Residents’ Attention and Awareness of Urban Edible Landscapes: A Case Study of Wuhan, China

Abstract

More and more urban residents in China have suffered from food insecurity and failed to meet the national recommendation of daily fruit and vegetable consumption due to rapid urbanization in recent years. Introducing edible landscapes to urban greening systems represents an opportunity for improving urban food supply and security. However, residents' opinion on urban edible landscapes has rarely been discussed. In this study, questionnaire surveys were performed in eight sample communities in Wuhan, China, to collect the information on residents' attention and awareness of urban edible landscapes. Results indicated that nearly one-third of the respondents were unaware of edible landscapes before the interview. Most residents thought that an edible landscape could promote efficient land use (57.26%) and express special ornamental effects (54.64%), but quite a few didn't believe that growing edible plants in urban public spaces could increase food output (37.10%) and improve food quality (40.12%). Overall, 45.65% and 32.73% of the growers performed their cultivation behavior in private and semiprivate spaces, respectively. Lack of public areas for agriculture use was regarded as the main barrier restricting the development of urban horticulture by 55.86% of growers and 59.51% of non-growers. The residents were also worried about their property manager's opposition, possible conflicts, and complex relationships with their neighbors. Food policies and infrastructure support from local governments and official institutions were needed to ensure the successful implementation of edible landscapes in urban areas.

Promoting the Development of Edible Landscapes in Suburban Areas with Place Branding—A Case Study in Taiwan

“…The fundamental reason behind this transformation is that, first of all, urban residents' demand for natural idyllic and biophilic landscapes has driven the development of peri-urban edible landscapes. As an evolved species in nature, human beings are innately biophilic [34,59,60]. However, in the process of urbanization, modern urban landscape creation has largely separated urban and rural landscape creation from each other, which makes it difficult to see edible crops in urban landscapes.…”

“…Second, people's awareness of edible landscapes is insufficient and their concepts are different. Indeed, Xie et al [34] noted in their study of edible landscapes in urban communities that nearly one-third of residents did not know what edible landscapes were. Further, Conway's study of urban residents' motivations for growing edible landscapes [35] noted that their knowledge of edible landscapes was incomplete, and their motivation for growing them was mainly the food vegetables and recreational pastimes that edible landscapes could bring.…”

Factors Affecting Farmers’ Perception of Greywater Irrigation in Urban Agriculture in the Colombo District, Sri Lanka

“…Health consciousness could be one possible reason for negative perception of greywater irrigation among the subsistence farmers. Production of healthy and high-quality food is one of the main intentions of urban citizens to engage in subsistence-level urban farming in both the developed and developing world [43][44][45][46]. Health problems due to the usage of wastewater may arise because of excess nutrients [47], pathogens [48], saline salts, and heavy metals [49].…”

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“…The category "others" includes many different types of challenges that we could not categorize under the other five types of challenges (Table 3). The most frequently recorded challenge in the developed world is land-related [5,30,33,34,37,47,50,54,57,60,71] and in developing countries, they are human-related [21,22,29,44,62,63,67,74] and "others" [9,21,29,44,62,63,67,74]. However, there is little significant difference among challenge categories between developed and developing countries.…”