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Scale up urban agriculture to leverage transformative food systems change, advance social–ecological resilience and improve sustainability

Nature Food volume 5, pages 83–92 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Scaling up urban agriculture could leverage transformative change, to build and maintain resilient and sustainable urban systems. Current understanding of drivers, processes and pathways for scaling up urban agriculture, however, remains fragmentary and largely siloed in disparate disciplines and sectors. Here we draw on multiple disciplinary domains to present an integrated conceptual framework of urban agriculture and synthesize literature to reveal its social–ecological effects across scales. We demonstrate plausible multi-phase developmental pathways, including dynamics, accelerators and feedback associated with scaling up urban agriculture. Finally, we discuss key considerations for scaling up urban agriculture, including diversity, heterogeneity, connectivity, spatial synergies and trade-offs, nonlinearity, scale and polycentricity. Our framework provides a transdisciplinary roadmap for policy, planning and collaborative engagement to scale up urban agriculture and catalyse transformative change towards more robust urban resilience and sustainability.

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Fig. 1: Conceptual framework of urban agriculture across scales.
Fig. 2: Results of literature review of urban agriculture studies.
Fig. 3: Theoretical foundations of scaling up urban agriculture as transformative change.
Fig. 4: Developmental pathways for scaling up urban agriculture over time.
Fig. 5: Schematic diagram of key considerations relevant to research and practices of scaling up urban agriculture.

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Data availability

All data used in this manuscript are made publicly available and deposited into Figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.24449713.

Code availability

All code used in this manuscript is made publicly available and deposited into Figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.24449713.

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Acknowledgements

This study is funded by the National Science Foundation (ICER-1830036). J.Q. also acknowledges the US Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Research Capacity Fund (FLA-FTL-006277) and McIntire–Stennis (FLA-FTL-006371), and University of Florida School of Natural Resources and Environment for partial financial support of this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatics Sciences, Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Jiangxiao Qiu & Hui Zhao

  2. School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Jiangxiao Qiu & Hui Zhao

  3. Department of Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

    Ni-Bin Chang

  4. Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Chloe B. Wardropper

  5. Department of Family, Youth and Community Sciences, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Catherine Campbell

  6. School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs and National Center for Integrated Coastal Research, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

    Jacopo A. Baggio

  7. Food and Resource Economics Department, Gulf Coast Research and Education Center, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Zhengfei Guan

  8. Department of Environmental Studies, College of Environmental Science and Forestry, State University of New York, Syracuse, NY, USA

    Patrice Kohl

  9. School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Joshua Newell

  10. School of Life Sciences and School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Jianguo Wu

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  1. Jiangxiao Qiu
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Contributions

J.Q. led the initial conceptualization of this work, and all authors contributed to the development of ideas. J.Q. designed the analyses, developed the visualizations and led the writing of the original draft. H.Z. conducted the literature search and screening of relevant empirical urban agriculture studies. All co-authors contributed to editing and revision of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jiangxiao Qiu.

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Nature Food thanks Manuel Bickel, Chiara Tornaghi and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Schematic diagram to illustrate the concept and spatial scale of the ‘urban regions’, at which urban agriculture is defined.

Urban regions are essentially a large regional landscape encompassing a major central population center, a network of urban centers, and a mosaic of surrounding natural, rural, and production lands with internal heterogeneity and contrasting patterns. Different forms of urban agriculture practices can occur in locales (for example, as shown in arrows) along the spatial gradient of the urban regions.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Nascent real-world examples of scaling up urban agriculture across the globe.

Paris, France (A) has opened one of the world’s largest operating urban rooftop farms to feed its residents and foster climate resilience; New York City, United States (B) boasts the most extensive network of community gardens (>550) to improve food access and life quality of residents and local communities; and Shanghai, China (C) has implemented the masterplans (construction began in 2017) to develop Sunqiao Urban Agriculture District (∼100 hectare) with numerous large-scale vertical farming systems for feeding burgeoning urban populations and reducing external food dependency.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Dominant urban agriculture types along the infrastructure and technology, and size gradients, with typical commercial (purple colored) and non-commercial (green colored) types.

Size of the boxes is in relative terms, and approximates the common and representative range of each urban agriculture type along these two axes. The location of urban agriculture types along these gradients is determined based on qualitative notions of the authors after the comprehensive review of the contemporary literature, which may evolve over time.

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Qiu, J., Zhao, H., Chang, NB. et al. Scale up urban agriculture to leverage transformative food systems change, advance social–ecological resilience and improve sustainability. Nat Food 5, 83–92 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-023-00902-x

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