Key questions

Appropriate methods for urban agriculture. Research, policy development, planning, implementation and evaluation. (E-conference - February 4-16 2002)

Focus

During the conference we will:

• Concentrate on methods and tools ("how to" issues), rather than on subject matter, whether agricultural technologies or the contents of policies, laws and regulations;
• Give emphasis to those methods that fill existing gaps and complement or go beyond more conventional "tried and tested" methods, and to those methods that can address the special characteristics of the urban setting and help to identify technical and process gaps;
• In general this will mean an emphasis on methods that are: participatory, problems based, policy and action oriented, multi-actor and multi-sector, interactive, interdisciplinary & system oriented, gender sensitive;
• We will welcome experiences gained within the field of UA as well as in related fields (like the Agenda 21 methodology, Healthy Cities approach, innovative urban planning approaches, PLA, PTD, farmer field schools, participatory natural resource management).

Key Questions

We kindly invite you to share your experiences (successes as well as failures!) with the application of the various methodologies of relevance in the field of UA in any of the following categories:

• Methods for Situation analysis/diagnosis and baseline studies on UPA
• Methods for Participatory UPA policy formulation and action planning
• Methods for Integration of UPA in urban land use planning
• Methods for Participatory technology development in UPA
• Methods for Marketing assessments and micro-enterprise development related to UPA
• Methods for Monitoring and evaluation of the impacts of UPA

We are happy to receive your comments on the topic papers, providing examples that support or falsify the experiences discussed in the synthesis papers and/or that throw more light on the gaps identified and the key issues raised at the end of each topic paper

We are especially interested in examples of:

• How you adapted existing methods for the specific conditions of urban agriculture, or developed new methods well adapted to the urban conditions;
• How you combined more conventional methods with innovative and participatory methods;
• The process of implementation of a specific methodology, the pre-conditions required to implement that method successfully and its cost-effectiveness;
• Methods adapted to suit better the interests of specific direct stakeholders in UA (women, poverty groups, young entrepreneurs, ethnic minorities) in the cities.