Urban agriculture in Santarém, Pará, Brazil: diversity and circulation of cultivated plants in urban homegardens

Antoinette Winklerprins,Perpetuo Socorro De Souza Oliveira

doi:10.1590/s1981-81222010000300002

Antoinette Winklerprins, Perpetuo Socorro De Souza Oliveira

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1590/s1981-81222010000300002

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Abstract

Urban agriculture, including urban homegardens, is vital for urban survival of many people in various cities around the world, including those in the Amazon region of Brazil. These spaces, through daily praxis, become important for incidental agrodiversity conservation as food plants are cultivated and their plant material circulated. Utilizing data from a year-long intensive qualitative study of 25 rural-urban migrant households, this article considers the diversity of plant material in urban homegardens in the Amazonian city of Santarém, Pará, Brazil. The purpose of the study was to understand the social systems that maintain cultivated plant diversity in homegardens. Our objectives in this article are twofold: a) to demonstrate that plant agrodiversity in homegardens persists in a setting which is located 'at the market'; and b) to document the ways in which flows of plant material help maintain this agrodiversity.

Highlights

Urban farming is one of the points where conservation interests and the interests of the cash-poor migrant begin to converge (Linares, 1996, p. 119).Urban agriculture (UA) is critical for the survival of many people in urban areas around the world (Bakker et al, 2000; Redwood, 2009; RUAF Foundation, 2010)
The private spaces where UA is practiced are known by a variety of names such as homegardens, house-lot gardens, dooryard gardens, and are defined as spaces around a house, a place of residence, which is cultivated with plants primarily for utilitarian, and for aesthetic reasons (Landauer and Brazil, 1990; Kumar and Nair, 2004)
Our objectives in this article are twofold: a) to demonstrate that plant agrodiversity in homegardens persists in a setting which is located ‘at the market’; and b) to document the ways in which flows of plant material help maintain this agrodiversity

Summary

Introduction

Urban farming is one of the points where conservation interests and the interests of the cash-poor migrant begin to converge (Linares, 1996, p. 119).Urban agriculture (UA) is critical for the survival of many people in urban areas around the world (Bakker et al, 2000; Redwood, 2009; RUAF Foundation, 2010). According to the United Nations, the world is an urban world, with over 50% of the global population living in urban places (UN DESA, 2010) In many cities, both large and small, the rate of urbanization exceeds the ability of local economies to absorb new migrants into the urban wage labor sector, and the need to rely on subsistence livelihood strategies in the city remains (Linares, 1996; Sanyal, 1985; Brunn et al, 2008; Armar-Klemesu and Maxwell, 2000; Browder and Godfrey, 2006; Foeken and Owuor, 2008). UA has been studied for a long time from both an academic as well as a development perspective (Bakker et al, 2000; Kimber, 2004) It is defined as “the growing of plants and the raising of animals within and around cities (...) [and] is integrated into the urban economic and ecological system” (RUAF Foundation, 2010). Depending on the scale of the endeavor, the people cultivating in the city can be conceptualized as agriculturalists and/or as gardeners

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