<p>Community gardens and youth-based programs in urban agriculture have potential to engage youth, especially minorities, in personal development, community building, and healthy eating promotion. This research study explored the role of urban agriculture at the Felege Hiywot Center (FHC), in promoting life skills, entrepreneurship, and healthy eating intentions among minority youth engaging in its programs. The study employed a mixed methods approach through surveys (n=24) and semi-structured interviews (n=10). The Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991; Fishbein, 2000) served as the conceptual framework with three predictive variables to life skills, entrepreneurship, and healthy eating intentions. Community partnerships, program structure, and individual background factors were measured, and relationships between life skills and entrepreneurship were explored. Results obtained from the analysis for both surveys and interviews indicate that participation in FHC promotes life skills, entrepreneurship, and healthy eating intentions for minority youth who engage in its programs. Overall, participants acknowledged the role of volunteers, professionals, sponsors, FHC structure, and individual background factors in promoting life skills, entrepreneurship, and healthy eating intentions. Qualitative data reports more in-depth descriptions of minority youth’s experiences at FHC’s youth program that impacted their daily lives and career decisions. Quantitative and qualitative results highlighted the leadership at the Felege Hiywot Center as particularly influential This research study contributes to the literature on the impacts of urban agriculture youth programs that incorporate experiential learning, farm-based education, and student centered-learning with youth development philosophies. The study also generated a conceptual framework that shows the interactions of different factors that lead to intentions. The results from this study support and extend prior research that suggests positive, lasting impacts from youth-based programs in urban agriculture.</p>

This dissertation examines how simultaneous social-ecological transformations including environmental change, climate uncertainty and urbanization affect low income residents in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Low income residents often reside in informal settlements which themselves inhabit marginal spaces in the city including roof tops, riverbanks, and land on the urban periphery. In Phnom Penh, many communities in the peri-urban zone depend on agriculture for their livelihood. Yet, this way of life is being compromised by changes to weather patterns, water quality and most pressingly urban expansion, as the wetlands they use to farm are being filled with sand to create new land on which to build luxury condos and expansive shopping malls. This thesis focuses on how low income residents, in particular urban farmers on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, live with and influence the ongoing social-ecological transformations that are shaping the city. I employ a mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology, including interviews, focus groups and a household survey to examine how patterns of urbanization in the past 25 years have created situations of both social and ecological marginalization in Phnom Penh. I show how the changing legal framework of land ownership has influenced access to land and housing while analysing how urban farmers have responded to these changes. The following research questions underpinned the study: 1. How are low-income residents of Phnom Penh affected by the process of environmental change (including climate change)? How do other forms of socio-economic marginalization influence this? 2. What are the historical conditions that have shaped the present reality for low-income residents of Phnom Penh in terms of their vulnerability to environmental change? 3. How are low-income residents responding, individually and collectively, to the changes they are experiencing as a result of urbanization and environmental change? What are the outcomes of these actions? 4. How is the concept of ‘resilience’ being employed as a policy objective in Cambodia? Does the presence of a resilience agenda improve conditions for low-income residents facing challenges related to environmental change in urban areas? I combined the theoretical fields of resilience and political ecology, to take advantage of their complementary understandings of the interaction between humans and nature. This theoretical combination highlights the importance of scale, focusing on the loss of agricultural livelihoods at the village level while also acknowledging the role of national policy and politics in shaping the priorities of urban development. My use of political ecology focuses on issues of agency to show how farmers are actively employing strategies to sustain their failing crops, such as increasing the use of chemical inputs, which tragically further undermines their precarious finances as well as the ecosystem they depend on. Farmers deploy short term strategies in an effort to retain a foothold in the city in the hopes that their children will be able to leverage their education to pursue opportunities outside of farming. I further draw on discourse analysis to show how the term resilience is employed in policy and by government officials at the national level to frame climate change as a managerial problem which can be solved with technical solutions and external funding. I argue this obscures how problematic decisions such as the in-filling of urban lakes are caused, not by failures of capacity but by political priorities, aligned to the interests of wealth creation for a small elite. While resilience has been embraced as a policy priority in Cambodia, it has not translated into practices which protect urban ecosystems or lessen social inequalities.

