The "Urban Agriculture Europe" EU COST-Action (2012

No abstract

This work contributes to the urban agriculture field of investigation in one aspect that remains lightly explored: the coupling of material and social dimensions in urban metabolisms studies. This paper offers an urban metabolism path investigation, which aims at confronting the flows of organic waste, the practices of the city-dwellers and the strategies of public bodies. We've applied the "metabolic rift" theoretical framework, established by McClintock (2010), to explore the ecological, social and individual dimensions of organic waste management in Rennes Metropolitan Area (France). In this way, the trajectory of the Rennes Metropolitan waste programs, the material flow analysis of biomass, and the study of inhabitants' composting practices have allowed us apprehending the metabolic rift between its social dimension (the decommodification of land, food, and labor), its ecological dimension (short-loop recycling by distributing compost to participants or other users), and its individual dimension (de-alienation from nature). The strengths and weaknesses relating to these three dimensions are then discussed to bring out some opportunities and threats.

Since two decades, urban agriculture has been booming and a wide range of forms, from urban allotment gardens to rooftop farming under greenhouse, is developing. Various benefits are recognized for urban agriculture integration within the city and a specific consideration is dedicated to ecosystem services. In this article, we have focused on cultural ecosystem services provided by urban micro-farms. The state of the art reveals that urban agriculture delivers cultural ecosystem services that are well perceived and evaluated by users, but there are still few studies on this topic. Based on the analysis of specific literature on cultural ecosystems and micro-farms in parallel to a period of observation and documentary research of five urban micro-farms either on rooftop or at soil level, located in Paris and its surroundings, we proposed a specific methodology. This methodology aimed at quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the cultural ecosystem services provided by urban micro-farms and is based on a framework, which distinguishes exogenous and endogenous cultural ecosystem services.