Whom Do Urban Agriculture Parks Provide Landscape Services to and How? A Case Study of Beijing, China

Abstract

An urban agriculture park (UAP) is a mixture of various kinds of urban agriculture and has a group of administrators to plan and manage its landscapes. Thus, the relationships between users and the ability of the UAPs to provide services are crucial. This study investigated the user profiles of three kinds of UAPs in Beijing, China. Investigation of 345 interviewees suggested that most of the users have an upper-middle level income and are well educated. Social connections vary across different types of UAPs. An assessment matrix of landscape services was introduced for a pioneer of UAP, Little Donkey Farm, based on questionnaires, a field survey, and indicators of landscape patterns. Pearson correlations between service demands and users’ characters showed age, companions, and education level were significantly correlated to the needs of scenery and education services. The landscape with the highest supply value was the vegetable plots planted by members. The scenery service was not adequately supplied, and 31.5% of the areas did not meet the demand. Based on the budgets of supply and demand, six types of landscape should be optimized. This study provides an approach to understand the path of landscape service provision in UAP and supports basic knowledge on how to better involve urban agriculture in sustainable development.

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].…”

“…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.…”

“…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. 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].…”