Urban Agriculture: Good for People, Places, Planet?

Abstract

Coupled human-natural systems must rapidly transform to address the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. Can these transformations make cities and the resource systems that power them simultaneously more sustainable, resilient, and just? Are tradeoffs between normative goals inevitable? This dissertation demonstrates the importance of understanding tradeoffs in system transformation through a series of manuscripts exploring the impacts of urban agriculture (UA) on people, places, and the planet. UA, or growing food in cities, has been linked to benefits ranging from improved health and wellbeing to expanded community and food system resilience to reduced nutrient pollution. Despite this, little work has systematically catalogued the social and material footprints of different forms of low-tech UA, leaving important gaps in our understanding of how the practice might impact cities and the climate as it expands. Drawing on citizen science and interdisciplinary approaches, this work explores the tradeoffs implicit in UA planning and practice. The first manuscript (Ch. 2) further elaborates the importance of a tradeoffs lens and explores how interdisciplinary metabolism methods can clarify tradeoffs that emerge from different UA policy regimes. The second manuscript (Ch. 3) compares the carbon footprint of UA to that of conventional agriculture, offering an example of the ways that tradeoffs can emerge not only at the system scale, but also on the site of interventions. From there, I turn fully to the city scale (Ch. 4), examining the socio-demographic dynamics of UA in an iconic American food-growing city: Detroit. I find that, while UA is often associated with food sovereignty movements, co-opting of local narratives may have led to inequitable access to community and home gardens. And finally (Ch. 5), I synthesize data and methods from this dissertation with the results of the international FEW-meter study of UA, testing the effects of scaling up UA on five cities in the US and Europe. Overall, this dissertation contributes both to the study of UA across contexts and offers critical theorization of tradeoffs in system responses to the triple planetary crisis. It lays the groundwork for a broadly interdisciplinary research agenda focused on coupled, participatory modeling of tradeoffs in social-ecological system transformation. My immediate next steps, addressing insights and limitations from this dissertation, will examine the role of resident decision-making in green infrastructure life cycle assessment, the potential for regional food systems to transform food-energy-water networks, and the potential for AI and household-level modeling to improve gentrification monitoring.