Abstract
Compared to rural agriculture, urban agriculture (UA) has some distinct features (e.g., the limited land access, alternative growing media, unique legal environments or the non-production-related missions) that encourage the development of new practices, i.e., “novelties” or “innovations”. This paper aims to (1) identify the “triggers” for novelty production in UA; (2) characterize the different kinds of novelties applied in UA; (3) evaluate the “innovativeness” of those social, environmental and economic novelties; and, (4) estimate the links between novelties and sustainability. The study was based on the evaluation of 11 case studies in four Western European countries (Italy, Germany, France and Spain). The results show that the trigger and origin of new activities can often be traced back to specific problems that initiators were intended to address or solve. In total, we found 147 novelties produced in the 11 case studies. More novelties are produced in the environmental and social dimensions of sustainability than in the economic. In most cases, external stakeholders played an important role in supporting the projects. The analysis further suggests that innovativeness enhances the overall sustainability in urban agriculture projects.
Highlights
The question of how to feed our cities has always been a concern for the organization of towns and settlements
This percentage was slightly higher for cases related to technological innovation (67%) than for those related to social innovation (60%)
Even if the general approach of a urban agriculture (UA) project has already been applied in previous cases, two important issues need to be considered when thinking about newness or innovation
Summary
The question of how to feed our cities has always been a concern for the organization of towns and settlements. In the global North, urban gardens were often implemented as an adaptation to crises, and they have sometimes held a permanent place in these cities since [3,4]. The so-called “war gardens” and “victory gardens” secured the provision of vegetables and fruits during the first and second world wars and throughout further periods of limited food access [5,6]. UA activities range from educational projects (e.g., school gardens) and food securityand community-directed projects (such as neighborhood gardens) to commercial farming ventures
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