Urban Agriculture and Resilient Cities

Dear Colleagues,

Worldwide, city dwellers are exposed to environmental conditions that often challenge human health and wellbeing, while also threatening natural resources. Rising costs for maintainance of urban infrastructure and for mitigation of climate change impacts call for sustainable and innovative solutions to holistically strengthen urban resilience. Consequently, urban green is being re-thought as cost effective nature-based solutions, which simultaneously provide environmental, social and economic benefits and help to build urban resilience..However, these traditional nature based solutions have not been able to significantly increase social cohesion nor to foster more sustainable life styles as they mostly invite to ‘stay and use’ but not to become actively involved on-site, in an ongoing fashion.
Edible City Solutions are going a step further, by deepening the social dimension of nature based solutions and inducing a paradigm shift towards more sustainable life styles. Edible City Solutions include the wide range of different forms of urban agriculture, building integrated farming, agro-forestry, aquaculture among other productive and ornamental purposes and services combined with closed loop systems for sustainable water, nutrient and waste management as part of Edible City Solutions. Urban food production provides opportunities for using innovative principles of ecological design and closed material and energy flows. It furthermore invites citizens to co-create sustainable development pathways for their society and proactively change urban environments to their own benefit and thus induces a paradigm change of urban lifestyle.
Although, urban agriculture projects have demonstrated multifunctional benefits, emancipative citizen commitment and successful inclusive urban regeneration to a considerably greater extent than other nature-based solutions, these solutions remain almost unused in strategic urban planning towards the development of sustainable, livable and healthy cities.
In this special issue, we want to a) critically review resilience and benefits of urban agriculture and other Edible City Solutions for local communities worldwide; b) analyse barriers for mainstream the use of Edible City Solutions in urban planning practices and c) discuss strategies to systematically anchor Edible City Solutions into planning of resilient cities.

Dr. Ina Säumel
Guest Editor

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• Cross sectoral planning
• Ecosystem services
• Environmental justice
• Multifunctional infrastructure
• Paradigm change
• participatory planning
• urban farming