2018 Conference

Individual Paper Presentation

Our paper will use a comparative perspective to compare theoretical approaches to urban agriculture (UA) throughout the Global North and Global South.   Throughout the Global North and South, there has been an emergence of research examining urban agriculture’s role in creating urban sustainability and realizing social, economic and environmental payoffs.  Topics addressed by researchers have spanned a large range of topics, yet the recent iteration of interest in urban agriculture has been loosely characterized by a divergence and disconnect between research conducted in the Global North, compared to that in the Global South. In cities of the Global North, engagement with urban agriculture is often framed by literature in political ecology, political economy, environmental activism and justice, and social movements, linking urban agriculture to citizen rights, movements against industrial agriculture, farmworker exploitation, urban food deserts, and sustainability. The picture of agriculture in cities of the global South, meanwhile, is more often analyzed in terms of food production and individual or household-level contributions of urban farming to food security and livelihoods.  We will examine different approaches to urban agriculture, with the goal of framing theoretical perspectives that unite UA discussions and themes in the Global North and Global South.  Several perspectives such as Sustainable Livelihoods, Urban Political Ecology and Critical Urban Studies offer rich potential in creating convergences between North and South perspectives.