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 [
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 [
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
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.