New paper on urban agriculture published !

As part of COST Action Circular City, Katrin Bohn has co-published a new paper on urban agriculture as a keystone contribution towards sustainable cities in the journal Blue-Green Systems by IWA Publishing.

The paper contends that ‘research and practice during the last 20 years has shown that urban agriculture can contribute to minimising the effects of climate change by, at the same time, improving quality of life in urban areas. In order to do so most effectively, land use and spatial planning are crucial so as to obtain and maintain a supportive green infrastructure and to secure citizens’ healthy living conditions’. It has been written by a group of European researchers, all members of the COST Action, approaching the subject of urban agriculture from multiple angles and thereby extracting its significance for and links to other urban resource streams. The co-authors contend that ’embedded in changing urban food systems, the contribution of urban agriculture to creating sustainable and climate-friendly cities is pivotal as it has the capacity to integrate other resource streams such as water, waste and energy. This article describes some of the current aspects of the circular city debate where urban agriculture is pushing forward the development of material and resource cycling in cities’.

The publication has been led by Siv Lene Gangenes Skar of NIBIO, Norway, and Ranka Junge of ZHAW, Switzerland, with inputs from Katrin on the paper’s concept as well as on the urban agriculture and urban development aspects including some of the paper’s imagery. Katrin is one of the two management committee members representing Great Britain in COST Action Circular City.

The paper is fully titled Urban agriculture as a keystone contribution towards securing sustainable and healthy development for cities in the future. It has been published in the journal: Blue-Green Systems vol. 2, issue 1 (2020) pp. 1–27 and can be found here.

For further information on COST Action Circular City see the project’s website.

For more information on Bohn&Viljoen’s role in the project see here.

Image: Resource streams in urban metabolism. This diagram, drawn for the participatory PHVision project in Heidelberg, shows how food and the food system are located as part of other resource streams into and out of the city. (source: Katrin Bohn with Rachel Shotliff 2016)