Garden space: Mapping trade-offs and the adaptive capacity of home food production

Abstract

The current attention for food production outside the traditional agricultural area concentrates on urban and community supported agriculture, but largely bypasses domestic gardens. Nonetheless, these multifunctional spaces offer interesting perspectives for food production. We developed a theoretical model to capture, quantify and interrelate the most relevant variables and constraints of potential food production in domestic gardens. As such, insight is gained in the food production potential in domestic gardens. Also the influence of utility on the household's decision on how much space and time to devote to food production was incorporated. The model development was fostered by quantitative and qualitative data collection for the case study Flanders. These data allowed to gain insights in the current food production and potential for food production in Flemish domestic gardens. The resulting model does not claim to be finalized, and future research could collect all necessary data to run the model. It does allow to explore the spatial and temporal constraints of individual domestic gardens for food production. This contributes to a better understanding of the adaptive capacity for food production of small-scale multifunctional spaces.