Scale up urban agriculture to leverage transformative food systems change, advance social-ecological resilience and improve sustainability

Scaling up urban agriculture could leverage transformative change, to build and maintain resilient and sustainable urban systems. Current understanding of drivers, processes and pathways for scaling up urban agriculture, however, remains fragmentary and largely siloed in disparate disciplines and sectors. Here we draw on multiple disciplinary domains to present an integrated conceptual framework of urban agriculture and synthesize literature to reveal its social-ecological effects across scales. We demonstrate plausible multi-phase developmental pathways, including dynamics, accelerators and feedback associated with scaling up urban agriculture. Finally, we discuss key considerations for scaling up urban agriculture, including diversity, heterogeneity, connectivity, spatial synergies and trade-offs, nonlinearity, scale and polycentricity. Our framework provides a transdisciplinary roadmap for policy, planning and collaborative engagement to scale up urban agriculture and catalyse transformative change towards more robust urban resilience and sustainability.

Challenges to Promote Sustainability in Urban Agriculture Models: A Review

Urban agriculture (UA) can be used as an action to promote sustainability in cities and inform public health policies for urban populations. Despite this growing recognition, its implementation still presents challenges in countries in the Global North and Global South.

BACKGROUND

In this context, this systematic review aims to identify the development of frameworks for the implementation of UA as a sustainable action and its main opportunities and shortcomings in meeting urban socio-environmental demands.

METHODS

In this review, using the PRISMA protocol, we evaluated 26 studies on the interplay between UA and sustainability surveyed on the Web of Science to provide an overview of the state of the art.

CONCLUSIONS

In summary, it was possible to identify many key challenges in UA adoption, which regard air and soil contamination, availability of green areas, layout of urban infrastructure, food distribution, among others. Due to numerous socio-economic and environmental contextual factors in cities, especially when comparing realities of the Global North and Global South, there is a need to develop a model that can be adaptable to these different contexts. Thus, it is recognized that the concept of sustainability does not present a universal understanding and that in its search it could be argued that one of the most important gaps is still to address social issues in relation to environmental ones.

The 'Covid-Trigger': New Light on Urban Agriculture and Systemic Approach to Urbanism to Co-Create a Sustainable Lisbon

In 2018, Lisbon won the title of Green capital of Europe 2020. It was described by the Expert Panel as an inspirational city which had started its journey towards sustainability during a period of economic crisis. A year later, Covid-19 had become a global pandemic. Imposed confinements highlighted the extent to which globalisation has spread the virus, as well as the particular fragility of places like cities where people, living together, were asked to not physically interact anymore. Exploring further that very particular global crisis can help to identify the faults in our economic systems and to ask why Lisbon was neither resilient nor sustainable in the face of that adversity. In addition to highlighting how weak our health is, Covid-19 has exacerbated vulnerabilities in Lisbon such as job losses (especially in the touristic sector), food supply (Portugal imports 70% of its food) and food waste. This paper explores how the activity which, 'par excellence', meets the most basic of our needs (food), through the example of Urban Agriculture (UA), could contribute to discussions on what makes a city sustainable. A literature review on UA in Lisbon highlights its various benefits, complemented by a broader literature review which converges to showing how UA can help to address the vulnerabilities generated or exacerbated by Covid. Having shown its potential contribution to addressing crises, this article then suggests to examine how systems approaches could help to incorporate UA further in a new type of more participatory urbanism aimed at creating sustainable cities.

Why Home Gardens Fail in Enhancing Food Security and Dietary Diversity

Visions of sustainable cities mostly conjure up well tended home and community gardens, where owners and residents plant fruits and vegetables that supply some of their livelihood needs. Indeed, home gardens can contribute to household food security but often fail to do so. Moreover, gardens can provide several additional ecosystem services and impact entire communities. This paper seeks to answer why these gardens often do not provide adequate services to make a substantial contribution to food security and identifies possible solutions. We undertook a case study in South Africa in a low-income former township area. The area is characterized by poverty, high levels of unemployment and food insecurity. We interviewed 140 respondents with home gardens to determine what role their own garden plays in household food security. Only 10% of households were found to be completely food secure. Of the rest, 39% experienced hunger that affected everyone in the household and 51% were at risk of hunger. Despite the fact that 72% of the respondents planted vegetables or fruits, the gardens did not contribute substantially to food security. The respondents mostly bought their food, with subsequent food shortages when they did not have enough money. The dietary diversity and consumption of vitamin A-rich fruits and vegetables were very low. The most important constraints inhibiting urban agriculture in the study area were cultural practices, such as the presence of large, bare, open spaces, or “lebala,” the focus of home gardeners on ornamental species and lawns; and a reliance on purchasing of foods.

Scoping Out Elements of Sociocultural Adaptation in European Urban Agriculture

This paper explores and sheds light on the elements, complexity, and dynamics of sociocultural adaptation to innovation and climate change in European Urban Agriculture. We use a scoping-exploratory review to search and unveil elements of sociocultural adaptation (SCA) in the existing literature on European urban agriculture. We categorize these elements into three main categories. This categorization can inform and be further explored, operationalized, and developed in new case-study-based research and serve as a starting point to better understand social adaptation to innovation and climate change in urban contexts, and beyond. Key results draw attention to (a) socio-technical and socio-ecological innovations as critical to sociocultural adaptation to innovation and climate change (b) some elements of SCA identified through the scoping review seem more central than others for the adaption process (c) we are left with the question of whether we need to bridge social science with biology sciences, such as human behavioral biology and neurobiology to find the answer to deeper questions about SCA.