The deliberative practitioner: Encouraging participatory planning processes.

For many activists and scholars, urban agriculture in the Global North has become synonymous with sustainable food systems, standing in opposition to the dominant industrial agri-food system. At the same time, critical social scientists increasingly argue that urban agriculture programs, by filling the void left by the "rolling back" of the social safety net, underwrite neoliberalization. I argue that such contradictions are central to urban agriculture. Drawing on existing literature and fieldwork in Oakland, California, I explain how urban agriculture arises from a protective counter-movement, while at the same time entrenching the neoliberal organization of contemporary urban political economies through its entanglement with multiple processes of neoliberalization. By focusing on one interpretation or the other, however, rather than understanding such contradictions as internal and inherent, we risk undermining urban agriculture's transformative potential. Coming to terms with its internal contradictions can help better position urban agriculture within a coordinated efforts for structural change, rather than promoting farming in cities as an end unto itself, one of many means to an end rather than an end unto itself.

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Radical, reformist, and garden-variety neoliberal: coming to terms with urban agriculture's contradictions

Performance and implementation of low impact development - A review.

Food security is becoming an increasingly relevant topic in the Global North, especially in urban areas. Because such areas do not always have good access to nutritionally adequate food, the question of how to supply them is an urgent priority in order to maintain a healthy population. Urban and peri-urban agriculture, as sources of local fresh food, could play an important role. Whereas some scholars do not differentiate between peri-urban and urban agriculture, seeing them as a single entity, our hypothesis is that they are distinct, and that this has important consequences for food security and other issues. This has knock-on effects for food system planning and has not yet been appropriately analysed. The objectives of this study are to provide a systematic understanding of urban and peri-urban agriculture in the Global North, showing their similarities and differences, and to analyse their impact on urban food security. To this end, an extensive literature review was conducted, resulting in the identification and comparison of their spatial, ecological and socio-economic characteristics. The findings are discussed in terms of their impact on food security in relation to the four levels of the food system: food production, processing, distribution and consumption. The results show that urban and peri-urban agriculture in the Global North indeed differ in most of their characteristics and consequently also in their ability to meet the food needs of urban inhabitants. While urban agriculture still meets food needs mainly at the household level, peri-urban agriculture can provide larger quantities and has broader distribution pathways, giving it a separate status in terms of food security. Nevertheless, both possess (unused) potential, making them valuable for urban food planning, and both face similar threats regarding urbanisation pressures, necessitating adequate planning measures.

/pdf/contributing-to-food-security-in-urban-areas-differences-43ff13e64x.pdf

Contributing to food security in urban areas: differences between urban agriculture and peri-urban agriculture in the Global North

Problem, research strategy, and findings: We draw on a multidisciplinary body of research to consider how planning for urban agriculture can foster food justice by benefitting socioeconomically disadvantaged residents. The potential social benefits of urban agriculture include increased access to food, positive health impacts, skill building, community development, and connections to broader social change efforts. The literature suggests, however, caution in automatically conflating urban agriculture’s social benefits with the goals of food justice. Urban agriculture may reinforce and deepen societal inequities by benefitting better resourced organizations and the propertied class and contributing to the displacement of lower-income households. The precariousness of land access for urban agriculture is another limitation, particularly for disadvantaged communities. Planners have recently begun to pay increased attention to urban agriculture but should more explicitly support the goals of food justice in t...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01944363.2017.1322914

The Intersection of Planning, Urban Agriculture, and Food Justice: A Review of the Literature

Green political theory has discovered urban areas as important spaces for the cultivation of ecological citizenship. Here, we explore urban agriculture's contribution to ecological citizenship, a concept that emphasises opportunities for public participation in, and social learning about, environmental decisions. Our analysis is based on participant-observation and open-ended interviews with the leaders and community participants of seven urban agricultural organisations in Philadelphia. Following a brief discussion of urban ecological citizenship and our study design, we discuss how urban agriculture promotes participation and learning.

Urban agriculture and ecological citizenship in Philadelphia

The traditional approaches to resolving urban stormwater problems include costly expansion of collections systems and/or creation of in-line storage and treatment capacity. An emerging ‘green’ infrastructure (GI) approach would instead reduce runoff sources. An agent-based model is used to explore the spatiotemporal emergence of rain gardens and green roofs in Point Breeze, a 175 ha neighbourhood in South Philadelphia, PA, under two different scenarios. In the first, household GI adoption rules consider only economic self-interest and the physical compatibility of each GI technology with lot characteristics. In the second scenario, the adoption rules are enhanced based on insights into the possible behaviour of property owners, as intuited by the designers/authors over a two-year period using a variety of empirical methods. In Scenario 2, relevant knowledge and perceptions are transferred to household decision-makers through social networks, and exposure to GI is assumed to diffuse GI innovation. The two ...

Decentralised green infrastructure: the importance of stakeholder behaviour in determining spatial and temporal outcomes

The Philadelphia Water Department is the first US water utility to propose a ‘green stormwater infrastructure’ (GSI) approach to managing urban stormwater. Given that many actors individually make decisions regarding the surface texture of urban watersheds, planning and installing an urban-scale GSI programme is both complex and uncertain. Whether and how water utility officials interact with watershed stakeholders introduces important questions about methodologies for participation, both in the policy process and the analysis thereof. We critically examine a participatory process employed in a Philadelphia neighbourhood in terms of Deliberative Policy Analysis (DPA). Informed by interpretive methodology, our analysis is two-fold: (1) we examine the potential as well as the challenges of using DPA in the analysis and practice of policy-making and, at the same time, (2) we consider the use of DPA under adverse circumstances, including extreme inequality and distrust. We outline some ways in which D...

Katharine Travaline

Papers

Urban agriculture and ecological citizenship in Philadelphia

Decentralised green infrastructure: the importance of stakeholder behaviour in determining spatial and temporal outcomes

Deliberative Policy Analysis and Policy-making in Urban Stormwater Management