Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

extent by region and country, they are increasingly embracing this wider range ofactivities.Hodgson et al. (2011) offer one such comprehensive definition:Urban agriculture encompasses far more than private and community gardens. Itis typically defined as the production of fruits and vegetables, raising of animals,and cultivation of fish for local sale and consumption. A more holistic systemsdefinition acknowledges the connection between urban agriculture and the largerfood system, as well its influence and dependence on a variety of economic,environmental, and social resources.They note also the other important but less common urban agricultural activities,including:institutional and demonstration gardens;edible landscaping;hobby and commercial bee, poultry and animal keeping;urban and peri-urban farms;hybrid forms that integrate gardening and farming.The other dimensions of variability include:purpose – production for personal consumption, educational purposes,donation or sale; neighbourhood revitalisation or local economic development;healing or therapeutic purposes; sale or donation;location – on private land (gardens, yards and balconies); public or communitymanaged land; residential or industrial areas; peri-urban land zoned for ruralenterprises; road verges and nature strips; rooftops; walls;size and scale – large contiguous parcels of land through to balconies andwindowsills;production techniques – in soil and raised bed cultivation; greenhouses;hydroponic & aquaponic venues; aquaculture sites (ponds, rivers, canals,ocean); indoor and outdoor animal rearing; and,end products – plants and animals/animal products for consumption; plants forornamental, medicinal and therapeutic use; re-usable waste products (compost)environmental or ecological services; social capital (Hodgson et al., 2011).De Zeeuw (2004) claims that urban agriculture can be usefully distinguished from itsrural counterpart because it is ‘...integrated into the urban economic and ecologicalsystem’. According to this view, urban agriculture uses resources such as urban water,organic urban waste and even local urban labour in ways that are not common in ruralagriculture. This contrast does not appear to hold strongly for Australia, except perhapsin the sense that rural agriculture sometimes experiences shortages of local labour andrelies on the attraction of workers from elsewhere, including from beyond Australia. Theuse of local water via storage and irrigation systems is also commonplace in the foodgrowing rural regions of Australia, although the definition of ‘local’ in relation tocapturing and using river water can be politically contentious. There is perhaps less reuseof waste products in large scale and industrialised food production, indeed there isa growing critique of the breaking of previously virtuous systems in beef production bythe introduction of corn feed lots (Pollan, 2007). However, it may be the case that smallscale agricultural activities involving self-provisioning and barter, carried out on smallparcels of land are in fact much more common in cities than in the countryside.Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change 84