Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

the food security of cities, but not to describe more detailed studies of local impacts inspecific places. These studies are beginning to emerge and to contribute to theaccumulation of valuable knowledge that is both general and specific, but there is roomfor further research.It is likely that without a concerted effort to collate these local studies and to learnlessons of research design and effective methods, the field will continue to becharacterised by an unhelpful degree of ignorance and fragmentation. We should notexpect a high degree of uniformity in research design and approach as few fields areable in practice to impose a strong set of paradigmatic assumptions on individualresearchers, but there is scope for overcome fragmentation through collation andsynthesis.3. What do we mean by urban agriculture?Historically, urban agriculture has made a significant contribution towards feedingAustralia’s growing city populations. Especially during wartime, urban and backyardfood production was encouraged as a way of supporting the war effort (Gaynor, 2006).In contemporary times, urban food production takes multiple forms, and while figuresare difficult to accurately gauge, (rates of reporting are likely to be under-estimatesand/or out of date – see Yeatman, 2008), there are some indicative indicators of itsgrowth. Firstly, data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics collected in 1992 (the mostrecent survey of home food production) found that over a third of the populationproduced food in domestic spaces. More recently, in 2010, the Australian City Farmsand Community Gardens Network listed at least 212 community gardens, while theAustralian Farmers Market Association provided a list of 149 farmers markets (thoughnot all are located in urban locations). There are also numerous community supportedagriculture (CSA) and food swap schemes, as well as hundreds of edible schoolgardens, including the well-renowned ‘Stephanie Alexander Kitchen School Garden’,founded in 2001. There are also active ‘permablitz’ communities in the capital of everystate and territory in Australia. Permablitzing – a hybridization of permaculture and the‘Backyard Blitz’ phenomenon – involves communities coming together to transformbackyards, abandoned blocks and other spaces into edible landscapes, or as onepermablitz activist described it: ‘eating the suburbs, one backyard at a time’. ‘Guerrillagardening’ is also gaining increasing national attention, including its increasedpopularisation via a commercial television program where the stars ‘fight the filth withforks and flowers’. The arsenal of guerrilla gardeners includes ‘weapons of mass revegetation’;referring to seed guns or seed bombs made of clay, organic compost, localnative seeds and water, that are then tossed into neglected spaces to germinate.Despite the continued existence and indeed expansion of a wide range of foodproduction activities in cities, as Pires (2011) notes, the very notion of urban agricultureis seen by some as a contradiction in terms – agriculture being something that happensbeyond cities in rural areas. Bartling (2012) traces the ways in which developing postwarurban culture (especially in the USA) celebrated the proliferation of consumptionover production and presented a set of practices and behaviours that were‘appropriate’ for urban and suburban life. Increasingly this defined urban animalhusbandry and food production as ‘inappropriate’ and although there is now clearevidence of a large and growing counter-cultural response to this, the relationshipsbetween ‘natural’ and built environments and between humans and nature continue toinfluence contemporary urban policy debates, albeit often in subtle ways (Turner,Nakamura & Dinetti, 2004; Register, 2006).Most definitions of urban agriculture include a variety of activities carried out at manydifferent scales, from the domestic to the city-wide. Although definitions vary to someUrban food security, urban resilience and climate change 83