Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

down to a food scarcity situation we are going to eat what we are given [Micro-Farmer, Gold Coast].Similarly, a backyard gardener from Melbourne expressed his vision of an expandingnetwork of climate-adapted and resilient food forests through urban backyards, andoutwards into suburban parks:What I’ve realised is that the next step beyond an individual’s isolated food forestis to have many of these linked up. To have a sense of community where peopleshare their produce. They all grow different produce, and share it betweenthemselves. That evens out any sort of fluctuations in species, weather, climateconditions and everything else. It creates a more resilient production system[Backyard Gardener and Permaculturalist, Melbourne].4.2.3 What do we mean by urban agriculture?The general conceptions of urban agriculture offered by interviewees were broad andinclusive. They included the following:anything that’s produced in the city, and used by and for the city [Independentresearcher]putting productive plants in the community [Local food activist and backyardgardener]agriculture and gardens producing within urban barriers, including peri-urbanzones. It’s not necessarily commercial, it would include backyard production.[Senior academic researcher]City of Yarra Urban Agriculture Officer, Pete Huff, brings a valuable cross-culturalunderstanding and experience to these issues, having worked as a small scalecommercial market gardener in the Bay Area of San Francisco and being familiar withthe burgeoning local food and urban agriculture movement in the United States. Heoffered the following thoughts on what urban agriculture is, highlighting the historicalcontinuities between what’s happening now in terms of food production in cities, withearlier practices:It’s opening up the spaces ‘in-between’ ... there’s quite a bit of land that can beaccessed in the urban setting, and could be developed into somethingproductive. It will take some alternative methods of cultivation, some very resilientfarmers that are able to adapt and move between those strips of land. But in mymind that’s what it’s all about – opening up what has previously been consideredto be collateral damage of urban development. That’s roof-top spaces, that’snature strips, that’s edges of parklands – places that can be productively farmed,and have immediate access to the market, while providing job training andemployment opportunities for people in the inner city. And I think really restoringthat – every city has a history of urban agriculture where glasshouses orgreenhouses existed, or bio-intensive production happened, animals were kept.It’s not something new, though we treat as though it is … It’s just that we’veforgotten the power of those in-between spaces to produce quite a bit of food[City of Yarra Urban Agriculture Officer].Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change 40