Urban agricultural projects have been mushrooming since
the end of the twentieth century, reshaping urban landscapes and even the whole urban
fabric, experimenting
with alternatives to the traditional urban life, sometimes creating new commons, and
bringing people together. Within
a city, farmers, gardeners, and their neighbors share more
than just fence lines. Cities already have a huge potential for farming. Three examples
can be observed in very
different cities around the World: Singapore, is fully selfreliant in meat, Bamako
is self-sufficient in vegetables, and
in Berlin there are 80,000 community gardens on communal land and 16,000 more people
are on a waiting-list [1].
And this is just the beginning; in many cities new unbuilt
areas emerge in the wake of deindustrialization (derelict
lands, wastelands, brownfields, etc.), or as a consequence
of urban shrinking due to aging populations (as in Japan or
Germany), or of emigration (as in some African mid-sized
cities). These new areas are a wonderful opportunity for
urban agriculture. In Detroit, thousands hectares of urban
land have been given over to unemployed workers for food
growing. In Britain, urban agriculture has been promoted on
wastelands of 20 cities by their various councils [2]. Urban
agriculture is gradually becoming a planning policy option.
In Delft, the planners of the city already combine urban
agriculture with several other land uses in their planning
documents; in Paris, an inclusive local land development
plan protects agricultural landscapes [3,4]. Urban agriculture is neither—or no more—the short-lived remnant of a
rural culture nor the hipsters’ latest futile craze.
et, on the face of it, tying together these two words—
urban and agriculture—is not self-evident, even if city and
agriculture have gone hand in hand for a long time: in fact,
since Neolithic times and the first human settlements, as
pointed by Paul Bairoch [5]. Jane Jacobs even promotes
the idea that agriculture is of urban origin, and it was only
later that agriculture migrates to the countryside—this was a
very slow process [6]. It was only in the middle of the
Twentieth Century, in the aftermath of the WW2, that cities and
agriculture—which had always been inseparable—divorced.
Increased mobility and progressive globalization made apparently pointless proximity
between farmers and urban
consumers. Farming was banned from the city by planning
regulation. Urban agriculture suffered then from many political restraints: restrictive
urban policy, laws giving an illegal
status to urban agriculture, lack of supportive services, etc.
Hopefully things are changing, and urban agriculture is being welcomed again in the
city after an unfortunate interlude
of some fifty years. Still in the Ninetieth Century the close
interaction between city and farming could be read in the
landscape and in the planning instruments and procedures.
In 1826, Von Thunen’s theory explained agricultural patterns near urban areas—in the
form of concentric circles,
with crop type being determined by transport cost-distance
modeling. It was maybe a rough and restrictive draft of
what we coin today as the importance of addressing the
rural-urban continuum to deal with urban sustainability. Indeed, talking about urban
sustainability is meaningless if we
stop at the city limits. Everyone agrees today to consider
that sustainable urban policies should take into account
an urban-rural continuum that goes far beyond the dense
mineral town within its administrative limits.
Urban agriculture may help designing truly sustainable
policies for such complex settings. We need to question
and discuss ways to include, in a perennial manner, agriculture in urban policies.
Urban agriculture can be seen
as a process of hybridization between city and agriculture,
which offers many advantages over other expressions of
nature in the city. In addition to allowing the development of
agricultural production, being consistent with the aspirations
of urban populations wishing to reconnect with nature, and
providing many ecosystem services, urban agriculture also
provides new opportunities for developers to rethink the
organization of the urban fabric. To facilitate this, there is a
need for knowledge building (sharing examples, procedures,
comparing different places), which should take the form of
a co-production of knowledge by all the actors involved in
urban agriculture actions through the world. Confronting
and integrating values and knowledge from different stakeholders is crucial to help
decision-making. This task was
initiated by the international conference 5 emes
Rencontres
Internationales de Reims on Sustainability Science whose
theme was precisely “Urban Agriculture: Fostering The
Urban-Rural Continuum”. Most of the articles in this special
issue of Challenges in Sustainability were presented on the
occasion of this conference.
To capsulize into a few words what was the guiding
thread throughout the conference, and therefore the unifying idea of this special
issue beyond the diversity of the
papers, the following can be said: When trying to determine
if urban agriculture may contribute to a sustainable future,
the primary question to ask is: Will this agriculture be at
the service of the inhabitants? Its success depends on its
objectives, its form, and its local ownership by the people
concerned. It has a lot to do with building resilient communities. By doing so, urban
agriculture can be the cornerstone
that helps reconfigure more sustainable cities.
