Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

volume or even its contribution to prevailing patterns of food supply and formal surveysof urban agricultural activity (to the extent that they exist) tend to under-report this widerange of activity (Yeatman, 2008). However, data collected by the Australian Bureau ofStatistics in 1992 (the most recent survey of home food production) found that over onethird of the population produced food in domestic spaces. More recently, in 2010, theAustralian City Farms and Community Gardens Network listed at least 212 communitygardens, while the Australian Farmers Market Association provided a list of 149farmers markets, though not all are located in urban areas. There is also numerouscommunity-supported agriculture (CSA) and food swap schemes, as well as hundredsof edible school gardens, including those supported by the renowned StephanieAlexander Kitchen School Garden program, founded in 2001. There are active‘permablitz’ communities in the capital cities of every state and territory in Australia.Permablitzing – a hybridization of permaculture and the ‘Backyard Blitz’ phenomenon –involves communities coming together to transform backyards, abandoned blocks andother spaces into edible landscapes, or as one permablitz activist described it: ‘eatingthe suburbs, one backyard at a time’. ‘Guerrilla gardening’ is also gaining increasingnational attention, including its increased popularisation via a commercial televisionprogram where the stars ‘fight the filth with forks and flowers’. The arsenal of guerrillagardeners includes ‘weapons of mass re-vegetation’; referring to seed guns or seedbombs made of clay, organic compost, local native seeds and water, that are thentossed into neglected spaces to germinate.In summary, few cities in Australia or indeed elsewhere have conductedcomprehensive and rigorous studies of the extent of urban agriculture. While it isrelatively straightforward to count the number of community gardens, city farms,allotments, or farmers markets in any place it is less easy to identify and countdomestic gardens in which fruit and vegetables are grown, food-swapping initiatives,informal gardening support groups and schemes to divert urban waste streams intocompost. Similarly, it would require a substantial and well-designed survey of localresidents to gauge the extent to which individuals participated in one way or another inthis wide range of practices. Smaller scale mapping exercises are becoming morecommon, especially those undertaken by university students as part of researchprojects, but it can be difficult to catalogue these and to aggregate them into morecomprehensive citywide profiles.Just as there are relatively few comprehensive surveys of the extent of urbanagriculture in Australian cities, so too is there a paucity of quantitative studies of itseffects and impacts. There are, however, numerous descriptive and ethnographicaccounts of various urban agricultural practices in various cities around the world thatprovide something of a foundation. While ethnographic accounts provide importantinsights into individual motivations to develop agricultural practices within cities and intothe experience of gardening, gleaning and so on, more extensive, systematic andquantitative accounts offer a valuable complement and would help produce a morerounded picture.Many studies rely on general perceptions of the benefits of urban agriculture whenconsidering local impacts. Lovell (2010) for example studied community gardens in UScities and concluded that ‘ … the social value of urban green space is not negligible.’Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change 26