Research & reports

Maleka P. Hashmi, Kitrina M. Carlson · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · Global

A student-driven, community-engaged learning course on food systems and choices was developed to enhance student understanding of food security determinants. The course, guided by the socio-ecological model, included student-led modules and community research projects in metro Atlanta, focusing on local food distribution and access in low-income areas. It culminated in a symposium and research reports, with a grant from Emory's CFCP supporting community collaboration.

Anna Biebrauer · University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy (University of Minnesota) · Global

This handbook provides a basic design primer for urban farmers, gardeners, and community groups interested in creating pocket farms, community gardens, or CSAs. It compiles urban agriculture components, precedents, and design considerations for arrangement, construction, perception, and use by farmers and their communities. The suggested ideas and plants are tailored for the Northern climate (hardy to USDA Zone 4).

&NA; · Nurse Educator · Global

This paper describes the development and integration of a multidisciplinary community garden as a service project for a baccalaureate nursing cohort at an urban university. It discusses the application of professional ethics, service, nutritional theory, and community health nursing competencies within this project.

Owen Metcalfe, Claire Higgins, T. Lavin · Oxford University Press eBooks · Ireland

This chapter considers the development of Health Impact Assessment (HIA) on the island of Ireland over a 10-year period. While not a statutory requirement, HIA has received some support from national and local government as a decision-support tool to enhance healthy public policy. New public health frameworks in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in 2012 have the potential to embed HIA more systematically. The Institute of Public Health in Ireland has played a key role in building capacity for HIA and supporting its practice, with a case study examining how HIA was used to add a health and health inequalities lens to a cross-border community garden development program.

Takao Ugai · ScholarSpace (University of Hawaii at Manoa) · Global

This investigation aims to develop a new urban scheme for "Cultivating Urbanism" by adapting agricultural practices into existing urban fabrics to create pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use, high-density cities filled with agriculture. The study analyzes the history of urban systems and agriculture, drawing on New Urbanism and Agricultural Urbanism to propose new urban typologies. It investigates the paradigm of ecology, lifestyle, food products, and physical and psychological benefits, using Shinjuku, Tokyo, as a case study for applying urban agriculture methodologies to various building prototypes.

David M. Hunt, Stephanie Geiger‐Oneto, Philip E. Varca · Journal of Consumer Behaviour · Global

This exploratory field study, drawing on community theory, examined whether engagement in co-production activities in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) leads to greater product satisfaction for consumers. Results indicated that two types of value co-creation—commitment to co-production and behavioral involvement in product-related activities—were positively correlated with product satisfaction. These findings support the notion that value co-creation provides value for consumers.

Alberto Graglia, Giulia Mazzanti · TERRITORIO · Cuba

This paper reflects on the conditions that enabled the rapid and large-scale spread of urban agriculture practices in Cuba, making it an emblematic example of reducing economic dependency on oil. The success of urban agriculture in Cuba is attributed to the country's unique history and its economic and political circumstances.

Iwona Makuch · Soil Science Annual · Global

This study investigated the influence of intensive horticulture on lead content and its fractions in soil profiles from house gardens, allotment gardens, and arable fields. It was not determined that the manner of usage had any influence on total lead content or its distribution in soil profiles. However, the usage manner did influence the content and distribution of lead fraction III, which is connected with organic matter, with humus horizons of garden soils showing the highest content.

Marit Rosol, P. Schweizer · City · Switzerland (Zurich)

This paper investigated how urban agriculture projects based on Solidarity Economics principles can develop new economic forms as an alternative to neo-liberal capitalism, focusing on the Swiss gardening cooperative ortoloco. For two years, ortoloco, a peri-urban organic farm with explicit political aims beyond food supply, successfully applied and continuously developed these principles in its economic practice. The project demonstrates the potential for developing new economic forms based on solidarity.

