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"Urban gardening."
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Grow your own : how to be an urban farmer
Urban environments require specific techniques to optimise growing conditions for plants. Two leading experts in horticulture and soil science teach the reader how to grow their own food-from the ground up-in this authoritative, accessible, generously photographed guide. Grow Your Own provides simple step-by-step methods and information enabling the average city dweller to grow food plants at whatever scale their time and resources permit and no matter their location, be it suburban backyard or apartment balcony. Some of the many topics covered include creating the best environment for growing (influenced by water/temperature/light/air quality), setting up the soil; fertilisers, compost and worm farms; choosing crops (annual/perennial/heirloom/modern); propagation, planting and maintenance; pest and disease management; seed saving; rooftop spaces and vertical gardens; and integrated urban farming including bees and poultry.
Book
Urban Gardening and Wellbeing in Pandemic Era: Preliminary Results from a Socio-Environmental Factors Approach
The nature and impacts of living in urban settings are gaining their saliences in developed and developing countries alike, particularly during the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the crisis, the wellbeing of urban society became intertwined with a so-called “new lifestyle”, which involved quarantine and working in a home environment. Facing such challenges, urban gardening is deemed as an alternative intervention to enhance residents’ wellbeing and the environmental sustainability of urban areas, including Indonesian cities. A preliminary study was conducted to monitor the wellbeing of urban gardening practitioners, as well as investigate the motivation and any association between gardening and wellbeing with the COVID-19 pandemic situation by analysing data from Indonesian metropolitan areas. The study utilized instruments of “satisfaction with life scale (SWLS)” and “scale of positive and negative experience (SPANE)” to investigate the subjective wellbeing of 67 respondents. Amongst others, we identified that urban gardening practitioners tend to be in positive moods and have better overall wellbeing; 52.24% of the respondents were highly satisfied with their life. Furthermore, we observed a variety of motivations to start gardening, with hobby and utilization of free space as prominent reasons, followed by other motivations such as environmental benefit and aesthetic. Integrating the environmental benefits of urban gardening and the implications for an individual’s wellbeing can be reflected for sustainable urban development and policies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Journal Article
Urban gardening
Offers tips and techniques for urban gardening and discusses how it affects the food we eat.
Book
Contributing to food security in urban areas: differences between urban agriculture and peri-urban agriculture in the Global North
Food security is becoming an increasingly relevant topic in the Global North, especially in urban areas. Because such areas do not always have good access to nutritionally adequate food, the question of how to supply them is an urgent priority in order to maintain a healthy population. Urban and peri-urban agriculture, as sources of local fresh food, could play an important role. Whereas some scholars do not differentiate between peri-urban and urban agriculture, seeing them as a single entity, our hypothesis is that they are distinct, and that this has important consequences for food security and other issues. This has knock-on effects for food system planning and has not yet been appropriately analysed. The objectives of this study are to provide a systematic understanding of urban and peri-urban agriculture in the Global North, showing their similarities and differences, and to analyse their impact on urban food security. To this end, an extensive literature review was conducted, resulting in the identification and comparison of their spatial, ecological and socio-economic characteristics. The findings are discussed in terms of their impact on food security in relation to the four levels of the food system: food production, processing, distribution and consumption. The results show that urban and peri-urban agriculture in the Global North indeed differ in most of their characteristics and consequently also in their ability to meet the food needs of urban inhabitants. While urban agriculture still meets food needs mainly at the household level, peri-urban agriculture can provide larger quantities and has broader distribution pathways, giving it a separate status in terms of food security. Nevertheless, both possess (unused) potential, making them valuable for urban food planning, and both face similar threats regarding urbanisation pressures, necessitating adequate planning measures.
