Critical geography of urban agriculture

Abstract

Urban agriculture is a broad term which describes food cultivation and animal husbandry on urban and peri-urban land. Grassroots as well as institution-led urban agricultural projects are currently mushrooming in the cities of the Global North, reshaping urban landscapes, experimenting with alternatives to the capitalist organization of urban life and sometimes establishing embryonic forms of recreating the Commons. While this renewed interest in land cultivation and food production is attracting increasing interest in a wide range of disciplines – from planning to landscape and cultural studies – it remains a very marginal and almost unexplored field of human geography. Nonetheless, beyond the rhetoric of sustainability and health, urban agriculture raises several relevant questions of interest for a critical geographer. Starting by drawing a map of concepts and theories available in an interdisciplinary literature, and highlighting fields of possible inquiry, this paper aims to define the scope of and an initial agenda for a critical geography of urban agriculture.