Nurturing cities: pathways towards a circular urban agriculture

Abstract

The recent Covid-19 pandemic has shown how world crises manifest themselves in a more disruptive way in urban communities. Urban areas were hit harder by the virus, and the images of empty shelves and endless queues in front of the supermarkets are the emblems of a western society that started to fear for its food security. Today, soils are under a lot of pressure to feed an increasingly urban population (80% of food will be consumed in cities by 2050), and if a future pandemic would hit grain or wheat or soy seeds instead of humans, there is a good chance that our food-system would be disrupted. In this scenario cities are the epicenter of the new challenges for the future, having the means, the technologies, and the assets to spark the transition towards a circular economy of food that replicates natural systems of regeneration, eliminating wastes, using them as inputs for the next production cycles. Hence, farming the cities emerged as a possible solution to feed an increasingly urbanized world, reducing the impact of our food system on agricultural soils, while providing citizens with local, freshly-produced food. This paper aims to illustrate how circular urban agriculture can be achieved by finding new farming spaces in cities, removing the constraints of the soil, and thus integrating off-soil production systems within buildings and urban districts, developing new synergies between the built environment and agriculture practices.