Urban Cultivation and Its Contributions to Sustainability: Nibbles of Food but Oodles of Social Capital

Abstract

Abstract:The contemporary interest in urban cultivation in the global North as a component of sustainable food production warrants assessment of both its quantitative and qualitative roles. This exploratory study weighs the nutritional, ecological, and social sustainability contributions of urban agriculture by examining three cases-a community garden in the core of New York, a community farm on the edge of London, and an agricultural park on the periphery of San Francisco. Our field analysis of these sites, confirmed by generic estimates, shows very low food outputs relative to the populations of their catchment areas; the great share of urban food will continue to come from multiple foodsheds beyond urban peripheries, often far beyond. Cultivation is a more appropriate designation than agriculture for urban food growing because its sustainability benefits are more social than agronomic or ecological. A major potential benefit lies in enhancing the ecological knowledge of urbanites, including an appreciation of the role that organic food may play in promoting both sustainability and health. This study illustrates how benefits differ according to local conditions, including population density and demographics, operational scale, soil quality, and access to labor and consumers. Recognizing the real benefits, including the promotion of sustainable diets, could enable urban food growing to be developed as a component of regional foodsheds to improve the sustainability and resilience of food supply, and to further the process of public co-production of new forms of urban conviviality and wellbeing.

The Vertical Farm: A Review of Developments and Implications for the Vertical City

“…In 2011, the United Nations completed a global assessment of the planet's land resources, determining that a quarter of all arable land is highly degraded. Further, since 1960, one million farmers in the United States have gave up farming [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. Today, the country suffers from "23 million food deserts, defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as urban neighborhoods and rural towns without ready access to fresh, healthy, and affordable food" [20] (p. 32).…”

“…Through flooding, hurricane, storms, and drought, valuable agricultural land has been decreased drastically, thereby damaging the world economy [7,11,12,18]. For example, due to an extended drought in 2011, the United States lost a grain crop assessed at $110 billion [11,19,20]. Scientists predict that climate change and the adverse weather conditions it brings will continue to happen at an increasing rate.…”

Seeding Social Capital? Urban Community Gardening and Social Capital

“…A totality of nineteen studies involve research from the US [2], [3], [7], [8], [55], [57][58][59], [61][62][63][64], [66], [68][69][70][71][72][73][74], six studies from Europe (three from the UK [1], [12], [75], two from Germany (Berlin) [5], [76] and one from Croatia [77]), four from Canada [56], [57], [65], [78], and four from Australia [4], [10], [67], [79]. This confirms a general tendency of a disproportionate mass of research from the US on urban community gardening, compared to Europe and elsewhere.…”

“…As table 2 reveals, six of the studies explicitly examine social capital [1][2][3][4], [18], [55], while others focus on closely related concepts or phenomena, such as networks [56][57][58][59], integration or adaption of migrants or other marginalized groups [10], [60], [61], social dimensions of sustainability [12], [62], neighborhood development [7], [8], [63], [64], and social aspects of health [65][66][67] and resilience [59], [68].…”

“…This confirms a general tendency of a disproportionate mass of research from the US on urban community gardening, compared to Europe and elsewhere. Furthermore, 27 studies are qualitative studies [1][2][3][4][5], [7], [10], [18], [56], [58], [59], [61], [62], [65][66][67][68][69][70][71], [73], [76]- [79], five studies are mixed-methods research [12], [63], [64], [72], [75], while only three articles comprises of mainly or entirely quantitative data [8], [55], [57].…”