Human Development Report, 1990.@@@Human Development Report, 1991.

Urban agriculture, poverty, and food security: empirical evidence from a sample of developing countries.

https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(12)60435-8.pdf

Shaping cities for health: complexity and the planning of urban environments in the 21st century

Sustainable intensification in agricultural systems

Urban agriculture offers an alternative land use for integrating multiple functions in densely populated areas. While urban agriculture has historically been an important element of cities in many developing countries, recent concerns about economic and food security have resulted in a growing movement to produce food in cities of developed countries including the United States. In these regions, urban agriculture offers a new frontier for land use planners and landscape designers to become involved in the development and transformation of cities to support community farms, allotment gardens, rooftop gardening, edible landscaping, urban forests, and other productive features of the urban environment. Despite the growing interest in urban agriculture, urban planners and landscape designers are often ill-equipped to integrate food-systems thinking into future plans for cities. The challenge (and opportunity) is to design urban agriculture spaces to be multifunctional, matching the specific needs and preferences of local residents, while also protecting the environment. This paper provides a review of the literature on urban agriculture as it applies to land use planning in the United States. The background includes a brief historical perspective of urban agriculture around the world, as well as more recent examples in the United States. Land use applications are considered for multiple scales, from efforts that consider an entire city, to those that impact a single building or garden. Barriers and constraints to urban agriculture are discussed, followed by research opportunities and methodological approaches that might be used to address them. This work has implications for urban planners, landscape designers, and extension agents, as opportunities to integrate urban agriculture into the fabric of our cities expand.

/pdf/multifunctional-urban-agriculture-for-sustainable-land-use-54hr9g4mxi.pdf

Multifunctional Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Land Use Planning in the United States

Ever since the first French geographical accounts of (intraand peri-) urban agriculture (UA) were published on Central Africa in the 1960s, scattered and isolated UA surveys by individual social scientists (e.g. Egziabher et al. 1994) have gradually been giving way to institutional projects led by multidisciplinary teams. As a result, more and better information is now available on a larger number of regions, countries and cities around the world. Over the same period, public initiatives pioneered by few local and national governments have been followed by more widespread awareness on the part of local authorities, in their regional and global fora, for the growth and potential of agriculture in and around cities. More urban governments are now seeking to exchange policy and technical experiences to better deal with a spreading phenomenon in their own city.

Urban agriculture: definition, presence, potentials and risks.

Growing cities, growing food: urban agriculture on the policy agenda. A reader on urban agriculture.

At the end of the 20 century, humanity is involved in an unprecedented experiment: we are turning ourselves into an urban species. Large cities, not villages and towns, are becoming our main habitat. Urban growth is changing the face of the earth and the condition of humanity. In one century, global urban populations have expanded from 15 to 50% of the total, which itself has gone up from 1.5 to nearly 6 billion. The size of modern cities in terms of numbers as well as physical scale is unprecedented. In 1800, there was only one city with a million people, London. By 1990, the world's 100 largest cities accommodated 540 million people and 220 million people lived in the 20 largest cities, megacities of over 10 million people, some extending to hundreds of thousands of hectares.

/pdf/urban-agriculture-and-sustainable-cities-3frh8xqg4y.pdf

Urban agriculture and sustainable cities.

As cities grow, they add jobs and services, becoming more complex economically as well as physically. The need for new jobs places huge demands on cities that are struggling to provide the public services that growth demands, often in the face of existing unemployment. In the developing world, many of the new jobs needed are for unskilled and relatively uneducated workers, both migrants and those born in the city.

The impact of urban agriculture on the household and local economies.

The concept of food security has been on the international agenda as far back as 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirmed that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food.....” Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights went further, in 1966, when it affirmed the “right of everyone to be free from hunger”. This right to food is even characterised as a “fundamental right” and is acknowledged as the primary economic right of a human being. This global concern heightened after the 1974 World Food Conference, when diminishing world food supplies and large-scale food shortages triggered responses in the international community that focused on increasing domestic agricultural production and creating international grain reserves. Food security was identified with commercial food prices and physical food availability, rather than with demand and consumption, especially by the poor and vulnerable.

S. Gündel

Papers

Urban agriculture: definition, presence, potentials and risks.

Growing cities, growing food: urban agriculture on the policy agenda. A reader on urban agriculture.

Urban agriculture and sustainable cities.

The impact of urban agriculture on the household and local economies.

Urban agriculture and food security, nutrition and health.