Journal Article
Critical geography of urban agriculture
Urban agriculture is a broad term which describes food cultivation and animal husbandry
on urban and peri-urban land. Grassroots as well as institution-led urban agricultural
projects are currently mushrooming in the cities of the Global North, reshaping urban
landscapes, experimenting with alternatives to the capitalist organization of urban life
and sometimes establishing embryonic forms of recreating the Commons. While this renewed
interest in land cultivation and food production is attracting increasing interest in a
wide range of disciplines – from planning to landscape and cultural studies – it remains a
very marginal and almost unexplored field of human geography. Nonetheless, beyond the
rhetoric of sustainability and health, urban agriculture raises several relevant questions
of interest for a critical geographer. Starting by drawing a map of concepts and theories
available in an interdisciplinary literature, and highlighting fields of possible inquiry,
this paper aims to define the scope of and an initial agenda for a critical geography of
urban agriculture.
Journal Article
Urban horticulture : ecology, landscape, and agriculture
\"Urban Horticulture, referring to the study and cultivation of vegetation in built environments, is gaining more attention as the world rapidly urbanizes and cities expand. While plants have been grown in urban areas for millennia, it is now recognized that they not only provide food, ornament, and recreation, but also supply invaluable ecological services that help mitigate potentially negative impacts of urban ecosystems, and thus increase the livability of cities. This new compendium, Urban Horticulture: Ecology, Landscape and Agriculture, provides background on key issues in this growing field. The first section introduces ecological landscaping, providing a holistic framework for understanding urban landscapes and horticultural practices, both ornamental and agricultural. The complexity of the field is further illustrated by two different approaches to sustainable ornamental landscape design. The second section examines urban soil and water and their essential roles in regulating and supporting horticultural ecosystem services on which urban populations depend. The third part focuses on pollination, and the importance of urban areas and horticultural practice to this vital service. The fourth section concerns the often overlooked area of domestic gardens and their influence on urban horticulture, and employs community gardens to explore the multi-faceted educational experience they provide, and its adaptability to other socio-ecological contexts. The editor, an experienced multidisciplinary urban planning and policy researcher, has selected studies that will be essential to urban planners, horticulturalists, and residents of cities, as well for all those interested in enhancing urban living through horticulture.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Tomato Urban Gardening Supported by an IoT-Based System: A Latin American Experience Report on Technology Adoption
When urban agriculture is addressed at a family scale, known as urban gardening, it is assumed as a non-commercial activity where some family members voluntarily take care of the plantation during their free time. If technology is going to be used to support such a process, then the solutions should consider the particularities of these gardeners (e.g., life dynamics and culture) to make them adoptable. The literature reports several urban agriculture experiences in Western countries and Southeast Asia; however, this activity has been poorly explored in South American countries, particularly at a family scale and considering the culture and the affordability of the solutions. This article presents an experience report of urban gardening in Peru, where a prototype of an IoT system and a mobile application were conceived, implemented, and used to support the gardening of vegetables at a family scale, considering the cultural aspects of the gardeners. This experience obtained positive results in terms of tomato production, mainly showing the system’s capability to self-adapt its behavior to consider the cultivation conditions of these urban gardeners. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first IoT system that can be iteratively adjust its behavior to improve the chances of being adopted by a particular end-user population (i.e., gardeners).
Journal Article
Terre dell’incontro. Il giardino come dispositivo ecosociale per l’integrazione tra le culture
This paper explores how urban gardening practices can serve as a tool to foster transcultural integration and support migrants in the process of redefining their identity in a new context. Through the shared care of a cultivated space, it is possible to overcome cultural barriers, fostering respect for differences while simultaneously creating a common ground for interaction, where newcomers and local communities develop a shared vision that can be extended to everyday life and public spaces. The transcultural gardens often develop in uncertain open spaces, which are therefore able to accommodate otherness and allow the emergence of alternative models of collective space. Through the analysis of established case studies, this paper highlights the different possibilities offered by these practices and demonstrates how these experimental spaces address the social and cultural needs of a global society, proposing a model of authentic integration based on dialogue and mutual respect.
Journal Article