Urban agriculture

Urban agriculture is agriculture in a urbanised environment. It refers to the growing and sometimes the processing and distribution of food, in or near towns and cities and may include raising animals like chickens or goats, aquaculture, growing crops for food,... Urban agriculture reduces food miles (when grown in the neighborhood where it is consumed, the most damaging "last mile" of transport is eliminated), increases the supply of fresh food to those who don't get adequate natural foods in their diet due to low income or lack of time, and increases resilience by distributing food production. When cities transform from being only food consumers to also being food generators, they contribute to their own sustainability, improved health, and poverty reduction.

Benefits[edit | edit source]

Plants reduce temperatures and combat the urban heat island effect (UHI)^W; decreasing the need for air conditioning and improving the quality of urban life, provide fresh produce that tastes better and potentially requires fewer resources to grow than produce transported from outside the city, provide insulation as a green roof^W, function as living walls^W to help cure sick building syndrome (SBS)^W, and improve the appearance and feeling of the physical environment.

Urban agriculture does the following:

• Closes the open-loop system that imports food from rural zones and exports waste to regions outside urban areas.
• Uses vacant urban areas, wastewater, and organic solid waste for growing agriculture products.
• Conserves natural resources. For example, using wastewater for irrigation increases the amount of freshwater for drinking and household consumption.
• Helps preserve bioregional ecologies^W from being transformed into cropland.
• Reduces energy consumed in transporting food from rural to urban areas.
• Promotes local food production that in turn, reduces transportation and storage costs.
• Improves the quality of the urban environment through greening^W and reduces pollution.
• Fights against hunger and malnutrition since it facilitates food creation by and distribution among the urban poor. For example, in developing countries, the majority of urban agricultural production is for self-consumption, with surpluses being sold at market. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization^W of the United Nations (FAO), urban poor consumers spend between 60 and 80 percent of their income on food, making them very vulnerable to high food prices.
• Provides food and reduces household spending on consumables, thus increasing the amount of income allocated to other uses.
• Allows surpluses to be sold in local markets, generating more income for the urban poor.^[1] These urban agriculture activities may impact poverty and food security.^[2] Urban agriculture contributes to food security and food safety by increasing the amount of fresh vegetables, fruits and meat products available to city dwellers. A common and efficient form of urban agriculture is the biointensive^W method. Since urban agriculture promotes energy-saving local food production, urban and peri-urban agriculture are generally seen as sustainable practices.

Education[edit | edit source]

Urban farms are an effective educational tool for teaching children about healthy eating.^[3] An example of educational urban agriculture is Full Circle Farm, an eleven-acre farm located on a middle school campus in the heart of Silicon Valley^W. The farm is a "living campus" where students get real-world, hands-on agriculture experiences that cultivate both healthy eating habits and environmental leadership. Schools have foreseen the asset of local food production and are beginning to incorporate agricultural sections into their curricula; presenting it as a career opportunity. The data points to the positive impact on farming labor market with the help of sustainability technologies and shows the growth of farming industry employment and salary raise..^[4]

Waste reuse[edit | edit source]

Urban agriculture helps us close the loop on waste production and reuse^W. Since the mechanisms for waste reuse are compact, they can be very suitable for urban environments. Composting, vermicomposting and composting toilets require little space; greywater treatment requires more space but can still be incorporated into a city setting. Sewage treatment^W (for flush toilets^W) is most efficiently handled on a larger scale. In urban areas where industrial waste is included, the output may not be suitable for agricultural use. However, using the appropriate separation and treatment processes, there is potential for this rich resource to play a role in urban agriculture.

Waste reuse must be carried out carefully. If proper precautions are not taken, or if they are inadequate and happen to fail, waste reuse can result in the spread of disease. See No such thing as waste.

History[edit | edit source]

Historically, urban food growing has occurred in many ways. The following details just some of the examples:

• Community wastes were used in ancient Persia to feed urban farming.^[5]
• In Machu Picchu^W, water was conserved and reused as part of the city's stepped architecture.^[6]
• Allotment gardens^W came up in Germany in the early nineteenth century as a response to poverty and food insecurity.^[7] In Detroit, plots or potato patches were set aside to help alleviate hunger in the urban environment.^[8]
• Garden city plots were commonplace between 1905 to 1910.^[8]
• School gardens movement (1900-1920).^[8]
• Relief gardens were created during the era of the Great Depression (1930-1939).^[8]
• Liberty gardens (1917-20) after WWI and Victory garden^Ws spread during WWII (1941-1945) in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, to reduce pressure on food production and support war efforts.^[8]
• Community gardens (1970s and ongoing).^[8]

Community[edit | edit source]

Urban agriculture can take advantage of community and build social capital^W connections. A community garden in Western Sydney, Australia^W, brought different ethnic groups together to grow particular crops according to their strengths and traditions, and trade with others in the community.^{[9][verification needed]} Most community gardens are open to the public and provide space for citizens to grow plants for food or recreation. Seattle's P-Patch^W is an example of a well-established community garden. Community gardening is a valuable experience for children and can be incorporated into the local curricula.

