Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

While some see the density of development and the price of land in urban areas as aserious impediment to the extension of urban agriculture, the benefits of proximity andthe fact that a wide range of urban agricultural activities are possible on very smallparcels of land, suggest that cities may in fact be very well suited to these activities (deZeeuw & Waibel, 2000).Mougeot (2000) argued forcefully for bringing urban agriculture to its ‘conceptualmaturity’ so that it is better able to help us both understand it as an activity and pressfor greater intervention to support it:Whether we agree or not with the phenomenon, the expression ‘urbanagriculture’ (UA), or ‘intra- and peri-UA’, originally used only by scholars and themedia, has now been adopted by UN agencies such as the UNDP. [...] Thismakes our need to define it self-evident, at least for our short- and mid-termgovernance.Mougeot’s approach is to integrate various conceptual building blocks for a morecomprehensive definition of urban agriculture: the types of economic activity involved;the categories of food and non-food items produced; the locations where it is practised;the relations between urban and peri-urban systems; the nature of production systems;the scale of production; and product destinations.Similar to the definition of Hodgson et al., as above, this leads Mougeot to offer thismore comprehensive and consistent definition:Urban agriculture is an industry located within or on the fringe of a town, a city ora metropolis, which grows or raises, processes and distributes a diversity of foodand non-food products, (re-)using largely human and material resources,products and services found in and around that urban area, and in turn supplyinghuman and material resources, products and services largely to that urban area.While defining the nature and practices of urban agriculture are important, this taskshould not obscure the related need to consider its role in developing more secure foodsystems in our cities and how this might be affected by climate change.The next section reviews the contribution of urban agriculture to broader conceptions ofurban food security.4. How might urban agriculture contribute to greater food security?In this section we review the possible and actual contribution of urban agriculture,broadly defined, to improving food security in cities. While the focus of the question ison Australian cities, much of the available literature relates to other cities of the worldor to cities in general.There are few studies that attempt to systematically measure the impact of any urbanagricultural activity in broad terms or in relation to food security. Indeed, as Burns(2004) notes:Currently, there are no known systematic reviews of the effectiveness ofcommunity food security interventions [...] There have been a small number ofnon-systematic reviews of community food security interventions conducted andthese have identified the need for more rigorous evaluation and the importance ofhighlighting the process issues in program implementation. (Burns, 2004, p. 4).However, urban agriculture is widely held (Browne et al., 2009; Condon et al., 2010;PMSEIC, 2010; Brown & Carter, 2003; de Zeeuw & Dubbeling, 2009; Havaligi, 2009;Burns et al., 2010) to offer a number of benefits to broad conceptions of food security.Among the most commonplace manifestations are community gardens, run byUrban food security, urban resilience and climate change 85