Abdullah Adam-Bradford, Duncan McGregor, Dávid Simon · · Ghana (Kumasi)

Rapid urbanization in Kumasi, Ghana, and its peri-urban areas leads to significant pollution and waste disposal problems, exacerbated by rapid growth, poverty, and weak local governance. Waste management services are rarely provided in these peri-urban areas despite increasing settlement densities. Community-based strategies promoting nutrient recycling, such as converting organic waste into compost for urban and peri-urban agriculture, offer opportunities to address these issues.

Fungai Hamilton Mudzengerere · · Zimbabwe (Bulawayo)

This research investigated the contribution of women to food security and family livelihoods through urban agriculture in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Primary data collected through observations and interviews showed that women practice urban agriculture more than men and play a crucial role in household food security. While women make decisions on crop types, harvest times, and markets, they face challenges with land ownership, financing, and market access, which negatively affect their agricultural activities.

Karl Hampton · · Australia

The EnvironmeNT grants initiative has supported various areas, including Indigenous Ranger groups for weed management, wildlife rescue services, school recycling projects, and the establishment of community gardens. It also provided funds for threatened species protection and feral animal impact reduction.

Batanai L Sammie, Charles Nyamutowa, Munyaradzi Gwazane · International Journal of Scientific Research · Zimbabwe

This study used FGDs and case studies to identify perceived causes of failure of NGO urban agriculture initiatives in Zimbabwe. The study identified the principal-agent relationship between NNGOs and LNGOs as the epicenter of all initiative failures.

Batanai L Sammie, Munyaradzi Gwazane, Charles Nyamutowa · International Journal of Scientific Research · Zimbabwe

A 2012 questionnaire survey of 40 cultivators in Gweru, Zimbabwe, collected baseline demographic information on urban open field cultivation. It found that 58% of field owners were men, 76% were between 25 and 65 years old, and children contributed 35% of the labor; education levels were 15% tertiary/university, 5% "A"-level, 48% "O"-level, and 27% primary. The study concludes that open field cultivation is a family practice engaged in across all social classes and recommends legitimizing urban agriculture as an integral part of Zimbabwean urban life.

Keith Sterling Miller · University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy (University of Minnesota) · Global

This literature review was conducted to support the design of a Community Garden Social Impact Assessment Toolkit. Its first section reviews key literature defining social capital, including its forms, distinctions, and conceptual limits; its second section reviews the most relevant research literature on social capital and community gardens. The review played three roles in developing the toolkit: providing a conceptual foundation for social capital, informing an interview guide used with community garden stakeholders, and shaping reflection exercise questions within the toolkit. To make the toolkit accessible to a wide and diverse audience, it deliberately avoids the phrase "social capital," instead using language that captures its essence and meaning as defined in the literature.

Lucien Armel Awah Manga, D. Kovačević · · Cameroon

Using survey data collected by the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD) among urban-farming households in the lowland area of Yaounde, Cameroon, a multinomial logit model analyzed the factors affecting choice of solid waste disposal method. Household size and accessibility of the residential area increased the probability of choosing municipal infrastructure (bins and garbage trucks) over recycling or illegal dumping, while longer years of residence, more agricultural experience, and greater distance to communal containers promoted illegal dumping or recycling instead. Given low waste-collection rates in the area, the study recommends building waste transfer stations in or near the lowland areas to support both household waste management and farming activities.

Andrea Calori · TERRITORIO · Global

The essay traces how agriculture has long been part of the urban planning policies of many cities and international institutions, while noting that agriculture and rural development only recently entered planning debates, delayed as part of the broader development of planning shaped by the 'overcoming of the rural' made explicit by 'modern' development. It connects several key turning points in how the role of the rural has been reconstructed globally in recent decades, offering new content for future action plans.

Zai Xue-ming · Horticulture & Seed · Global

A Chinese report on building a practical teaching system for applied urban horticulture talent, using the College of Horticulture at Jinling Institute of Technology as a case example, addressing systematic skills training, improving the occupational skills of urban gardening talent, and enhancing students' innovation and entrepreneurial capability.

