Strawberry fields forever? Urban agriculture in developed countries: a review

By Hoi‐Fei Mok, Virginia G. Williamson, James R. Grove, Kristal Burry, S. Barker, Andrew J. Hamilton. Agronomy for Sustainable Development, 2013

431 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Food production in cities has long been a tradition in many countries around the world and a mainstream activity for many developed countries. While urban agriculture plays an important role in increasing food security and social well-being, it comes with significant costs and constraints. Here, we review the growth of urban agriculture throughout the developed world in order to clarify the different benefits, risks, and hindrances associated with the practice. Through this analysis, we identify the need for better understanding of the following five aspects if urban agriculture is to make a meaningful contribution to food security and social well-being in the future: (1) the impacts of continued urban sprawl and loss of peri-urban agricultural land; (2) appropriate government and institutional support at local, regional, and country levels; (3) the role of urban agriculture in self-sufficiency of cities; (4) the risks posed by pollutants from agriculture to urban ecosystems and from urban ecosystems to agriculture; and (5) the carbon footprint of urban agriculture and use of “food miles.” If urban agriculture is to have a legitimate place in resolving the global food crisis as advocates claim, then it is time to take urban agriculture seriously and assess more rigorously both the positive and negative impacts, especially carbon emissions. Only then can the world’s limited resources be properly allocated to the development of urban agriculture.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/02dd85af37143c49e0992e86ae7fa01a3ce037c3

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Citations in the corpus

Food First: COVID-19 Outbreak and Cities Lockdown a Booster for a Wider Vision on Urban Agriculture (2020, background): “Although urban agriculture is not the only possible solution to food security due to well-known limitations on space constraints for food self-provisioning [25,26], we support the idea that fostering the production of fresh vegetables and fruits (highly volatile in price and perishable) may act as a”
The Intersection of Planning, Urban Agriculture, and Food Justice: A Review of the Literature (2017, background): “There is a large body of research on urban agriculture in the Global South (Bryld, 2003 ; Lynch, Binns, & Olofi n, 2001 ; Mok et al., 2014 ), Europe (Dowler & Caraher, 2003 ; Morgan, 2009 , 2013 ), and Australia (Mason & Knowd, 2010 ), among other places.”
The Role of Urban Agriculture as a Nature-Based Solution: A Review for Developing a Systemic Assessment Framework (2018, background): “Thus, regulations or designs can influence the success of UPA and institutional framework conditions for the implementation of UPA are argued to need an in-depth understanding for successfully implementing UPA [14,24].”
Global assessment of urban and peri-urban agriculture: irrigated and rainfed croplands (2014, result): “More generally, while staple crops constitute a large portion of urban croplands, other annuals are a dominant urban crop in 73 percent of regions; a finding consistent with past reviews of urban agriculture [2, 3, 32].”