Recent challenges and new possibilities with urban agriculture in Victoria, British Columbia

Abstract

This paper investigates existing planning barriers to urban agriculture in cities.• We argue that urban planners must focus on existing regulatory challenges related to zoning bylaws, land-use policies, and governance strategies to enhance food-growing opportunities. • Changing the mechanisms for urban agriculture development approvals and creating a specific food action plan are key elements for implementing successful food-growing urban projects in cities.Increasing urbanization generates new challenges for cities, including housing shortages, environmental degradation, public health concerns, and food security issues, just to mention a few. High levels of food insecurity can motivate planners to increase their support for community gardening forms of urban agriculture. The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified many pressures of urban living. In this paper, we focus on challenges around urban agriculture activities, in particular, exploring regulatory approaches and limitations when it comes to growing food in cities. This study uses qualitative research methods to explore the main barriers to urban agriculture as perceived by community-based groups in Victoria, British Columbia. Data collection included 18 semi-structured, face-to-face interviews, and two community mapping workshops with local residents, government officials, and nongovernmental groups. Data analysis generated initial codes and themes that revealed "urban agriculture zones" and "garden-style" apartment housing as important avenues for urban agriculture projects. These findings are relevant in Victoria, where more than half of the population lives in apartments. A food action plan is a regulatory mechanism that can boost food production when aligned with the official community plan. Any progress towards far-reaching changes, however, requires an efficient urban agriculture development process, including creating site inventories, increasing stakeholder participation, reducing waitlists, and tackling high land prices.

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

“…The focus on food security identified by our analysis reveals the need for urban planning to integrate food or urban agriculture as part of its agenda (Basu et al, 2021;Simon, 2023). This agenda might consider supporting the use of underutilised spaces in urban areas for food production (Glaros et al, 2022) or creating zones for urban agriculture (Ghezeljeh et al, 2022) to mitigate spatial problems or barriers such as the lack of or inadequate space for gardening (Cerda et al, 2022).…”

“…Tittonell et al (2021) analysed the initiatives of family farming and the agroecology movement to support food security in Latin America. Ghezeljeh et al (2022) discussed the policy on food security and urban agriculture in Canada, the barriers, and the effective strategies and planning for improving urban agriculture. In addition, the studies in this group focused on the factors involved in adopting the concept of urban farming and the barriers to its practice (Ivascu et al, 2021) or the perceived value and problems of practising urban agriculture (Sylvester et al, 2022).…”