Effects of High-Tech Urban Agriculture on Cooking and Eating in Dutch Nursing Homes

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.

Sustainable Agri-Food Systems: Environment, Economy, Society, and Policy

Agri-food systems (AFS) have been central in the debate on sustainable development. Despite this growing interest in AFS, comprehensive analyses of the scholarly literature are hard to find. Therefore, the present systematic review delineated the contours of this growing research strand and analyzed how it relates to sustainability. A search performed on the Web of Science in January 2020 yielded 1389 documents, and 1289 were selected and underwent bibliometric and topical analyses. The topical analysis was informed by the SAFA (Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture systems) approach of FAO and structured along four dimensions viz. environment, economy, society and culture, and policy and governance. The review shows an increasing interest in AFS with an exponential increase in publications number. However, the study field is north-biased and dominated by researchers and organizations from developed countries. Moreover, the analysis suggests that while environmental aspects are sufficiently addressed, social, economic, and political ones are generally overlooked. The paper ends by providing directions for future research and listing some topics to be integrated into a comprehensive, multidisciplinary agenda addressing the multifaceted (un)sustainability of AFS. It makes the case for adopting a holistic, 4-P (planet, people, profit, policy) approach in agri-food system studies.

Introduction to the Special Issue “A Systemic Perspective on Urban Food Supply: Assessing Different Types of Urban Agriculture”

The production of food within cities through urban agriculture can be considered as a nature-based solution and is argued to be an important response to the current COVID-19 pandemic as well as to climate change and other urban challenges. However, current research on urban agriculture is still fragmented, calling for a systematic and integrative assessment of different forms of urban agriculture and the drivers and constraints for their effective realization. In this context, the Special Issue presents conceptual and empirical research articles from around the world on the impact and implementation potential of various types of urban agriculture. The studies of this Special Issue cover a broad range of impact and implementation dimensions, asssessment methods and geographical backgrounds that can support future studies to develop a systemic perspective on urban food production.