Statistics[edit | edit source]

• 50 percent of the world's population lives in cities, and this number is growing.^{[verification needed]}
• 800 million people are involved in urban agriculture worldwide and contribute to feeding urban residents.^{[10][verification needed]}
• Low-income city dwellers spend 40 to 60 percent of their income on food.^[11]
• To feed a city of 10 million or more, at least 6,000 tons of food are needed daily.^[12]

Cautions[edit | edit source]

Soil contamination[edit | edit source]

Soil contamination^W is a potential problem in urban environments, particularly with regard to lead. The soil should be tested; if lead is present, increasing the pH can alleviate the problem. Lead can also be removed through phytoremediation^W with Indian mustard^W or spinach^W.^[13]

Impact[edit | edit source]

The importance of local food is often overstated, as the manner of production typically has a greater impact than the manner of transport. This case does not negate the value of growing food locally, but perspective and analysis are essential.

Mosquito-borne diseases[edit | edit source]

The impact of mosquito-borne diseases should be considered. Breeding grounds are created through standing water (even tiny amounts of rainwater may be enough for some species, such as the variety that spreads Dengue^W). Resting sites for adults may actually be more important than larval habitats.^[14]

^{[expansion needed]} See also mosquito control.

Food safety[edit | edit source]

It is advisable to take several food safety measures in order to minimize the health risks:

• Both humanure and greywater should be used with caution, or not used at all (especially on plants that are eaten raw), since these waste products can contain human pathogens. "Night soil," or human waste used historically as fertilizer, is known to cause illness especially among those not accustomed to eating food grown in this way.
• Greywater reuse can be made safer by greywater treatment and by underground irrigation or at least spreading the water by drip irrigation under a layer of mulch. Application of greywater, even treated greywater, may be restricted for a number of weeks prior to harvest.
• Groundwater recharge makes use of the soil's microorganisms and natural filtering ability and increases water availability without applying the greywater too close to the edible plants.
• Humanure from composting toilets is an extremely rich source of soil nutrients and soil microorganisms but must be extremely mature to be safe. Safety can be aided by applying the mature humanure to the empty garden bed first and then applying layers of safer soil and mulch.
• A safer place to apply these resources is where the edible plant parts are well above the ground - for example, on fruit trees or vines on trellises.
• Consideration must be given to the safety of food, especially leafy greens, in urban environments with high levels of lead and mercury.^[8]

Movements and trends[edit | edit source]

Movements and trends impacting the popular awareness of and interest in urban agriculture include:

• The Transition Towns movement, ecovillages, peak oil, and the local food (or locavore) movement.
• The Incredible Edible Towns movement beginning with Incredible Edible Todmorden.^[15]
• Increasing interest in fresh vegetables, herbs and fruit for the sake of food quality and health.
• Modern planning and design initiatives that are more responsive to urban agriculture because they fit within the concept of sustainable design. Urban agriculture is often tied to policy decisions to build sustainable cities.^[16]
• Popularity of green parties that are more open to the idea of urban food production.

Importance[edit | edit source]

Economic[edit | edit source]

Urban agriculture is an industry that responds to a city's nutritional demands from within that city with the use and reuse of that city's resources. This industry provides increased income and employment; producing valuable products that would otherwise not be available and saving household food dollars that can be used for different kinds of food or non-food items. These benefits are separate from other important benefits such as health, food security, and community.

