The Urban Agriculture Nexus

This paper presents a new interpretation of the Food-Energy-Water Nexus, capable of identifying links between the environmental, economic and social factors of urban agriculture in the Global North. The Nexus is a concept advocating the optimisation of resource usage in relationship to food production. This optimisation has been researched from many perspectives, including resource security (i.e. ensuring that usage does not compromise availability - Al-Saidi and Elagib, 2017) and inter-sectorial management (i.e. a systems approach to identify feedback loops when planning interventions in each one of the three sectors – Allouche et al., 2015). These perspectives mainly focus on the macro and meso scale of intervention (Biggs et al., 2015), in which, for example, decisions concerning the construction of hydroelectric plants have an impact on the availability of water for agricultural purposes. At these scales, people are considered in terms of access to resources and participation in the decision-making processes. Instead, behaviours and cultures of resource use to grow food at a micro scale are rarely considered. Urban agriculture is practiced mainly at an individual and community level, and utilises resources to produce not only food but also social benefits. Hence, in the nexus for urban agriculture presented here, the social aspects that this practice embeds in the food growing activities play a major role. Following a brief overview of the different perspectives of the nexus, one is derived which is fit for urban agriculture, together with relevant factors necessary to design a framework of analysis. This framework aims at developing an understanding of the nexus that connects people, horticultural practices, urban resource usage and food.