Formalizing Objectives and Criteria for Urban Agriculture Sustainability with a Participatory Approach

Abstract

The last few years have seen an exponential development of urban agriculture projects within global North countries, especially professional intra-urban farms which are professional forms of agriculture located within densely settled areas of city. Such projects aim to cope with the challenge of sustainable urban development and today the sustainability of the projects is questioned. To date, no set of criteria has been designed to specifically assess the environmental, social and economic sustainability of these farms at the farm scale. Our study aims to identify sustainability objectives and criteria applicable to professional intra-urban farms. It relies on a participatory approach involving various stakeholders of the French urban agriculture sector comprising an initial focus group, online surveys and interviews. We obtained a set of six objectives related to environmental impacts, link to the city, economic and ethical meaning, food and environmental education, consumer/producer connection and socio-territorial services. In addition, 21 criteria split between agro-environmental, socio-territorial and economic dimensions were identified to reach these objectives. Overall, agro-environmental and socio-territorial criteria were assessed as more important than economic criteria, whereas food production was not mentioned. Differences were identified between urban farmers and decision makers, highlighting that decision makers were more focused on projects’ external sustainability. They also pay attention to the urban farmer agricultural background, suggesting that they rely on urban farmers to ensure the internal sustainability of the farm. Based on our results, indicators could be designed to measure the sustainability criteria identified, and to allow the sustainability assessment of intra-urban farms.

Introduction to the Special Issue “A Systemic Perspective on Urban Food Supply: Assessing Different Types of Urban Agriculture”

“…It contains contributions on sociocultural [25,[29][30][31][32], commercial [33][34][35] and self-supply [36,37] UA types, along with studies focusing on either varying or mixed UA types [38][39][40][41]. Comparing the scope of the studies in terms of focusing on technology-or nature-based UA, the majority of the papers deal with nature-based forms of UA [25,[29][30][31]36,39,40,42], while only three papers investigate technology-oriented types of UA [33,35,37] (see Figure 1). All in all, the case studies cover towns and cities all over the world and address a wide range of various types of UA, its impact and implementation dimensions, research objectives, and methodologies reflecting the interdisciplinarity and international research of UA.…”

“…In the case study of Houessou et al [36] in Benin, the authors highlight that in addition to an insecure access to urban land, restricted marked access and inequality issues, insufficient government support is hindering the expansion of UA in Benin [36]. The authors suggest that the assessment of the benefits provided by UA (such as conducted by [29,32,33,35,37,39,40], see Section 2.2) can strengthen the political will to consider UA as an important part of an ecologically, economically, and socially sound urban development.…”

“…Eight papers in this Special Issue focus on impacts of UA, its assessment, and related recommendations for sustainable urban development. Similar to the studies in this Special Issue dealing with the implementation of UA, the focus of the papers on UA impacts is on the social dimension [32,37,39] and related multidimensional impacts [33,41]. Two papers deal with environmental impacts [35,40], and one takes a socioeconomic perspective [29].…”

“…In this regard, a Chinese case study by Xie et al [39] assessing landscape services provided by urban agricultural parks found that service supply and demand both lack scenery services, which should be considered when planning UA. Interestingly, while Dubová et al [30] suggested that drivers for engaging in community gardens differ among various population groups (see Section 2.1), also perceived impacts provided by UA differ among various UA actor groups [33,39,41].…”

Toward an Evaluation of Cultural Ecosystem Services Delivered by Urban Micro-Farms

“…These characteristics differentiate them from other forms such as community gardens or urban farms [9][10][11]. An increasing amount of attention is being paid to the various types of professional intra-urban agriculture, with a focus on the different technical systems [12], their function and level of professional development [13,14] or their business model [15]. However, in France, the term "urban farm" does not yet have a legally defined status, unlike traditional farming operations which are defined for statistical purposes by the term "exploitation agricole"(agricultural holding) as an economic and production hub meeting three conditions: (i) they carry out a farming-based activity; (ii) they reach or exceed a certain size (area, number of animals, production levels, etc.…”