Urban agriculture does the following:

• Expands a city's economy and creates entrepreneurship and employment opportunities through food production, processing, packaging and marketing.^[17]
• Increases food supply and reduces food costs.
• Supplies a wider choice of better quality products.
• Creates opportunities for women to be part of a city's informal economy since farming and selling activities can be combined with household tasks.^[18]
• Helps relieve chronic and emergency food insecurity. Chronic food insecurity refers to less affordable food and growing urban poverty while emergency food insecurity relates to breakdowns in the food distribution chain. Urban agriculture reverses these insecurities by making food more affordable and providing emergency supplies.^[19]

Such practices are widely seen as small-scale and part of the informal economy^W but where inadequate, unreliable and irregular access to food is a problem, urban agriculture has been a positive response. Households and small communities use vacant land and contribute not only to their household food needs but also to their city's food needs.^[20] Local food movements provide work. We could reasonably expect that unemployed^W populations in large cities and suburban^W towns would decrease if urban dwellers were given opportunities in food production and processing. This is especially attractive in areas with stagnant economies^W, or that have been negatively affected by the outsourcing^W of industrial jobs. Some community urban farms help women who would otherwise find it hard to get jobs in the formal economy find work.^[21] Participation from women yields a higher food production rate; producing the adequate amount for household consumption while supplying more for market sale.^[22]

Energy efficiency[edit | edit source]

The current industrial agriculture^W system leads to high energy costs for food transport. The average conventional produce item travels 2,400 kilometers (1,500 miles).^[23] While this cost is often much less than other factors like heated greenhouses^W and other energy used during production, reducing the food transport energy can be a valuable step toward reducing the ecological footprint of food.

Food quality[edit | edit source]

The greater freshness of local food is very appealing. Many prefer the taste of local agricultural products, or organic food. This quality reduces the need for preservatives^W and the use of modern varieties that sacrifice taste and quality for transportability.

Specific cities[edit | edit source]

Experiences and lessons from specific locations are described on these pages:

• Urban agriculture in Bangkok, Thailand
• Urban agriculture in Beijing, China
• Urban agriculture in Cairo, Egypt
• Urban agriculture in California
• Sustainable agriculture in Cuba
• Mumbai Port Trust terrace garden
• Sustainable agriculture in New York City
• Urban agriculture in Shenzhen, China
• Incredible Edible Todmorden

Implementation[edit | edit source]

To promote urban agriculture, do the following:

• Share the planning, work, and produce of community gardens with schools.
• Highlight various local projects like balcony gardens, "lazy gardens" and edible landscaping.
• Create a community kitchen to encourage micro food processors.
• Enforce regulations that emphasize and require edible landscaping in new buildings.
• Establish educational programs for gardeners and students that will impact their food choices and actions.
• Identify collection and reuse systems for stormwater, rainwater, greywater, and irrigation.
• Allocate space for farmers' markets.

Community centers[edit | edit source]

Community centers and gardens educate the community to see agriculture as an integral part of urban life. The Florida House Institute for Sustainable Development in Sarasota, Florida^W, serves as a public community and education center in which innovators with sustainable, energy-saving ideas can implement and test such ideas. Community centers like Florida House provide urban areas with a central location for learning about urban agriculture and integrating it with the urban lifestyle.

Other examples of community centers are Greensgrow Farms in Philadelphia^W and Northey Street City Farm in Brisbane, Australia^W. Greensgrow Farms uses an abandoned site as an urban farm to teach the community how food is grown and how to grow their own food. Northey Street City Farm hosts weekly community activities to educate and involve local residents in agricultural practices.

Community-based models[edit | edit source]

Creating a community-based infrastructure for urban agriculture means establishing local systems to grow and process food and transfer it from farmer to consumer. Some projects have collectively tended community farms on common land^W, much like eighteenth-century Boston Common^W. These include the Collingwood Children's Farm^W in Melbourne, Australia^W. Other community garden projects use the allotment garden^W model, in which gardeners care for individual plots in a larger gardening area, often sharing a toolshed and other amenities. Seattle's P-Patch^W gardens use this model, as does the South Central Farm^W in Los Angeles^W. Independent urban gardeners also grow food in individual yards and on roofs. Garden sharing^W and yard sharing^W projects seek to pair producers with land - typically, residential yard space. Roof gardens^W allow for urban dwellers to maintain green spaces in the city without having to set aside a tract of land.

Food processing on a community level can be achieved by centralizing resources in community toolsheds and processing facilities. The Garden Resource Program Collaborative, Detroit^W has cluster tool banks - different areas of the city that have toolbanks^W where tools, compost, mulch, tomato stakes, seeds, education and other resources are shared and distributed with the gardeners of that cluster. This group approach also strengthens the gardening community by providing transplants education on gardening, policy, and food issues, and by connecting gardeners via workgroups, potlucks, tours, field trips, and cluster workdays.

