Urban Foraging: A Ubiquitous Human Practice Overlooked by Urban Planners, Policy, and Research

Abstract

Abstract:Although hardly noticed or formally recognised, urban foraging by humans probably occurs in all urban settings around the world. We draw from research in India, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States to demonstrate the ubiquity and varied nature of urban foraging in different contexts. Across these different contexts, we distil seven themes that characterise and thereby advance thinking about research and the understanding of urban foraging. We show that it is widespread and occurs across a variety of urban spaces and places. The species used and the local practices vary between contexts, and are in constant flux as urban ecological and social settings change. This requires that urban foragers are knowledgeable about diverse species, harvest locations, and rights of access, and that their practices are adaptable to changing contexts. Despite its ubiquity, most cities have some forms of regulations that prohibit or discourage urban foraging. We highlight a few important exceptions that can provide prototypes and lessons for other cities regarding supportive policy frameworks and initiatives. The formulation of dynamic policy, design, and management strategies in support of urban foraging will benefit from understanding the common characteristics of foraging in cities worldwide, but also will require comprehension of the specific and dynamic contexts in which they would be implemented.

Urban Foraging in Berlin: People, Plants and Practices within the Metropolitan Green Infrastructure

“…The ascendency of urban agriculture over the past 20 or so years has re-introduced cities, and the greenspaces within them, as places that can successfully provide provisioning services (sustenance) to urban residents across the globe, with variation in cultural and geographical contexts [9]. Largely overlooked, however, is another provisioning practice that takes advantage of already-existing cultivated and wild-growing vegetation in greenspaces: urban foraging [10].…”

“…Such information, however, is needed to understand the social and ecological implications of foraging activities in a regional context [10] and could support the incorporation of foraging into urban policy and management to explicitly support sustainability goals [12]. This study employs in-depth ethnography-based interviews with foragers in the city-an approach successfully employed by, e.g., Poe et al [11], to investigate foundational questions about the practice.…”

“…These "forageables" include wild and domesticated species that occur spontaneously, those that spread or persist without human intervention and those that are introduced primarily for non-edible/material purposes, such as landscaping [11]. Urban foraging (also called 'urban gathering' or 'urban collecting') can occur in a wide variety of spaces, both managed and unmanaged, public and Sustainability 2018, 10, 1873 2 of 23 private, including parks and forests, abandoned lots, alongside streets and in nature preserves [10,12]. It thus relies on the role of formal and informal urban greenspaces in harboring considerable biological richness [4,13], which in addition to maintaining, regulating and supporting ecosystem services, also include a wealth of forageable species for humans.…”

“…Urban foraging can be described as the gathering of raw biological resources (e.g., plants and plant parts, fungi) in urban and peri-urban areas for food, medicine, crafts, small-scale sale or other purposes [10]. These "forageables" include wild and domesticated species that occur spontaneously, those that spread or persist without human intervention and those that are introduced primarily for non-edible/material purposes, such as landscaping [11].…”

“…For example, while it seems to be a ubiquitous practice in cities around the world [10], to date, much of the research, especially in the context of the industrialized world, is concentrated in the USA, e.g., [11,12,19]. In Europe, despite a wealth of ethnobotanical studies in rural areas and small towns, e.g., [29][30][31], research from urban areas, where about 70% of the population lives [32], is sparse.…”