Global Landscape of Urban Agriculture and Covid-19 Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

During the Covid-19 pandemic, urban agriculture, which refers to various forms of agricultural production within or surrounding the city, gained more attention from scholars worldwide. Given the multiple benefits associated with urban agriculture, these practices were adopted to address the adverse impacts in various dimensions, such as food security, health, and well-being. Simultaneously, urban agriculture also was affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, influencing the practice from both theoretical and practical perspectives, which expanded the scope of research in this field across various disciplines and perspectives. Consequently, it is difficult to track the topic and scope of the current research status as a basis for developing research about urban agriculture in the future. However, a systematic review that consolidates the current state of knowledge to support advanced research had not yet been conducted. Our paper aimed to fill this gap by employing a bibliometric analysis of articles in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) to examine the research landscape of urban agriculture and Covid-19. VOSviewer was the main platform adopted to conduct the bibliometric analysis in order to construct the research landscape based on three scopes, namely, main contributors (authors, sources, organisations, and countries), hot issues, and research themes. The analysis revealed that the WoSCC had indexed a total of 214 articles, with an increasing number of publications from 2020 to 2022. Although studies on urban agriculture and Covid-19 were conducted worldwide, authors and organisations from developed countries, especially the United States, were the primary contributors to article publications. The journal “Sustainability” was the main source of published articles about urban agriculture and Covid-19, receiving the highest number of citations. Research on urban agriculture and Covid-19 was conducted under eight crucial research themes associated with the food sector, benefits for health and well-being, climate change and air quality, marginalised communities, practising the community garden, practising home gardening, lessons learned from the policies and projects, and innovation and technology. Despite research being conducted on urban agriculture and the Covid-19 pandemic within different themes and geographical contexts, the majority of studies primarily focused on the benefits and behaviour change associated with urban agriculture practices to mitigate the negative impact of Covid-19 in terms of the food system and mental health. This finding is consistent with the keywords co-occurrence analysis, which identified “food security/insecurity” and “resilience” as the main hot issues. In addition, most of the other high-frequency keywords also were associated with the food system and well-being. Based on these findings, research on urban agriculture during Covid-19 generally concentrated on the crucial problems associated with Covid-19, especially for the food sector and health, rather than urbanization, which had been the primary focus in earlier times. Finally, we provide recommended ways forward for future studies in this field by offering insights into the current scope of the research landscape on urban agriculture and Covid-19, which had been neglected in previous studies.