Deliverable 1.2 Baseline study including key indicators and development of a typology
Creators: name: Borges, Luciane Aguiar
name: Shinan Wang
name: Berlina, Anna
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2021

description: Urban Agriculture (UA) is multifunctional (e.g. social, ecological) and multi-purpose (e.g. recreation, self-supply, profit) practice that involves different actors and implies on a variety of development options. UA can have a great impact on other domains of the urban system such as urban food supply system and sustainable urban development. Typologies have been found to be a useful tool to deal with this complexity. They provide a means to unpack the different dimensions of UA, reducing the complexity and diversity of cases into a smaller number of more intelligible types. This is appreciated by policymakers as it reduces the variety of empirical evidence and facilitates the design of policy recommendations. The current report develops a theoretical and methodological framework that sustains a coherent Urban Agriculture (UA) typology that covers the specificities of the different SiEUGreen showcases - Aarhus, Hatay, Fredrikstad, Beijing and Changsha. The study begins with a literature review to gain a broad understanding of UA. This includes a discussion of the purpose of UA through different periods of time and across different institutional settings and cultures. The differences between the purposes and functions of UA initiatives in the Global South1 and the Global North2 are highlighted showing that in the Global South UA is often seen as a means of survival and providing a living, and a response to food insecurity and in the Global North the most prominent motivations are preservation and development of green spaces, promoting urban sustainability, contribution to physical and mental wellbeing, as well as effects on the community and social integration, e.g. of minorities or migrants. The narrative then turns to the European and Chinese contexts, with an overview of how UA is addressed in the political discourse and planning systems in both cases. In Europe, UA seems to fall between different policy areas and has not been institutionalised within the EU administration level. In China, increasing urban-rural integration is high on the agenda and UA has been considered as an effective approach to reduce urban and rural disparities and is promoted especially in the peri-urban areas. Afterwards, theoretical considerations to develop a SiEUGreen typology gain attention. Among the four SiEUGreen pillars - food security, resource efficiency and societal inclusion – land is deemed the core issue as it enables and/or constrains UA practices. Assuming this, UA is understood having three dimensions: spatial, functional and institutional. The spatial dimension considers the type of land on which UA takes place, with the most fundamental distinction being between peri-urban agriculture (PUA) and intra-urban agriculture (IUA). The functional dimension refers to the practices behind UA initiatives and is associated with the technological choices and operational aspects and the institutional dimension acknowledges governance in terms of the constellations of actors that are involved practices of UA. As the availability and security of urban land for agriculture are closely interlinked with ownership this aspect is also taken into consideration in the development of the typology. The case of Aarhus Municipality in Denmark provides the testing ground for the typology. The city has become known for its bottom-up initiatives involving UA due to the ‘Taste Aarhus’ Program and is currently home to over 280 UA initiatives. The methodology includes the inventory and mapping the Taste Aarhus gardens. Data concerning the UA initiatives were collected from the Taste Aarhus website and the Taste Aarhus Team, resulting in a database containing 280 UA initiatives. UA initiatives were then classified according to the attributes under the land-use dimensions of UA -spatial, functional and institutional. Classification under the spatial dimension (location) occurred with the help of web-mapping tools using a photointerpretation technique. The functional and the institutional dimensions and ownership were discerned based on the web descriptions and (as required) consultation with the Taste Aarhus Team. Following this, a categorisation of the UA initiatives was made with the goal of understanding the frequency of occurrence for each dimension in the Aarhus case. This process resulted in the identification of six types of institutional arrangements that better describe the UA practices in Aarhus showcase. Based on these types, a cross-case typology for SiEUGreen and indicators were proposed. This process, however, required some adjustments, to acknowledge the characteristics of all SiEUGreen showcases. This implied understanding the UA dimensions within a continuum. For example, for the spatial dimension the categories ‘peri-urban’ and ‘intra-urban’ were conceived as the extremes of the ‘continuum’, but ‘in-between’ these limits other particularities such as UA performed in ‘leftover spaces’ of the city could be recognised. These adjustments allowed positioning all the SIEUGreen showcases on a common framework, which has enabled: 9 • Improving the ‘dialogue’ between the SiEUGreen showcases, • Informing strategies for engagement of stakeholders, • Assisting knowledge exchange between the showcases, and • Advising business models. The study concludes with the proposal of indicators for measuring the potential contribution of the SiEUGreen showcases for each of UA pillars- land use, food security, resource efficiency and societal inclusion. The list of qualitative and quantitative indicators is suggested based on data availability for each showcase.