Urban agriculture: a global analysis of the space constraint to meet urban vegetable demand
By Federico Martellozzo, J. Landry, D. Plouffe, V. Seufert, P. Rowhani, Navin Ramankutty. 2014
183 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Urban agriculture (UA) has been drawing a lot of attention recently for several reasons: the majority of the world population has shifted from living in rural to urban areas; the environmental impact of agriculture is a matter of rising concern; and food insecurity, especially the accessibility of food, remains a major challenge. UA has often been proposed as a solution to some of these issues, for example by producing food in places where population density is highest, reducing transportation costs, connecting people directly to food systems and using urban areas efficiently. However, to date no study has examined how much food could actually be produced in urban areas at the global scale. Here we use a simple approach, based on different global-scale datasets, to assess to what extent UA is constrained by the existing amount of urban space. Our results suggest that UA would require roughly one third of the total global urban area to meet the global vegetable consumption of urban dwellers. This estimate does not consider how much urban area may actually be suitable and available for UA, which likely varies substantially around the world and according to the type of UA performed. Further, this global average value masks variations of more than two orders of magnitude among individual countries. The variations in the space required across countries derive mostly from variations in urban population density, and much less from variations in yields or per capita consumption. Overall, the space required is regrettably the highest where UA is most needed, i.e., in more food insecure countries. We also show that smaller urban clusters (i.e., <100 km2 each) together represent about two thirds of the global urban extent; thus UA discourse and policies should not focus on large cities exclusively, but should also target smaller urban areas that offer the greatest potential in terms of physical space.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/44216a227dd63a05a6ca7fc4574fea912e3e7423
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Citations in the corpus
- Consolidating the current knowledge on urban agriculture in productive urban food systems: Learnings, gaps and outlook (2019, background): “Even though there is considerable urban farming activity (Hamilton et al., 2014), Martellozzo et al. (2014) have found the potential for self-sufficiency for most of the developing countries with their densely populated cities to be rather small.”
- The effect of education on household food security in two informal urban settlements in Kenya: a longitudinal analysis (2016, background): “In SSA, urban agriculture remains mainly informal, sometimes outlawed and is not integrated in urban planning, making it unsustainable (Martellozzo et al. 2014).”
- Urban versus conventional agriculture, taxonomy of resource profiles: a review (2016, background): “Very optimistic estimates assert that UA could supply 100 % of global urban vegetable needs with 40 % of urban land at current yields (Martellozzo et al. 2014), while others have estimated that UA already produces 15–20 % global food (Abdulkadir et al. 2012).”