Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes: Urban agriculture as an essential infrastructure

Andre Viljoen and Katrin Bohn

In: UA Magazine No. 15 - Multiple Functions of Urban Agriculture

This paper is written from a U.K. perspective and uses London as an example of an expanding city.

Experiences showing the beneficial effects, and in some cases essential benefits, of urban agriculture have been described in this magazine, other journals and websites. Most of these experiences show benefits related to food security and income, with a primary focus on the South. However, the benefits of urban agriculture are potentially applicable to a far wider population, as the integration of urban agriculture into a multifunctional (mixed) land use strategy has the potential to significantly reduce a city’s ecological footprint. The question arises as to why urban agriculture is not being implemented or propagated on a far wider scale in existing and emerging cities