Dear Colleagues,

The scope of growing activities within the city is still expanding, documenting a huge potential of urban agriculture (UA). A fast-growing body of literature documents the benefits of UA from improving individual health, increasing access to fresh fruits and vegetables, creating opportunities for community building, and fostering civic engagement and social learning to critical pieces of the sustainability movement providing green infrastructure, edible landscapes, and political spaces attached to issues of food security and food justice, etc. Food connects the questions of health, well-being, social equity, environmental justice, and sustainable development.

Practitioner-oriented scholars also reflected these trends and indulged themselves in the study of this phenomenon. In particular, the planning and public health scholars made a considerable effort to appraise UA´s possible contributions to the urban food systems and identify the best practices for policy and planning. The American Planning Association published the first Policy Guide on Community and Regional Food Planning in 2007. Within the Association of European Planning Schools, a Sustainable Food Planning group was established in 2009. Indeed, urban food production and planning are close allies. Transforming urban spaces into productive landscapes for UA became a key concern for many urban planning agendas. Supported by UA´s positive contribution to many urban sustainability issues, municipal officials across the world are drafting policies to foster urban food production. The first “global” food policy document (the Milano Food Charter) was signed in 2015. Despite all these efforts to create a suitable policy environment, there is still a lack of structural, political, and legislative tools for this goal in urban spatial planning. This Special Issue should identify the key challenges confronting UA in the realms of practice, policy, and planning, and where possible, propose solutions to these challenges.

For this Special Issue, we invite papers that explore new dimensions—both practical and theoretical—of the emerging field of urban food planning and urban agriculture. We welcome a great variety of empirical work, including case and comparative studies, documenting the effective work towards the inclusive, just, and environmentally friendly transition to a sustainable urban food system with the help of urban agriculture in any geographical context. We also encourage conceptual papers which reveal new aspects of hybrid food-governance arrangements and experiment with alternative policies and approaches to sustainable urban development and urban agriculture´s role within food planning.

Example of potential paper topics:

- diverse forms of urban agriculture involved within local and regional planning policies (community gardens, home gardens, urban farms, therapeutic gardens, vertical farms, rooftop gardens, etc.)

- the role of a range of local actors and agents of change in the urban food system planning (citizens, consumers, NGOs, communities, grassroot activists, scientists, educators, influencers, food-service providers, food producers, retailers, etc.)

- stories around shorter food chains and circular economies within the approaches to sustainable urban food systems (sharing; bartering; food banks; zero-waste; community supported agriculture; community kitchens; cooperatives)

- evidence of urban planning and design tools which facilitate urban (and periurban) agriculture

- unintended consequences of urban agriculture and greening efforts through alternative food initiatives (green gentrification; unequal access to productive land; exclusive character of some UA movements)

Dr. Jana Šiftová
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• urban agriculture
• sustainable development
• food planning
• food system
• policy
• equity
• justice
• environment
• community