Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

elieve, having regard to the diversity of innovative practices that urban agriculture isnow recognised as including, that it makes little policy or practical sense to introduce itin the Australian context. This does not of course prevent councils and policy-makersbeing cognisant of the different functions and roles of non-commercial communitygardening, and commercial-scale urban food production in a city or peri-urban marketgarden.4.2.4 How might urban agriculture contribute to greater food security?When asked to explain what they understood by resilience in the urban context, manyparticipants in both case study areas used terms such as ‘adaptability’, ‘flexibility’,‘preparedness’, ‘confidence’, and ‘increased skills’. Those working in communitygroups spoke of ‘social resilience’ and ‘connectedness’, expressed through ‘sharingand doing’, ‘networking’, ‘re-skilling’ and ‘enhancing capabilities’. Based on their ownexperience and practice, these participants were passionate believers in the creativeand adaptive power of people working together in pursuit of a shared goal and vision:When you create space for people to come together, amazing things can happen… Council could encourage neighbours to steward a street … This has seriouspotential! [Community food advocate]Another community food activist, who had participated in a number of permablitzescommented:There’s an average of forty people at each blitz, many with only entry-levelknowledge about food growing, and most of whom don’t know each other. It’sshocking how well people work together. In each blitz there is some problemsolvinginvolved, and inevitably the design alters through discussion [Communityfood activist and social entrepreneur].While another proposed a broader, community- and systems-based understanding ofresilience:Resilience for me is the ability to decentralise systems. I see resilience as anevolution in action, creating opportunities for people to be actively engaging in apractice, growing food or whatnot, in a very localised sense, that allows them toevolve the most appropriate systems for their particular needs, and theirparticular time. And I think it’s something that needs to be inspired, becausepeople will naturally do it.That will create a diversity of solutions … I see that as resiliency around food:people growing their own food locally, in their own neighbourhood, are like littlelife-rafts, little support networks, that are forming around growing and producingfood; but more importantly, getting out of their houses, and co-living, sharing theburdens of life in a city, and life in general, in a neighbourhood. Which issomething that I know existed before. It hasn’t existed in my lifetime, or at least inmy experience, but it’s something that I see as that true resilience. When timesbecome difficult, people rather than go internally, come out [City of Yarra Urbanagriculture officer].The researchers with whom we spoke tended to understand resilience from theperspective of social-ecological systems thinking, as seen for example in the writings ofUrban food security, urban resilience and climate change 42