Urban Agriculture: Passing Fad or New Prospects for Agriculture and Cities?

Abstract

Urban agriculture has recently become a prominent topic with broad media coverage. The initial period of growth being over, the question remains whether urban agriculture will have a long-term effect on agriculture and urban life. Indeed, city administrations integrate (urban) agriculture into their planning strategies. Agricultural actors, in turn, hope that the growing interest in and engagement with urban agriculture open new opportunities for agriculture, a sector which currently faces major economic, cultural and ecological challenges. We introduce a new working group (AG) of the Swiss Academic Society for Environmental Research and Ecology (saguf) that networks urban agriculture experts from the French- and German-speaking parts of Switzerland. A key interest of the AGUrban Agriculture is to determine how urban agriculture might initiate changes in rural and urban areas, thus contributing to a sustainable transformation of society (Zingerli and Kueffer 2016): how does urban agriculture stimulate debates about the future of agriculture in Switzerland, and which new perspectives does urban agriculture provide for the future of Swiss cities? We illustrate a state-of-the-art definition of urban agriculture with examples that were discussed in the AG, and which show the range of ongoing urban agriculture initiatives in Switzerland.