Dossier
Urban agriculture
Urban agriculture can contribute to urban needs by connecting local food and energy production to community goals, like care for the urban environment, room for recreation in urban areas, care-facilities or educational possibilities. Urban agriculture can be a garden on a rooftop or balcony, an allotment for amateur gardeners or professional urban food production and processing at the edges of a city. Each of these types of urban agriculture should be given its place under the sun. Urban agriculture can contribute to a liveable and sustainable city in many ways. It may help to reduce the urban environmental footprint.
More than half of the global population lives in cities. This urbanisation leads to high claims on land and space, a growing need for liveable urban structures and increasing demands for recognisable, locally produced food. Cities and their surrounding countryside are becoming more and more entwined. Wageningen University & Research sees opportunities for new forms of agriculture in natural settings in and around cities.
What is the Wageningen approach for urban agriculture?
- Designing and researching new concepts for urban land use
- Developing concepts into tangible initiatives with stakeholders
- Connecting communities, public organisations and business owners
- Creating space for urban agriculture in spatial planning and legal structures
- Evaluating, learning and advise policy makers and business partners
Projects:
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Call for partners: Safe Circular Urban Food Production
- Wageningen Food Safety Research (WFSR) aims to address the safety of circular urban agricultural systems. We will start a project on the identification of food-safety hazards in a selection of circular urban agriculture systems Our contribution will be evaluating the presence of food safety hazards, such as pharmaceuticals, heavy metals and pesticides in municipal organic waste streams. Part of the project will be the assessment of potential hazards, defining critical points in safe urban food chains, and the development of a guidance protocol that aids citizens and stakeholders in starting circular urban farming initiatives that produce food safely. -
The Feeding City
- The Feeding City — a collaborative research programme between the AMS Institute, municipality of Almere, province of Flevoland and Aeres University of Applied Sciences — is embedded on the Flevo Campus, thus facilitating opportunities for research, education and entrepreneurship relating to the ‘Food and the City’ theme. The programme objective is to innovate the urban food system by working closely with the business community, institutions and residents from the city and the surrounding region. -
COcreating LANdscape based aDaptation of urban regions enhancing biodivERsity (Het Ronde Landschap)
- Cities face major challenges such as increasing population pressure, energy transition, urban densification, the prevention of flooding and heat stress and the decline of biodiversity. The rural area also has its challenges. Flooding or water shortages cause problems in agriculture and changing temperatures and water availability affect biodiversity. There is also the need to use primary sources more circularly by closing cycles. The landscape and nature offer all kinds of solutions that can help to effectively and sustainably meet these challenges. -
Healing Gardens
- We are testing to what extent gardening can help (former) cancer patients meeting the norms of physical activity and fruit and vegetable intake, and to what extent gardening in a group can function as a form of social support. -
The Urban Nexus of the Environmental Flows of Water, Energy and Food
- Cities are becoming increasingly more populated and rapid urbanization is taking place all around the world. This requires larger supplies of input and output resources to sustain human and urban needs. Water, Energy and Food (WEF) have long been acknowledged as essential inputs to feed cities. -
Successful implementation of green urban development (SIGS)
- Successful Implementation of Green Urban Development (Dutch acronym: SIGS) is a project committed to improving the implementation of functional vegetation in urban development and expansion projects. Its goal is to provide urban professionals with the knowledge needed to enhance the integration of vegetation in urban development processes. -
Fruit4Sports: Fruit from a sports park's orchard in the sports café
- Finger-wagging next to the soft drinks machine or the fish-and-chip shop will not prevent people becoming overweight. A positive message, on the other hand, can! That is the idea behind Fruit4Sports.
News:
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How can we design a fully circular food system for Amsterdam in 2050?
- How can you keep organic materials for food production in the cycle and how do you arrange that with each other? In a series of podcasts and articles, Wageningen researchers talk about their vision of the circular food system of the future. The first is Hilke Bos-Brouwers on Circularity by design: how can we design a fully circular food system for Amsterdam in 2050? -
The result of the Urban Greenhouse Challenge
- This academic year saw student teams from all over the world once again compete to present the best urban agriculture idea. With the Urban Greenhouse Challenge, large student competitions have become an inextricable part of Wageningen.