Urban agriculture for sustainable cities: using wastes and idle land and water bodies as resources

Abstract

Urban agriculture for sustainable cities: using wastes and idle land and water bodies as resources describes how cities can be transformed from being only consumers of food and other agricultural products into important resource-conserving, health-improving, sustainable generators of these proucts.

Contributing to food security in urban areas: differences between urban agriculture and peri-urban agriculture in the Global North

“…While the contribution of UA to a resilient local food system is highly valued, the subject of UA itself remains vague. In recent years, scholars have developed various definitions of UA (Smit and Nasr 1992;Mougeot 2001;De Zeeuw et al 2001;Dubbeling and Merzthal 2006;Mendes et al 2008;Bohn and Viljoen 2010;Pearson et al 2010;Ackerman 2011;van der Schans and Wiskerke 2012). The core concept at the heart of all these definitions is the understanding that UA involves food production in urban areas.…”

“…The rapid, often uncontrolled growth, of some cities there led to an increase in poverty, food insecurity and unemployment in both the urban and periurban populations (FAO 2007;Dubbeling et al 2010). UA and PUA are often not a choice; they are a means of survival, providing people not only with food, but also a living (Smit and Nasr 1992;Hamilton et al 2014). Moreover, the lack of technologies such as a distribution cold chain or refrigerators at home reinforces the necessity to produce perishables close to urban centres.…”

“…Moreover, the lack of technologies such as a distribution cold chain or refrigerators at home reinforces the necessity to produce perishables close to urban centres. UA and PUA are discussed and promoted as strategies for sustainable development (Smit and Nasr 1992;FAO 2007;De Bon et al 2010) and often regarded as one entity, regularly labelled UPA, the abbreviation for 'urban and peri-urban agriculture' (FAO 2007;De Zeeuw et al 2011). Production in UA as well as in PUA in the Global South is characterised by the following features: It is both subsistence and market oriented, farmers and gardeners do not necessarily have a farming background (Dubbeling et al 2010), production often takes place in polluted environments (De Bon et al 2010), health risks prevail due to poor management and environmental pollution (Bryld 2003;Hamilton et al 2014), it often lacks a legal status (Bryld 2003), and leisure or recreational activities are rarely to be found (Cabannes 2006).…”

A Global Geospatial Ecosystem Services Estimate of Urban Agriculture

“…UA offers potential to ameliorate a host of urban environmental problems by increasing vegetation cover and therefore contributing to a decrease in the urban heat island (UHI) intensity (Susca et al, 2011), improving the livability of cities (Frumkin, 2003;Turner et al, 2004) and providing enhanced food security to over half of Earth's population (de Bon et al, 2009;Pearson et al, 2010). UA is connected to multiple metabolic pathways in the urban ecosystem including food provisioning (Zezza & Tasciotti, 2010), regulation of local microclimate and hydrology (Oberndorfer et al, 2007), consumption of nutrient rich "waste" water and biosolids/organic matter (Armstrong, 2009;de Zeeuw et al, 2011;Smit & Nasr, 1992), and fixation of atmospheric nitrogen (Herridge et al, 2008) and carbon (Beniston & Lal, 2012). For pollinators and other wildlife, habitat is created in the city (Goddard et al, 2010).…”

Modeling integrated urban water systems in developing countries: case study of Port Vila, Vanuatu

“…Understanding the potential to utilize ''waste'' streams such as rainwater and septic sludge for beneficial uses such as meeting non-potable water demand (Makropoulos and Butler 2010) and urban agriculture (Smit and Nasar 1992;Molyneux et al 2012), while simultaneously decreasing the environmental impacts of nutrient release.…”