Farmers' markets^W provide a common land where farmers can sell their product to consumers. Large cities tend to open their farmers' markets on the weekends and one day in the middle of the week. For example, the farmers' market of Boulevard Richard-Lenoir^W in Paris, France^W, is open on Sundays and Thursdays. However, to create a consumer dependency on urban agriculture and to introduce local food production as a sustainable career for farmers, markets would have to be open regularly. The Los Angeles Farmers' Market^W is open seven days a week and has linked several local grocers together to provide different food products. The market's central location in Downtown Los Angeles^W provides interaction for a diverse group of sellers to serve their customers.

Large-scale intensive farming[edit | edit source]

High-density urban farming like vertical farms^W or stacked greenhouses can achieve many environmental benefits on a citywide scale that would otherwise be impossible. These systems produce potable water from wastewater, recycle organic waste back into energy and nutrients,^[24] and reduce food-related transportation while providing fresh food for large communities in almost any climate.

Issues[edit | edit source]

• Using wastewater for irrigation without careful treatment and monitoring can result in spreading diseases among the population.
• Cultivating on contaminated land is a health hazard for consumers and cultivating along roadsides exposes food to car pollution.
• Although agriculture and urbanization are considered to be incompatible activities since they compete for the access and use of limited land, urban agriculture effectively uses public and private vacant lots and other areas that are not suited for development like steep slopes and flood plains.
• Common problems include legal restrictions and economic impediments to accessing land and resources like reasonably priced water.
• Lack of tenure security acts as a preventive for farming due to the uncertainty in the land's use length.^[25]
• People who believe industrial farm production can produce food at larger volumes more efficiently are critical of urban agriculture.
• It is uncertain whether urban farming alone - farming very intensively on small land areas - could replace land-extensive production in rural areas that produce the bulk of our food products. Yet, hunger persists in both urban and rural areas (see food security), despite a subsidized industrial agriculture. The degree to which urban agriculture can address these food needs systemically is undetermined, although there are indications in some communities that it is an important food source.
• Other opponents argue that localized food production and the introduction of common resources and common lands into the urban areas would produce a tragedy of the commons. However, many urban farms and community gardens are managed privately or through other civil society organizations.
• Municipal greening policy goals can pose conflicts. For example, policies promoting urban tree canopy (UTC) are not sympathetic to food-production gardening.

Land access and property rights[edit | edit source]

Since urban agricultural activities are often conducted on vacant, municipal land, there have been rising concerns about the allocation of land and property rights. The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the FAO have published the "Guidelines for Municipal Policymaking on Urban Agriculture" and are working with municipal governments to create successful urban planning policy measures.^[26]

Including urban agriculture in local plans as proper land use will continue to help impoverished communities gain a better well-being while fighting urban poverty.

References[edit | edit source]

• Matthew Benson. (2015). Growing Beautiful Food. ISBN 978-1-62336-356-7</ref>

See also[edit | edit source]

• Allotment
• Urban permaculture
• ecological sanitation
• living wall
• mulch
• permaculture
• seed balls
• simple living
• sustainable agriculture
• vertical farming
• Category:Urban planning

External links[edit | edit source]

• Wikipedia:Good Agricultural Practices
• Wikipedia:Community Food Security Coalition
• Article about Chicago's City Farm
• City Farmer News
• Farming goes vertical (September 11, 2007). CNN.com.
• Growing Food for London conference Proceedings of the 2008 Growing Food for London conference to tackle urban food security
• Capital Growth Programme to establish 2,012 new food growing spaces for London (community and commercial) by 2012
• Skyfarming (April 2, 2007). New York Magazine.
• Small, Green, and Good: The Role of Neglected Cities in a Sustainable Future, a Boston Review article which argues that declining cities can use urban agriculture to provide local food sources
• Sustain: The alliance for better food and farming (UK) Network for news on urban agriculture projects and research
• Christensen, R. 2007. SPIN-Farming: advancing urban agriculture from pipe dream to populist movement Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy 3(2):57-60. http://sspp.proquest.com/archives/vol3iss2/communityessay.christensen.html. Published online August 28, 2007
• Upside-down tomato planters - commercial site.
• Urban Agriculture in the Developing World - from Worldchanging.com
• Urban Agriculture Notes
• Urban permaculture podcast
• Vertical Gardens: The Organic Wallpaper - from Worldchanging.com
• Urban Gardening forums at Permies.com