While a growing body of scholarship identifies urban agriculture’s broad suite of benefits and drivers, it remains unclear how motivations to engage in urban agriculture (UA) interrelate or how they differ across cities and types of organizations. In this paper, we draw on survey responses collected from more than 250 UA organizations and businesses from 84 cities across the United States and Canada. Synthesizing the results of our quantitative analysis of responses (including principal components analysis), qualitative analysis of textual data (...) excerpted from open-ended responses, and a review of existing literature, we describe six motivational frames that appear to guide organizations and businesses in their UA practice: Entrepreneurial, Sustainable Development, Educational, Eco-Centric, DIY Secessionist, and Radical. Identifying how practitioners stack functions and frame their work is a first step in helping to differentiate the diverse and often contradictory efforts transforming urban food environments. We demonstrate that a wide range of objectives drive UA and that political orientations and discourses differ by geography, organizational type and size, and funding regime. These six paradigms provide a basic framework for understanding UA that can guide more in-depth studies of the gap between intentions and outcomes, while helping link historically and geographically specific insights to wider social and political economic processes. (shrink)

School gardens and garden-based learning continue to gain great popularity in the United States, and their pedagogical potential, and ability to impact students’ fruit and vegetable consumption and activity levels have been well-documented. Less examined is their potential to be agents of food system reskilling and transformation. Though producer and consumer are inextricably linked in the food system, and deskilling of one directly influences the other, theorists often focus on production-centered and consumption-centered deskilling separately. However, in a school garden, the (...) production/consumption disconnect is erased, by virtue of the design of the site itself and how it is utilized by the actors within it. School gardens provide the critical component of education in alternative food networks, and contribute to the producer/consumer reskilling that is a necessary part of food system transformation. We conducted a case study of an established school garden program during its transition from autonomous non-profit to official, district-funded program of a rural school district in the Midwest. By participating in the full “seed to plate” life cycle of a garden crop, students in the garden were actively involved in the reconnection of producer and consumer, while educators were fostering in students an appreciation for fresh, healthy foods and actively challenging the “McDonaldization” of both students’ diets and education. Based upon these findings, we argue that school gardens in rural areas could leverage the dominant role of rural America in developing and shifting food system paradigms. (shrink)

Since its origins as an academic newsletter, _Agriculture and Human Values_ has evolved to be one of the leading journals publishing critical scholarship of the food and agricultural system. This essay illustrates and comments on the evolution of the scale and scope of research published in the journal over the years.

Urban agriculture is a promising avenue for food system change; however, projects often struggle with a lack of volunteers—limiting both their immediate goals and the broader movement-building to which many alternative food initiatives (AFIs) aspire. In this paper, I adopt a case study approach focusing on Farm X, an urban farm with a strong volunteer culture located in Tāmaki-Makaurau Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city. Drawing on a significant period of researcher participation and 11 in-depth interviews with volunteers and project coordinators, (...) I first contextualise and explore the history of Farm X, then offer themes to describe key factors which help or hinder their volunteer engagement. Engagement is helped by strong leadership, learning by doing, socialising around plants, and contributing to a movement. Conversely, engagement is hindered by time scarcity, economic hurdles, and struggles over direction. Drawing on McClintock’s (Local Environ 19(2): 147–171, 2014, 10.1080/13549839.2012.752797) insights into the hybrid and contradictory nature of urban agriculture as a tool for social change, the paper continues with a discussion of two important trade-offs involved in both farm management and the movement building promoted by Farm X: focused leadership verses volunteer agency; and asking more verses less of volunteers. Finally, I suggest several avenues that may be useful for other urban agriculture projects interested in movement building. (shrink)

Consumers have a growing desire to know where their food comes from and how it is produced, not only for health and safety reasons, but also to satisfy a nostalgia or a perception of “true”, “healthy”, “authentic” and “traceable”. The commercial urban agriculture sector attempts, at least in part, to respond to a growing demand from citizens for locally produced food and for local agriculture that can be signalled to consumers with the help of quality signs, such as reserved designations (...) and added-value claims labels. To date, however, we can wonder about the issues of establishing an added-value claim “urban agriculture” to promote the distinction and development of food products from commercial urban agriculture. This study, using semi-directed interviews with 16 urban farmers and managers of urban agriculture businesses in Quebec, explores their perception of an added-value claim "urban agriculture" to certify their food products. The results of the thematic analysis carried out showing seven main issues, namely: notion of urbanity, sustainability of agricultural practices, valorization of hyper-locality, community, regulations, ownership concerns and relevance of the claim. These issues underline that the logic of commercial urban producers is not only mercantile but also community, social and environmental. In this sense, legislating a movement, under the establishment of a public food label to meet the market's needs and promote the development of this industry, can reveal the various forms of power, exclusion and inequality embedded in urban agriculture initiatives but also some niche opportunities for them. Thoughts are proposed to promote products from urban agriculture from the perspective of increasingly nurturing cities. (shrink)

Few topics have been addressed through as large a range of perspectives and interests as urban agriculture (UA), yet the literature has been loosely characterized by a divergence and disconnect between research conducted in the global north (GN), and that in the global south (GS). In cities of the global south, UA is widely analyzed through a productivist lens, focusing on food production and individual or household-level contributions of urban farming to food security, household income, and livelihoods. Meanwhile, in cities (...) of the global north, engagement with UA also speaks to food production and food security but is just as often focused on environmental and social movements, civic engagement and justice, and more recently urban sustainability and resiliency. We argue that productivist and post-productivist dichotomies are somewhat displaced as differences between the GN/GS are becoming less pronounced. Furthermore, such a dichotomy reinforces assumptions about the nature of urbanization itself, eliding both the commonalities among urban spaces and specificities that come from each place. By examining how UA is approached and written about in different contexts, we hope to highlight the gaps, but also to illustrate convergent themes, particularly those that increasingly characterize contemporary UA research. After elaborating on these tensions, we will build on the increasing relevance of the convergences by suggesting some potentially fruitful future directions for UA research. We conclude with ideas about how novel theoretical concepts might be used to identify overlapping themes in useful and insightful ways, and to increase the significance and reach of UA research. (shrink)