Urban Agriculture

Urban agriculture is the production of food within the boundaries of a city. Urban agriculture can be a pot of herbs grown on a balcony, backyard gardening, rooftop gardening, greenhouses, market and community gardens, edible landscaping, and even beekeeping. To learn more about Collective Roots' work in the area of urban agriculture, please click here.

Urban agriculture has many beneficial functions such as entrepreneurial food production, recreation, education, neighborhood beautification, gathering spaces, and community building. It also contributes to a sustainable urban environment by improving soil and air quality, supporting biodiversity by providing habitats for insects and birds, and reducing unnecessarily high temperatures caused by the heat island effect. Additionally, growing and distributing food within cities decreases energy needs and costs associated with long distances and conventional growing methods.

Though community gardening can be considered a component of urban agriculture it should not be confused with gardening for urban food production. Often as a part of a City’s parks and recreation department, community gardens are usually established as form of recreation and neighborhood beautification; they are located in small lots or parks; and they are maintained by neighborhood residents and volunteers. Any food from these gardens is usually consumed on a small scale, usually by individuals and families. On the other hand, the purpose of community urban food production is to primarily grow organic food for sale (often to people in underserved neighborhoods), provide job skills training, and recover food waste for fertilizer.

Community urban food production attempts to maintain a sustainable food chain within a shorter area by producing, processing, selling, and composting food within a neighborhood or city.

All over the world there is a turn to urban gardening and urban agriculture that, combined with technological breakthroughs on the energy front, offers hope for a sustainable future.

In a report entitled Urban Agriculture, the UN Development Program documents how urban farming is spreading in every part of the world, both developed and developing. In the U.S., for example, 40 percent of the dollar value of food output in 1990 came from metropolitan urban areas -- up from 30 percent in 1980. In 1990, 65 percent of Moscow's economically struggling families raised their own food, up from 20 percent in 1970. There are 80,000 community gardeners in Berlin with 16,000 on a waiting list.

Urban agriculture is not new to American cities. During the Second World War, North Americans were encouraged to plant Victory Gardens to grow their own food so that larger agricultural production could be channeled to feeding Allied troops abroad. Urban dwellers in the United States and Canada converted backyards, empty lots and rooftops into gardens to grow hundreds of thousands of tons of fruit and vegetables.

Today, food security and hunger are pressing concerns for many cities. Urban gardening not only “provides low income people with an important safety net where they can grow nourishing foods and save income for themselves and their families,” but it can provide the entire city with opportunities for economic development and community revitalization as residents take pride in neighborhoods gardens and provide all residents with reliable access to fresh and nutritious foods and a sense of community self-sufficiency. -Section of the Oakland Food System Assessment. View the whole assessment by clicking here.

Some articles on Urban Agriculture are listed below. View Collective Roots Urban Agriculture Resources and Links page by clicking here.

UN / FAO site on Urban Agriculture and Peri-Urban Agriculture.

The Community Food Security Coalition provides a great overview of urban agriculture:

Urban Agriculture and Community Food Security in the United States:
Farming from the City Center to the Urban Fringe, Prepared by the Urban Agriculture Committee of the CFSC, February, 2002. Principal Author: Katherine H. Brown. Contributors: Martin Bailkey, Alison Meares-Cohen, Joe Nasr, Jac Smit, Terri Buchanan. Editor: Peter Mann

"Urban agriculture includes greenbelts around cities, farming at the city’s edge, vegetable plots in community gardens, and food production in thousands of vacant inner-city lots. Further, urban agriculture comprises fish farms, farm animals at public housing sites, municipal compost facilities, schoolyard greenhouses, restaurant-supported salad gardens, backyard orchards, rooftop gardens and beehives, window box gardens, and much more. Urban farming includes horticulture, aquaculture, arboriculture, and poultry and animal husbandry. The potential for food production in cities is great, and dozens of model projects are demonstrating successfully that urban agriculture is both necessary and viable."

The International Development Research Centre is doing some phenomenal work in the area of urban agriculture. Check out these publications and links:

Growing better Cities: URBAN AGRICULTURE FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT by Luc J.A. Mougeot, Published by the International Development Research Centre, www.idrc.ca / info@idrc.ca

“In the past two decades, some enlightened municipalities have recognized the value of urban food self-reliance and begun to work with "urban farmers" rather than against them. Today, urban agriculture is increasingly on the international agenda, recognized as part of a comprehensive solution to the problems of runaway growth of cities in developing countries.”

The entire publication may be read online at www.idrc.ca/books, and serves as the focal point for an IDRC thematic Web site on urban agriculture: www.idrc.ca/in_focus_cities.

Cities Farming for the Future: Urban Agriculture for Green and Productive Cities, Edited by René van Veenhuizen. Published in the Philippines in 2006 by International Institute of Rural Reconstruction and ETC Urban Agriculture

“The livelihood of a large number of people in cities in developing countries, especially the poor and women, depends completely or partly on urban agriculture. These agricultural activities take place in various parts of cities, both in the built-up area (in back yards, along streams and railway reservations, on vacant public or private land) as well as in the rapidly changing sub- and peri-urban areas. Attention to urban agriculture is steadily increasing.”

Cities Farming for the Future highlights research that indicates that urban agriculture has multiple roles and functions and plays an important role in:

• enhancing urban food security, nutrition and health
• creating urban job opportunities and generation of income especially for urban poverty groups and provision of a social safety net for these groups
• contributing to increased recycling of nutrients (turning urban organic wastes into a resource)
• facilitating social inclusion of disadvantaged groups and community development
• urban greening and maintenance of green open spaces

SAGE
SAGE’s mission is to engage regional diverse populations with the sustainable agriculture movement and to develop urban edge agriculture as a vital urban-rural interface. The programs and projects undertaken by SAGE promote its vision and are designed to meet the following goals.

• Foster and support innovative projects linking urban and rural places
• Demonstrate the connections between community health, sustainable agriculture, metropolitan infrastructure and growth, housing, and regional land use planning
• Link urban community food security needs with the needs of sustainable family farmers