and dromology. Ashram Acres, established in 1981 in Birmingham, England, exemplifies many merits of urban agriculture, aiming to utilize the agricultural expertise of local migrants from South Asia, the Caribbean, and Ireland.

Attila Tóth, Ľubica Feriancová · Acta horticulturae et regiotecturae · Spain (Barcelona)

This study investigated squat farming as a typology of urban agriculture, focusing on the case study of Can Masdeu, a squatted and cultivated land at the northern city border of Barcelona, Spain. It aimed to understand how landscape and urban structures are influenced by land cultivation and how the social dimension of squat farming is structured. Spatial and perceptual analyses were applied, and users were interviewed through discussions and questionnaires, with results describing the spatial and social characteristics of squat farming at Can Masdeu.

Davide Olori · Archivio istituzionale della ricerca (Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna) · Italy

This publication aims to collect research contributions on new movements and self-organized initiatives that re-use and transform various parts of the city, including abandoned buildings, green areas, and public spaces. These experiences, such as informal community gardens and squatter occupations, can be interpreted as interstitial practices or a growing method of urban construction.

Alexander Follmann, Valérie Viehoff · Local Environment · Germany

This paper investigates NeuLand, a community garden created in March 2012 on a brownfield site in Cologne, Germany. It assesses NeuLand as typical of a new form of political engagement 2.0, focusing on local problems and direct actions, and its potential to offer a blueprint for alternative urban futures and new ways for citizens to claim their "right to the city." The study links the NeuLand experiment to broader discussions on alternative socio-ecological futures, extending beyond analyses of urban gardening solely for sustainable food production or community cohesion.

H. Renting · LA Referencia (Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas) · Europe

This contribution highlights a growing research interest in urban and peri-urban agriculture and related public policies, particularly within Europe and internationally. It presents major European research projects and relevant recent international conferences focusing on urban and peri-urban agriculture. The paper outlines proposed debate topics and analytical approaches used in these initiatives.

· Hart Publishing eBooks · United Kingdom (England and Wales)

This paper explores the phenomenon of people in England and Wales returning to the land for various food-growing projects, including over 1,000 community gardens and 82 school farms. It examines the legal frameworks regulating these diverse projects and finds that the legal framework is fragmented, poorly signposted, and often absent, with projects sometimes depending entirely on landowner goodwill. The study concludes that there is little coherency in the law regarding these initiatives.

Chiara Tornaghi, Barbara Van Dyck · Local Environment · United Kingdom

This paper explores the "spheres of influence" and contradictions that shaped the trajectory of the Edible Public Space project in Leeds, UK, drawing on the authors' personal experience. It analyzes the dynamics and contradictions at play in the formation of an urban gardening group stemming from scholarly and committed action ambitions. The study focuses on the role of spatial interventions in fostering social innovation in the public food and land agenda, aiming to capture learning elements for scholarly activism, political gardening, and radical urbanism.

Jean Lagane · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · France

This paper examines the challenges of food provisioning in Marseille due to global food networks and environmental issues like global warming and metropolization. A three-year ethnographic study of the "Marche du Cours Julien" in Marseille explored how citizens revived local farmers' markets and promoted bottom-up ecologization. The study also analyzed the links between the Cours Julien farmers' market, which hosts a French Community-supported agriculture (CSA), and the development of Alternative Food Networks and Short Food Supply Chains.

Serge Bonnefoy · SHILAP Revista de lepidopterología · France

This paper traces the historical trajectory of peri-urban agriculture in France, starting from the history of the Town/Country dualism and the phases of politicization of peri-urban agriculture, and examining the development of agglomeration policies into which agriculture has become embedded, identifying five distinct types of agricultural agglomeration policy. It describes the movements currently renewing peri-urban agriculture policy: the pursuit of sustainable cities (including opposition to urban sprawl), the food issue (strengthening agriculture's production function), and a return to a territorial economy. The paper focuses on the uncertainty of this policy argument and how it is exploited by different policies.

Zsófia Benedek · Econstor (Econstor) · Europe

A literature review of international research on short food supply chains (SFSC) and their impacts, combined with findings on the types already established in Hungary. SFSC consumers tend to be more highly educated than average; traditional forms such as farmers' markets attract older people while newer forms such as community-supported agriculture and web-based value chains attract younger people. The review finds that clear scientific evidence of SFSCs' positive environmental, social or economic impact is not always available, and in some cases traditional food supply chains prove cheaper and more environmentally beneficial, concluding there is no generally preferable SFSC solution given their heterogeneity.

