How do we unlock urban agriculture’s potential? By improving policies, spreading knowledge, and implementing a supportive network. This is the work of European Forum on Urban Agriculture, an EU project determined to help urban agriculture reach its potential. So, what can cities take from the project and how can the rest of us champion agriculture in urban settings? We ask Ian Whitehead, one of the brains behind the project.
Shockingly, many children don’t know where food comes from. In the USA, a survey revealed that a third of young kids thought meat products were made from plants, while almost 10% of primary school pupils in the UK are clueless about how certain vegetables grow.
Contributing to this is the disconnect of city living and farming – which is still primarily a rural occupation.
One of the many advantages of urban farming is that it involves local communities and bridges that gap.
As well as providing some much-needed contact with nature, this creates opportunities for education and building an emotional relationship with fresh food that stays with us for life, supporting a healthy diet.
Also, urban agriculture has the potential to transform food systems with gains for food security and the environment through restructuring supply networks, supporting circularity, and reducing food miles.
The stubborn problem though is that agriculture has a “slightly outdated image”, says Ian Whitehead, research associate at RWTH Aachen, so getting a city farm off the ground can take a bit of a runup.
Thankfully, because of his involvement with the European Forum on Urban Agriculture (EFUA), Ian has learnt a thing or two about advocating for urban agriculture (UA).
Introducing the European Forum on Urban Agriculture
Over a four-year period, EFUA set out to provide networking, knowledge exchange, and deployment opportunities that would ultimately establish a practical and policy framework to promote farming in both inner-city and peri-urban locations.
As a multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder Horizon 2020 funded project, it brought together citizens, expert researchers, and representatives from civil society, farming, academia, and government to understand where the gaps exist, how to plug them, and how to best involve local networks.
Our main aim is to ensure that policy at EU, national, and city levels synergises and provides a pathway for enabling real change, whilst reflecting the diversity and cross cutting benefits of urban agriculture.
Furthermore, EFUA looks at innovations in UA – vertical farming, community gardening, and community supported agriculture, etc. – to see how these can help to update the image of agriculture. The answer, it seems, is by appealing to sustainability values.
“It’s not just about food”, explains our CityChanger: “It’s about a better environment; it’s about climate change mitigation; it’s about making sure that these policies reflect the present societal concerns.”
The Relevance of EFUA
Ian makes it clear that, for a project like this to lead real change, it’s extremely important to communicate positive messages – and the forum has plenty!
As one of 11 project partners, this task falls to his team at RWTH Aachen.
It’s thanks to them and the hard work of the project partners, that EFUA has published a lot of their outcomes ahead of the project’s conclusion in late 2024, so cities can already apply this knowledge to a local context. Publications like their factsheet on diverse forms of agriculture and their relevance to the urban context, for example.
“If people have an idea, and they want to move it forward, they need to know where they can get resources,” Ian explains. Whether that’s “financial incentives, information, or people from the authorities that can help”.
While what’s on offer is dependent on a localised context, EFUA’s outcomes provide general guidance for how to go about it – all based on their findings.
A good place to start is the EFUA’s new “Let’s Grow Together” UA Manifesto.
Urban Farming Gets Political
Written with practitioners and policymakers in mind, this document brings together the project’s insights into the benefits, typologies, and governance topics around urban agriculture. It serves as a compact, easy access, yet robust reference, detailing how to implement five top line recommendations:
- Create an official status for urban agriculture in the city
- Facilitate exchange through themed urban agriculture events & visits
- Develop structures for collating & analysing UA data
- Map and manage spaces used & suitable for UA
- Establish urban agriculture councils and working groups to lead project(s).
These points cover many of the social and political mechanisms needed to leverage farming in urban and peri-urban locations.
Done well, the forum discovered, these steps can normalise the presence of urban agriculture geographically and culturally. Quite the antidote to the indifference or ignorance that we’ve seen in citizens’ somewhat distant relationship with rural agriculture.
But people need more reasons to buy into it than that. Why should a city give up valuable land space and capital to support UA, and why should people give up their time and energy to make it flourish?
That’s why we turn to EFUA’s five-pronged benefits portfolio, which works very much in conjunction with the manifesto.
An Impressive List of Advantages
The benefits portfolio offers a comprehensive evidence-based picture of how urban agriculture improves:
- Economics – being close to urban centres promotes innovation, diversification, and new business models.
- Social-cultural resilience – as community farming underpins food literacy, interaction, and development of other infrastructure, such as food tourism.
- Urban environments & climate – from the redevelopment of brownfield sites to cooling cities with increased greenery.
- Food quality – including growing greater dietary diversity, robust food security, and better freshness by reducing supply chains.
- Health and wellbeing – because the exercise of social farming is soothing for body and mind, and the use of fewer chemical fertilisers and pesticides than rural farms results in produce that’s better to eat.
