September 2022 -- Urban ag is growing - how do we make sure it's good for people and the planet? 

The central project of my dissertation, the FEW-meter project, is drawing to a close, and we're working to synthesize some of our findings so far into policy recommendations for the future of urban ag. This month, we released a roadmap to resource-efficient urban agriculture. While we argue that urban ag is likely to expand in the future and that this is likely to come with many social benefits, we also acknowledge that resource-efficient and environmentally-friendly urban ag is not a guarantee. Food production has a huge environmental footprint, and if urban ag is to help reduce this instead of expanding it, we'll need policy and planning optimized to make that happen. To explore these policies, we conducted interviews with urban ag stakeholders across several countries and followed these interviews with an internal scenario-building process, during which we used back-casting to explore possible urban ag futures and their relationships to urban sustainability. We identify seven key factors and develop key recommendations for how each factor can be leveraged to support more sustainable cities. 

In the introduction, we offer the following summary of these factors and key strategies: 

Recommendations for key factor 1: Political Frame Conditions 

Recommendations for key factor 2: Economic Regime 

Recommendations for key factor 3: Urban Growth Dynamics 

Recommendations for key factor 4: Urban Planning Policies 

Recommendations for key factor 5: Land-use Pattern 

Recommendations for key factor 6: Climate Change 

Recommendations for key factor 7: Technical Trends 


Check out the full "roadmap" archived on Zenodo: 

Fox-Kämper, Runrid, Kathrin Specht, Silvio Caputo, Jason K Hawes, Agnès Lélièvre, Nevin Cohen, and Lidia Poniży. “Roadmap to Resource Efficient Urban Agriculture.” Zenodo, August 24, 2022. https://zenodo.org/record/6622125.