Understanding the multi-dimensional effects of urban agriculture at the city-scale: A study of the US and Europe

Keywords: urban agriculture, urban metabolism, geospatial analysis
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 21

Abstract

Urban agriculture (UA) is widely discussed as a key intervention for urban sustainability and resilience, but its multi-dimensional effects – food provision, community cohesion, job training, and more – have proven difficult to assess and plan for at the scale of a city. Furthermore, many UA services (e.g., mental health benefits) and disservices (e.g., green gentrification) are localized to the neighborhoods which host UA sites, leading to challenges of equitable distribution. While some work has sought to assess food production at the city-scale, few efforts have integrated resource consumption, localized effects, and social benefits into scaling. In this work, we address this limitation, combining urban agriculture data from a five-country citizen-science project with geospatial assessment of cities in the US and Europe. We first assess the biophysical limitations to scaling in the case study cities, identifying sites for several forms of UA through multicriteria suitability analysis. We then examine the effects of UA expansion to these suitable sites, including: 1.) food production capacity; 2.) water, energy, and material flow dynamics; 3.) quantified social benefits; and 4.) localized and distributional effects. Preliminary analyses have found that suitable sites for UA vary significantly by city, including both the total area available and the types of areas available. In dense urban areas, UA is unlikely to produce a meaningful change in the city’s overall resource footprint, making tracking social benefits and localized effects all the more important for understanding the key characteristics of scaled-up UA.