Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

may be biophysical and driven by climatic changes, many are social, economic andpolitical.This project was designed to extend our knowledge of the current diversity of urbanagricultural practices in Australian cities, to identify the social, economic and politicalbarriers to urban agriculture and to explore the potential for extending its practice in thefuture, especially one increasingly affected by climate change. It draws on a systematicreview (presented as Appendix One) of current practice in Australia and beyond andsupplements this with two case studies of major Australian cities, Melbourne and GoldCoast, involving interviews with key local stakeholders with knowledge of current urbanagricultural practices, barriers and limits. The systematic literature review wasundertaken prior to the case study research and the themes used to structure thereview were used also to structure the fieldwork interviews. This Appendix presents asummary analysis of the case study fieldwork undertaken in Melbourne and the GoldCoast.1.1 Background to Melbourne and Gold Coast case study areasMelbourne is a thriving city of 4 million residents. It is currently experiencing asustained wave of inward migration at the rate of 70,000 new arrivals per year and itspopulation is projected to reach 7 million by the middle of this century.Like all Australian cities and virtually all cities established in the 19 th century or earlier,Melbourne had substantial areas of land within or very close to the city boundariesdevoted to market gardening, livestock rearing and fruit orchards. This strongagricultural link was essential to the development of Melbourne, the day to day survivalof its population and the operation of its urban economy (Budge, 2009). Marketgardens and urban orchards were located in areas that are now high-density innerurban suburbs, such as Brunswick, Coburg, Preston, Northcote, St Kilda, Bentleigh,Moorabbin and Templestowe. These commercial-scale food production activities werecomplemented by the widespread practice of householders utilising their back gardensto grow vegetables, keep chickens, and larger animals such as goats and cows for milk(Gaynor 2006: 21, cited in Burke 2009). Indeed Gaynor reports that in 1881, ‘40% ofhouseholds [in Brunswick] owned large livestock and 63% owned poultry (Gaynor2006: 19, cited in Burke 2009). This pattern or relatively self-sufficiency in urban andsuburban food self-sufficiency pattern continued through to the middle decades of thetwentieth century, and ‘helped much of the working class feed themselves through thedepressions of the 1890s and the 1920s, as well as the hardships of two World Wars’(Burke 2009: 4).While peri-urban farming, market-gardening, and backyard self-sufficiency, wereundoubted elements within the broader historical narrative of Melbournian, andAustralian, urbanisation, the socio-economic and spatial dynamics of urban foodsystems were transformed by profound technological, economic, planning and culturalchange in the decades after World War II. Also during that time, what Budge terms ‘themarket forces associated with the suburbanisation of metropolitan areas’ meant thatlow-density suburban sprawl and ‘big-box’ shopping centres – with major supermarketsat their core – became the dominant and preferred model of land use and residentialdevelopment in major Australian cities like Melbourne (Budge, 2009: 5-6).Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change 102