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

Abstract

Since two decades, urban agriculture has been booming and a wide range of forms, from urban allotment gardens to rooftop farming under greenhouse, is developing. Various benefits are recognized for urban agriculture integration within the city and a specific consideration is dedicated to ecosystem services. In this article, we have focused on cultural ecosystem services provided by urban micro-farms. The state of the art reveals that urban agriculture delivers cultural ecosystem services that are well perceived and evaluated by users, but there are still few studies on this topic. Based on the analysis of specific literature on cultural ecosystems and micro-farms in parallel to a period of observation and documentary research of five urban micro-farms either on rooftop or at soil level, located in Paris and its surroundings, we proposed a specific methodology. This methodology aimed at quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the cultural ecosystem services provided by urban micro-farms and is based on a framework, which distinguishes exogenous and endogenous cultural ecosystem services.

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

“…The cases presented in this Special Issue reflect the diversity of UA types following the typology of Krikser et al [6]. 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).…”

“…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].…”

“…When analyzing UA impacts socially [32,39] or multidimensionally [41], some studies applied the ecosystem services approach. 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.…”

“…In contrast, urban farmers rate internal sustainability, including its contribution to quality of life and maintenance of independence, as particularly important. To better understand the various impacts of UA, a French case study by Giacchè et al [32] on cultural ecosystem services provided by urban microfarms emphasized that further differentiation of actors benefiting from UA is needed. Thus, the authors tend to differ in their opinions of endogenously induced effects for UA users and exogenously induced effects for non-users such as urban residents or passersby in areas where UA is located.…”