Marian Simón Rojo, Nerea Morán Alonso · E.T.S. Arquitectura (UPM) eBooks · Spain

This paper argues that the resurgence of interest in urban and peri-urban agriculture is tied to a rediscovery of the importance of food security and local production, which has led to the development of the first local sustainable food plans. It states that this resurgence often comes with an aura of renewed modernity, whether through its creative and social-mobilization potential or through the dazzling technological innovation linked to new building-based production systems (vertical farming), and notes that professional and academic urban-planning circles have begun incorporating debate on organizing local agricultural systems, framed as strategic reserves in an energy-transition scenario, into reflection on the city's future.

Michela Felicetti · Advanced engineering forum · Italy

A paper examining whether the food hub concept can be applied to the Piana di Sibari area of Calabria, Italy, designated a Quality Agrifood District (DAQ) under regional law. After identifying features of the food hub concept within the area's largest cooperative, the paper argues that this arrangement represents an opportunity for small farmers to access conventional food supply chains from which they would otherwise be excluded. It frames food hubs as a hybrid of alternative and conventional food networks and, notably, as a way to address the economic viability problem faced by local food initiatives such as community-supported agriculture (CSA)—that is, the paper's premise is that CSA-type local food initiatives struggle to be economically viable on their own.

Marcelo Ortega Romero, Juan Mingot Marcilla, María Jesús García Martínez, Eduardo de Miguel, Miguel Izquierdo‐Díaz, Amaya Gómez · · Spain (Madrid)

This study evaluated the potential health risk from trace elements in urban garden soils in Madrid, Spain. Thirty-six composite soil samples were collected from the top 20 cm of six urban gardens, and concentrations of cobalt, chromium, copper, nickel, lead, and zinc were determined. The findings indicated that urban soils are significantly enriched in trace elements relative to background levels, suggesting a potential health risk.

María Antonia Fernández Nieto, Jorge Gallego Sánchez-Torija · Hábitat y Sociedad · Spain (Madrid)

An academic research group and a neighborhood association initiated a citizen participation process to recover a degraded urban space in the peripheral neighborhood of Puerta Bonita in Carabanchel, Madrid. This initiative aimed to convert the space into an urban community garden. The project seeks to reincorporate agriculture into the city with environmental sustainability criteria, influence local economies, regenerate neighborhood relations, and develop environmental education.

Marco Luca Stanchieri · X Jornadas de Sociología · Spain (Barcelona)

This paper explores the concept of "urban voids" in contemporary cities, focusing on abandoned plots resulting from unfulfilled urban reform projects. It argues that despite being defined as "voids," these spaces are sites of active human social practices, serving for common appropriation, self-management, conflict, and negotiation, fostering neighborhood cohesion and community action. Based on ethnographic data from Barcelona, the paper aims to expose the misleading nature of urbanistic language that defines socially vibrant spaces as "voids," questioning the social exclusion mechanisms supported by such definitions.

Sylvie Lardon, Salma Loudiyi · OpenEdition (OpenEdition) · France

Set against the mid-21st-century demographic challenge, in which urban growth projections toward 2050 raise alarms over cities' food security, food sovereignty, and the sustainability of increasingly fragile territorial food systems, a French essay questions our capacity to think through change and devise new modes of action. The available abstract is truncated at this point and provides no further detail.

Rebecca Bramall · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · United Kingdom

An essay (United Kingdom) centered on a 2007 allotment project - a "victory garden" set up in St James's Park, London, by the Imperial War Museum London with the Royal Parks - that traces connections between the Second World War "Dig for Victory" campaign and contemporary discourses of sustainability and austerity. Focusing on urban agricultural projects, it considers how austerity discourse might shape British consumers' understanding of agricultural systems and the formation of consuming subjects.

Chiara Tornaghi · · United Kingdom

This academic-activist research on grassroots urban agriculture initiatives, focusing on four projects in Leeds, UK, found that local and regional institutions have limited ability to respond to these new demands. Planning traditions constrain institutions, failing to create flexible public spaces. Consequently, short-term solutions are found in "loose spaces" or ad-hoc negotiations, but these remain emergency or residual practices, highlighting challenges for urban public space management.

Coline Perrin · International Planning Studies · France, Italy

Case studies in Provence and Tuscany indicate that planning prescriptions and land-market control are insufficient for protecting farmland on the urban fringe. Farmland is not effectively protected if regulatory approaches are not integrated into a global strategy for agriculture and food based on community involvement. Farmland protection policies are more effective when combining top-down policies with bottom-up initiatives and recognizing the multifunctional character of urban agriculture.