With our ever increasing global population it will be necessary for dense urban environments to develop methods of farming locally. Not only will urban agriculture be beneficial in aiding in the solution of this growing populations need for food production, but it can help to reconnect us to our food and their processes. This dissertation explores the education and reconnection of the public with the food production cycle through the experience of building integrated agriculture, vermiculture and aquaponic systems (cultivating plants and fish symbiotically). Pretoria’s Apies River is an ideal location for the establishment of a research facility of urban ecosystemic food production. The proposed urban agriculture program will allow for hands on research and development of emerging methods and technologies related to farming in the city environment while providing a platform for public education through interaction&inspiration. / Dissertation (MArch(Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Architecture / unrestricted

The ever-increasing population in the metropolis of Accra, Ghana resulting in con-cerns for finding lasting solutions to manage large volumes of waste produced can be tackled through composting for urban agriculture. With insanitary land filling serving as the major disposal option in the metropolis, plans to build the first ever sanitary landfill facility in the metropolis calls for measures to be taken in order to prolong the lifespan of the facility. This therefore necessitates the need to look into an alternative means of diverting organic waste from landfills. The objective of this research is to re-view the Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) management situations in Accra Metropolitan Assembly upon which an investigation is made into the various process steps involved in aerobic windrow composting and also finding out the possibility for integrating composting with urban agriculture. The study relied mainly on secondary data obtained from books, published articles, governmental documents, internet, and master thesis reports on related topics. By the help of a causal loop diagram, the interdependence of various policy actions and sys-tem elements in the waste management process are linked to illustrate the possibility of a composting programme for urban agriculture. Even though the metropolis for some time back has been operating a centralized composting facility, the facility is confirmed to be closed down due to problems ema-nating from financial inadequacy, power failure and mechanical breakdown. The study delve into the process steps in windrow composting and finally identified potentials for composting in the metropolis but however enumerated constraints ranging from human and environmental health, financial, institutional, policy directives, to public and leadership attitudes as stumbling blocks to the implementation of a centralized composting scheme. It finally concluded that the metropolis has the potentials to embark on composting for urban agriculture however, until measures are taken to overcome these constraints, implementing a centralized composting scheme in the metropolis may not be a sustainable option. It is further recommended that whiles the city authorities continue to tackle the constraints to pave way for the implementation of the program, efforts must be made in promoting small scale composting that rely on manually operated tools to help reduce organic waste loads in the municipal waste stream.

Many studies have investigated the issue of feeding the world’s growing population from different perspectives. Conventional agricultural methods usually have small production yields while requiring large amounts of scarce and unevenly distributed resources such as farmland and water. Furthermore, although produced food may meet the demands, it is still inefficiently delivered among different regions. Urban agriculture has been proposed to produce food inside urban areas with higher yields and less resource consumption. Hydroponics is one of the urban farming methods that needs further research before being applied on large scales. This study aims to investigate the potential lettuce production using hydroponic systems to grow lettuce domestically in urban areas in Sweden to lower its lettuce import and motivate local food production to become self-sufficient. The study is performed using a literature review, theoretical design of a system, and scenario-based assessment of hydroponic lettuce production. The detailed analysis is performed via a case study of lettuce production in Uppsala municipality and two scenarios considering the reduction of lettuce import to Sweden and related challenges and opportunities of the designed system. The analyses demonstrate that the system paves the way to decrease lettuce import and dependence on trade. Therefore, applying the system increases self-sufficiency and decreases vulnerability to shocks. Nevertheless, the study does not necessarily address issues related to transportation and food miles. Moreover, finding suitable places to establish the system needs further studies.

Urban agriculture in post-industrial countries is commonly represented in form of shared community gardens or individual gardening lots. However, within the last years, an increasing number of commercial urban farming enterprises around the globe have started their operations. While recreational projects have received much attention, the commercial and entrepreneurial remained mainly uninvestigated. Using a grounded theory approach, this explorative dissertation aims to contribute to an understanding of farming as a new urban profession and the motivation of commercial urban farmers (CUFs) to grow in the city, rather than the countryside. Based on ten semi-standardized in-depth interviews, this study reveals first, that CUFs merge the commonly rural occupation of farming and their desire for autonomic labor with the urban lifestyle as self-made growers, without significant relevant personal or educational background in farming, using alternative growing techniques. Second, the study finds two CUF categories: urbanists, who perceive themselves as actors in sustainable urban development and pursue urban growing activities to contribute to this target; and bargainers, who regard urban growing as a means to an end to progress to small-scale rural agriculture. This suggests that CUFs must engage in inner negotiations between their economic capabilities, the geographic location, and the more society oriented visions they commit themselves to. This research conceptualizes urban farming as tool to fulfill not only food and sustainability goals, but that could also function as basis for sustainable small-scale growing in the countryside.

