New Book on Global Urban Agriculture

CABI just published an edited volume entitled "Global Urban Agriculture: Convergence of Theory and Practice between North and South" in which I have two chapters. One is a chapter co-authored with Michael W. Hamm entitled A View from the South: Bringing Critical Planning Theory to Urban Agriculture.  In this chapter, we discuss urban agriculture as an urban practice, rather than a rural practice misplaced, that might be regarded as one dimension of a diverse food system. We argue that studies of urban agriculture can be 'put to work' to,

1. develop more accurate, locally-grounded understandings of how people provision their households,
2. shed light on city processes that make people vulnerable to food insecurity,
3. provide instructional case-studies that challenge conventional notions of what cities are and how they are put together.

The chapter encourages food and urban scholars to take a more systemic approach to understanding urban agriculture, which goes beyond judging it solely in relation to the absolute quantities of food it produces.

The second is entitled Urban Agriculture as Adaptive Capacity: An Example from Senegal. This chapter was based on my dissertation research carried out in M'Bour, Senegal. I argue that different frames yield different understandings of various social phenomenon, and that resilience theory can help us to better qualify and situate urban agriculture in relation to city food systems and household food provisioning strategies. I did a webinar for this chapter about a year ago.

The book's overall argument is that better theorizing of the practice of UA has implications not only for enabling more sustainable food systems, but also for urban social and economic justice.