Toward Sustainability: Novelties, Areas of Learning and Innovation in Urban Agriculture

Abstract

Given the search for new solutions to better prepare cities for the future, in recent years, urban agriculture (UA) has gained in relevance. Within the context of UA, innovative organizational and technical approaches are generated and tested. They can be understood as novelties that begin a potential innovation process. This empirical study is based on 17 qualitative interviews in the U.S. (NYC; Philadelphia, PA, USA; Chicago, IL, USA). The aim was to identify: (i) the most relevant areas of learning and innovation; (ii) the drivers of innovation; (iii) the applied novelties and their specific approach to overcoming the perceived obstacles; (iv) the intrinsic challenges that practitioners face in the innovation process; and (v) the novelties' potential to contribute to sustainability and societal change. As the results of the study demonstrate, learning and innovation in UA occur predominantly in four areas, namely, "financing and funding", "production, technology and infrastructure", "markets and demands" and "social acceptance and cultural learning". The described novelties include approaches to enhance the positive impacts of practicing agriculture within urban areas, and some of them have the potential to contribute to societal change and open up opportunities for social learning processes.

How Can Innovation in Urban Agriculture Contribute to Sustainability? A Characterization and Evaluation Study from Five Western European Cities

“…This follows the view of Johannesen [43] and van der Ploeg [44], according to whom innovation is not only technological innovation but goes far beyond that. According to Opitz et al [40], new products, concepts, and practices can be understood as an expression of innovation processes in UA. Confirming Biggs et al's [45] theoretical considerations on innovation, our results also point to the fact that the starting point (trigger) of innovation is usually a specific problem.…”

“…In the context of innovation, existing studies that look into UA largely focus on one specific field of innovation in UA: these studies address either social innovation or technical innovation for environmental improvement or address economic innovation such as new business models. Opitz et al [40] and Berges et al [41] investigate the link between innovation and sustainability in UA by using a qualitative approach.…”

Effects of consumer-producer interactions in alternative food networks on consumers’ learning about food and agriculture

“…In the literature on urban agriculture, the latter is discussed as a vehicle for learning for innovation (Opitz et al, 2016b) or as a means of integrating the elderly . Comparable multi-functional approaches to AFNs are conceivable, especially because the complex issue of food seems to be a highly workable gateway to access complex knowledge about agriculture, markets, and health issues that, in turn, will have consequences for individual behaviours.…”

The geography of urban agriculture: New trends and challenges

“…Due to limited urban space and the restrained environmental conditions, food production inside cities has brought a lot of innovative agricultural approaches, starting from the application of soilless or the intensified plant growing technologies, to the identification of new places for production, such as vacant lots, roofs, walls, brownfields, idle or under-utilised land or even underground under artificial lighting (Smit and Nasr, 1992;Solon, 2014;Osborne, 2015;Opitz et al, 2016;Mok et al, 2014). Currently, the project ´Urban Green Train´ is being realised with the support of the Erasmus+ Programme across Europe.…”