Recently, urban agriculture (UA) has expanded throughout cities of the developed world as a response to social injustices and environmental gaps of the globalized food system (including food security, economic opportunities and community building). Due to the limiting factors of the urban environment (e.g., land availability), UA often occupies the roofs of buildings as vacant space to further develop local food production through so-called urban rooftop agriculture (URA). This paper presents an interdisciplinary ...

Multifunctional and Peri-Urban Agriculture (MFA and PUA) have spread all around the world as new, alternative means of food production. Due to their non-productive services, they are considered fundamental for food sovereignty and rural development, and also as tools to conserve the rural-urban fringe and limit sprawl. MFA and PUA are very often embedded in Alternative Food Networks (AFNs), which represent a change in food production and consumption practices. Drawing upon the definition of landscape according to ...

Urban gardening initiatives have evolved from their original purpose of food production to assume aesthetic, recreational, educational, social, or therapeutic functions. The general objective of this paper was to determine the new socio-spatial configuration into which these experiences have been implemented, in order to determine the diversity of actors involved in urban agriculture (UA) within the municipality of Perugia. Secondary objectives were to explore the social and environmental capital produced and to ...

This paper discusses the role rooftop food gardens can play as urban regeneration devices, by combining environmental and social benefits and leveraging food production as a mediating function. In particular, this study focuses on the case of OrtiAlti, an action-research project based in Turin, set up to revitalize abandoned or under-utilized urban buildings through rooftop community gardens. The research is aimed at understanding the extent to which rooftop farming can contribute to urban regeneration processes if ...

Urban gardens take on different forms and meanings, which vary depending on the socio-economic context where they located/used and how it evolves over time. This makes a garden comparable to a micro-social ecosystem, different from other gardens and ever changing. As with every social-ecosystem resulting from a territorialisation process, there is a certain degree of social inertia that makes it difficult for outsiders with new motivations and demanding new spaces to enter into the “garden ecosystem”. Drawing on ...

In Qatar food and water security are high on the agenda of safe and sustainable development. At the same time, rapid urbanisation which is not integrated with ecological landscape design is contributing urban sprawl, fragmented landscapes and to the loss of biodiversity. At Qatar University, the architecture department has been working for several years on the concept of regenerative cities to develop an integrated approach to planning and design and to increase resource efficiency and quality of life. This has led ...

“Reaffirming that all human rights are universal, indivisible, interrelated, interdependent and mutually reinforcing and must be treated in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing and with the same emphasis, and recalling that the promotion and protection of one category of rights should never exempt States from the promotion and protection of the other rights, recognizing the special relationship and interaction between peasants and other people working in rural areas, and the land, water, nature and territory ...