Abstract
Urban gardening (UG) as a component of urban agriculture (UA) has reached popularity during the last decades. This growing interest depends on several factors including the different functions that have been attributed to UG over the years, operating from the economic to the social, health and cultural levels. While multifunctionality of UG is well documented, only a few studies investigated individual gardeners’ motivations, which can be subjective and heavily affected by the local context in which it takes place. The paper aims to detect some peculiar features of Milan city gardeners, in order to highlight the motivations of their activity through an innovative and replicable approach based on multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and hierarchical clustering analysis (HCA). The analysis has been applied to the Milan case study, in the North of Italy; the results suggest a great importance of the social component of UG, and trace some different gardeners’ profiles.
Highlights
IntroductionUrban agriculture can be described as the growing, processing, distribution of food and nonfood plant and tree crops, and the raising of livestock, directly for the urban market or private needs, both within and on the fringe of an urban area [11]
The paper aims to detect some peculiar features of Milan city gardeners, in order to highlight the motivations of their activity through an innovative and replicable approach based on multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and hierarchical clustering analysis (HCA)
Most allotment gardens consist of 50-square-meter plots which are divided into individual plots of the size of 25 m2, each one run by two gardeners per time
Summary
Urban agriculture can be described as the growing, processing, distribution of food and nonfood plant and tree crops, and the raising of livestock, directly for the urban market or private needs, both within and on the fringe of an urban area [11]. Horticultural activities are by far the most widespread form of agriculture in cities [2,12] to the extent that the terms “urban agriculture” and “urban gardening” are often used as a synonyms even in scientific literature. Peri-urban agriculture and every other activity that does not involve the direct cultivation of a garden-plot with food crops, such as livestock husbandry, zero-acreage farming [14] or entrepreneurial urban farming, are not covered by this research
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