The Urban Agriculture Nexus in Southern cities: Appraising the benefits of urban food growing in Bogotá

With a rapidly increasing world population and an impending climate crisis, our cities, where it is estimated that half of humanity will live by 2050, are both hotspots of vulnerability and forges of change that will dictate our future. Urban agriculture is a nature-based solution that produces food, whose supply is one of the most critical issues in urban settlements, and social benefits in a sustainable manner. Although there has been a growing interest towards this practice over the past two decades, its characteristics and benefits are not yet fully understood. Until the early 2000s, urban agriculture was mainly practiced for its socio-cultural implications in countries of the Global North, while in the Global South it was often associated with self-subsistence. Over the last 20 years this scenario has evolved and the multitude of qualitative and quantitative benefits of urban farming reported in both the Global North and Global South call for new methodologies able to capture its multidimensionality.

This thesis aims at defining and quantifying the impacts of urban agriculture in Bogotá, currently one of the most renown cities in Latin America for urban farming with more than 7,000 active urban gardens. This aim is attained by collecting and analysing data from a sample of 15 case studies (urban food gardens) and subsequently by using these datasets to evaluate at an urban scale the potential for food productivity, resource efficiency and social benefits. The methodological approach is mixed and combines a quantitative-qualitative framework designed within a European-funded research project (FEW-meter) to collect and analyse data generated from the case study sample, and a GIS based method designed for this investigation, to evaluate potential impacts at a city scale.

This study found that urban agriculture in Bogotá is practised for both practical and socio-cultural reasons, a trend that has already been observed in other Southern territories. However, the picture that emerges is much more complex and is shaped by the cultural and social context, as demonstrated by the four types of urban gardens identified. Home gardens have a practical purpose of self-sufficiency, similar to productive gardens, which do however sell what they produce. Conversely, community and educational gardens pursue social cohesion and promotion of sustainable lifestyles. Although the definition of these four types of urban gardens has been instrumental in upscaling the effects of urban agriculture at the city scale, it should be emphasised that these categories are a simplification of a varied spectrum of gardens, which seems to share a common aspiration for social re-structuring.

The upscaling methodology allowed to quantify in detail the maximum productivity of urban agriculture in Bogotá, which until now has been scarcely investigated. Although the results obtained are extremely promising, it should be emphasised that this methodology is still experimental. Its value lies in its innovative approach to spatial analysis, which employs social and spatial contextual features (rather than simply looking at land availability and suitability) to predict the likelihood of expansion of urban agriculture.