This makes it an essential tool in advocating for change: the range of these benefits are hard to argue against.
A convincing start. All the same, you might wonder, even with these tools under our belt, how can we communicate effectively with the right stakeholders to actually encourage an uptick in urban agriculture?
How to Communicate About Urban Agriculture
Participating in agriculture empowers urban communities, so let’s tell them that!
UA is a platform for neighbours to meet and “through working together for a common goal, they can find some common interest and can actually transform the places in which they live, have contact with nature, and actually solve some of the issues the society has,” Ian points out.
As a hands-on experience, farming is tangible, visceral. It empowers people to act in a way that talk and research in isolation rarely does.
That can really alter perceptions of farming – and drastically improve engagement.
Urban agriculture makes farming cool for a whole new generation of people that wouldn’t otherwise be interested.
Get Your Hands Dirty – EFUA in Person
True to the second point in the manifesto, EFUA plans to capitalise on this energy with an event that facilitates exchange: their ‘action conference’.
In Brussels in September 2024, practitioners will come together not in a room, but in a field!
“We’re doing things differently,” the website claims, “we’re starting down on the farm, where the real work of UA is done!”
Ian explains that the “action-orientated emphasis and active involvement” will showcase ready-to-implement solutions; by giving people a chance to try them out, they’ll feel confident applying them on home turf.
The Next Big Challenge: Policy Change
In Ian’s opinion, urban agriculture should be higher on the political agenda.
“People don’t need to have everything provided by the state,” he says. There is a “tremendous energy within society that can be harnessed”.
However, it’s up to local authorities and governments “to learn how to harness that through providing effective incentives, effective information, and effective ways of accessing the system to make it simpler”.
Given the benefits of UA he has spoken of, why shouldn’t there be ample support like this at policy level? Maybe for now, it’s all a little too new and it takes more time to learn from practice.
Urban agriculture is very much in its infancy, and its potential is great.
Finding a Balance – Policy Recommendations
The recent rise of high-tech agricultural projects, such as rooftop and vertical farming, has proven to have enormous transformational potential for city centres – such as finding ways to reusing empty buildings. But there are those who fear this gives licence to unsavoury happenings in the apparent name of sustainability: permissions granted for skyscrapers that otherwise wouldn’t get passed; prioritising green exteriors over conditions for inhabitants; and completely overlooking the community element of grow-your-own urban gardens.
Dealing with emerging issues like these may be the next step. The good news is, because it is at a city level where transitions are relatively simply to implement, it may be quite simple. Elsewhere it’s not so straightforward.
In issue 41 of the Urban Agriculture magazine published by RUAF – a partner of EFUA – Trine Agervig Carstensen and Rebecca Leigh Rutt write that policy can be helpful to unlock the funding and resources needed to seed and support urban farming.
However, “there is no explicit UA policy at the EU-level”, which means there’s no guarantee this support will be forthcoming. It’s a similar picture with national and regional level policy.
At best, urban agriculture is a secondary priority mentioned in passing in other policies, such as biodiversity, net zero, and social inclusion strategies.
They go on to suggest that policies which enable stakeholders from different cities to link up can enhance UA’s presence at a regional scale. They call on the EU to openly recognise the benefits of urban agriculture as a means to empower a culture of growers throughout the continent.
Time to Act
Although supportive policy would be ideal, there’s no reason to delay. Often change follows change: implementing even small solutions can grab attention; it can snowball from there.
EFUA’s outputs provide the necessary groundwork for change.
To help anyone willing to pick up and run with this knowledge, we asked Ian if he has any other top tips – unofficial glimpses of wisdom he picked up while working on the project.
Top Tips for Advocating for UA
- UA projects must involve a range of people who possess diverse skillsets – from those working in the field to decision-makers calling the shots at city hall.
- Start by finding allies. “It’s very difficult for one person to act on their own and make much impact, but with a group of like-minded people, then this becomes more feasible.”
- Making reliable knowledge and expertise easily accessible generates a higher chance of engagement. Linking with local authorities and NGOs who can act as ‘mentoring organisations’ can work wonders for groups active ‘on the ground’.
- Among their ranks, municipalities should have well informed representatives who can bring stakeholders together. They should lead on forming a consensus and working together to reach a shared objective.
- That facilitator should be someone who understands current issues, who can deal with public scrutiny, and facilitate founding of new farms by helping people through the setting up process.
Ian reminds us that, when it comes to advocating for urban agriculture, there’s one golden rule of communicating: “Make the message easily accessible and digestible.”
Drop the jargon. Make it interesting for a general audience. And speak out about what you’re doing: you’ll soon find that you’re no longer doing it alone.
Note: this article is based on an earlier version written by Metka Novak, but has been updated to reflect the outcomes of the EFUA project.
