ABSTRACT
Urban agriculture initiatives are increasing in numbers. Projects are being created on all continents and in all kinds of cities large or small. The Covid-19 crisis has also increased the awareness of public authorities to the participation of this agriculture to food provisioning for some populations but also for its participation to social resilience of the city. Studies have been done to evaluate the impact of urban agriculture on city sustainability and tools have been developed to measure it at several scales from the city to the project. The private sector has also begun to work on tools to evaluate the sustainability of urban agricultural projects to help public authorities and landowners choose project to install in new places. With such a plethora of tools, do we still need to work on this subject? As the existing tools do not apply at the same scale, do not rely on the same goals of sustainability and are not always very transparent about their workings? The first step to answer all these questions is through a systematic review of published tools in scientific reviews. Therefore, the objective of this review is to compare the identified tools according to several criteria (scale, type of urban agriculture evaluated, sustainability dimensions studied, complexity/ number/type of indicators, public availability, etc.). This will enable us to identify both the conditions under which existing tools can be used, gaps in the existing pool of resources but also the gaps in knowledge to measure some part of UA sustainability and identified technical and organisation levers than can improve UA sustainability. The first pool of analysed articles shows the use of existing frameworks in half of them whereas half developed their own systems and sometimes indicators. Nearly all tools are based on the three sustainability pillars (environmental, economic and social) even though they are sometimes redesigned for the tool in different categories. © 2022 International Society for Horticultural Science. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Throughout history, urban agriculture practitioners have adapted to various challenges by continuing to provide food and social benefits. Urban gardens and farms have also responded to sudden political, economic, ecological, and social crises: wartime food shortages;urban disinvestment and property abandonment;earthquakes and floods;climate-change induced weather events;and global economic disruptions. This paper examines the effects on, and responses by, urban farms and gardens to the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper is based on data collected in the summer of 2020 at the onset of the pandemic when cities were struggling with appropriate responses to curb its spread. It builds on an international research project (FEW-meter) that developed a methodology to measure material and social benefits of urban agriculture (UA) in five countries (France, Germany, Poland, UK and USA) over two growing seasons, from a Food-Energy-Water nexus perspective. We surveyed project partners to ascertain the effects of COVID-19 on those gardens and farms and we interviewed policy stakeholders in each country to investigate the wider impacts of the pandemic on UA. We report the results with respect to five key areas: (1) garden accessibility and service provision during the pandemic;(2) adjustments to operational arrangements;(3) effects on production;(4) support for urban farms and gardens through the pandemic;and (5) thoughts about the future of urban agriculture in the recovery period and beyond. The paper shows that the pandemic resulted in multiple challenges to gardens and farms including the loss of ability to provide support services, lost income, and reductions in output because of reduced labor supply. But COVID-19 also created several opportunities: new markets to sell food locally;more time available to gardeners to work in their allotments;and increased community cohesion as neighboring gardeners looked out for one another. By illustrating the range of challenges faced by the pandemic, and strategies to address challenges used by different farms and gardens, the paper illustrates how gardens in this pandemic have adapted to become more resilient and suggests lessons for pandemic recovery and longer-term planning to enable UA to respond to future public health and other crises. © Copyright © 2021 Schoen, Blythe, Caputo, Fox-Kämper, Specht, Fargue-Lelièvre, Cohen, Poniży and Fedeńczak.