Detta arbete utvärderar ett kamerasystem som kan ta bilder för analys av växters välmående. Kamerasystemet bygger på en Raspberry pi model 3 b+, en PInoIR kamera modul v2 och ett blått filter. Kameran kan övervaka växter genom att den inte har något infrarött filter. Då kan matematiska uträkningar utföras på allt kamerans sensorer kan ta in. Ett experiment har designats för att skapa mätvärden som används i utvärdering av kamerans funktionalitet. Kamerasystemet bedöms fungera enligt det förespråkade ramverket och den programstack det bygger på. Det analyserade resultatet visar att kamerasystemet kan se skillnad på hydroponiska odlingar med olika tillgång till näring. / This work evaluates a camera system that can take pictures for the analysis of plants' well-being. The camera system is based on a Raspberry pi model 3 b+, a PInoIR camera module v2 and a blue filter. The camera can monitor plants because it does not have an infrared filter. This enables mathematical calculations to be performed on light registered by the camera's sensors. An experiment has been designed to create metrics that are used in evaluating the camera's functionality. The camera system is preforming well by using the proposed framework and program stack. The analyzed results show that the camera system is able to spot the difference between hydroponic cultures with access to differents amounts of nutrition.

Despite the overwhelming role food plays in our everyday lives, the both new and old phenomenon of incorporating food systems into master planned communities has largely been overlooked. The in-progress community of Serenbe located just outside of Atlanta, Georgia is breaking this trend. The mixed use 1,000 acre community has already included many food and agriculture elements such as an organic farm, farmers’ market, grocery store, farm-to-table restaurants and edible landscaping - making it an exemplar case of an emerging planning strategy called Agricultural Urbanism. While many are heralding Serenbe for its strides as a community that incorporates agriculture into its design, the problem is that the full impact of this project remains unknown. In utilizing the case study method for landscape architecture developed by Francis (2001), this thesis examines the process, current state and projected outcomes of including Agricultural Urbanism into the Serenbe Community.

ElectriCITY, a citizenship-driven economic association aims at making Hammarby Sjöstad the most climate-friendly district in Sweden. Their next step is to integrate urban agriculture into the neighborhood. Urban agriculture is, by definition, growing or producing food in a city. It allows, among other things, to increase access to locally grown food for the population nearby and to educate city dwellers on many aspects of agriculture. This project’s goal is to offer a large overview of urban agriculture and its different governance characteristics. In addition to the literature review and to have a better understanding of the relevant stakes of this field, the project was based on six different case studies that introduce various types of urban agriculture governance: SweGreen (Stockholm), Odlande Stadsbasarer (Stockholm), Nature Urbaine (Paris), the WandelGarten (Freiburg), the Tillsammansodling group of Viva (Gothenburg) and Greenhouse (Malmö). The study was built on desk studies, interviews, and two participant observations. It had a focus on the different governance characteristics of the urban agriculture approaches (internal, external, and contextual) based on a distinction between market-oriented projects and non-market-oriented ones. The findings showed similarities between the case studies on different points such as their approaches to sustainability or the need to have external partners and political support. They showed as well the importance to take into account the external and contextual factors for projects to be well-integrated into the urban system.

The thesis takes into notice a rare case of integration of rooftop urban agriculture into sustainable development of urban areas. The current situation shows that the development of rooftop urban agriculture has not been adequately studied. This master thesis aims to enhance the understanding regarding planning opportunities and challenges for integration of rooftop urban farming in urban design and sustainable urban development with a focus on environmental benefits of its implementation. Furthermore, the thesis brings up a conceptual design programme «Malmö FIVE» that shows one of the ways how architects and urban planners could inspire city developers and municipalities to explore the ways of the redevelopment of the existing unused urban spaces into the new resilient environments.  The thesis based on a combination of literature review, analysis of planning materials, site visits, conducting interviews, discussions and attending seminars and lectures to answer the research questions. The research identified multiple challenges that can be encountered in the process of implementation of rooftop urban agriculture. The findings determined the importance of rooftop urban agriculture being approached from the strategic sustainability perspective to value its potential fully. Rooftop urban agriculture can provide significant environmental values thus have an essential role in the sustainable development of urban areas.