Sofie Engberg · · Global

This study takes a corporate perspective on urban farming to identify factors enabling value creation, using a qualitative approach combining a literature review with a case study -- document analysis and interviews -- of an urban farming corporation that uses greenhouses for production. Drawing on stakeholder theory, triple-bottom-line theory and hybrid organisation theory, it concludes that urban farming can generate economic, environmental and social value simultaneously, that enabling factors include favourable resource availability and active stakeholder dialogue, and that greenhouse cultivation allows for minimal use of pesticides and fertilizers.

Amadou Diop, Seyni Ndiaye · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · Senegal

A study replicating earlier field surveys on crop yields and nutritional benefits of urban farming in Dakar, Senegal, using standardized sampling across selected urban villages. Crop yields from the replicated plots showed an average increase of 15% over initial estimates, with significant variation between crop types such as vegetables versus grains. Nutritional analysis found that urban farming increased micronutrient content in staple foods by up to 20%, particularly in leafy greens and fruits.

Zoey Rogers, Elizabeth Bragg · Ecopsychology · Australia

This study examined what motivates residents of Melbourne, Australia, to lead an environmentally sustainable lifestyle, focusing specifically on the role of "sense of place." Nineteen in-depth interviews were conducted with residents engaged in three types of sustainability activism: personal (e.g., energy and water saving, shopping at farmers' markets), group (e.g., community gardens, sharing neighborhood goods), and political (e.g., lobbying and organizing for structural change). Participants did report a sense of place in Melbourne, but what motivated their action was a broader sense of connection with nature and the planet, awareness of the human-made and cultural/political environment, and their personal health, relationships and community — not necessarily tied to a specific geographical location within the city. Motivating factors differed slightly across activist types, though connection with nature was consistent across all groups; the authors suggest that in urban settings, local sense of place may act as an enabler and reinforcer of action — providing a place to act and people to act with — rather than as a motivator in itself.

Maira Echeverry, Sebastián Gutiérrez, Julián Pineda, Nelson Ravelo · · Colombia

This account describes Barrio San Luis, an informal settlement on the eastern hills of Chapinero, Bogotá, Colombia, formed by rural-to-urban displacement and still undergoing legalization, where residents obtained services such as a community-run water system through collective organizing. It describes the Casa Taller Las Moyas, a project founded roughly seven years earlier to serve neighborhood children and youth left without care while parents work, offering workshops in baking, ceramics, crafts and urban agriculture in two daily shifts organized around school schedules; the text ends mid-sentence and provides no further data on the seed-conservation activities named in the title.

Ziying Zhang · Ningxia Journal of Agriculture and Forestry Science and Technology · Global

A brief review that starts from the definition of urban agriculture, outlines the main models of urban agriculture found abroad, and summarizes the experience and lessons of foreign urban agricultural development. No quantitative data are presented.

Muhammad Ali Memon · Apple Academic Press eBooks · Global

A book chapter (2012, no specific region) on Integrated Solid Waste Management (ISWM) based on the 3R approach (reduce, reuse, recycle) discusses optimizing waste management across all waste-generating sectors — municipal, construction and demolition, industrial, urban agriculture, and healthcare facilities — and all stakeholders, including generators, service providers, regulators, government, and communities. It traces solid waste management (SWM) from an original focus on reducing public health risk, to a later environmental focus, to a more recent emphasis on resource conservation and recovery under the 3R approach, and describes the ISWM concept — streamlining source separation, collection and transport, transfer/material recovery, treatment/resource recovery, and final disposal — as expanding under UN Environment Programme promotion from its original municipal solid waste management (MSWM) scope to cover all waste-generating sectors.

André Viljoen, Katrin Bohn · Architectural Design · Global

This piece by André Viljoen and Katrin Bohn of Bohn&Viljoen Architects juxtaposes the organopónicos, or market gardens, of Cuba — which proliferated after the US trade blockade of the 1990s and the resulting fuel shortages — with more recent food-production experiments in North American cities that draw on the Cuban example. The authors argue that in urban agriculture there is a direct connection between scarcity and abundance, with the threat of food shortages repeatedly acting as an effective trigger for food-growing enterprises, and that produce can be grown even with few or limited resources.