Urban agriculture (UA) holds great promise as a means to address food insecurity in developed cities and also provides many other advantages for communities.
Modern technologies are revolutionizing UA operations. These revolutionary systems optimize resources and monitor plants in real-time while simultaneously decreasing water and energy use for operations.
1. Water Conservation
Urban agriculture (UA) is an increasingly popular sustainable development practice that uses various farming techniques and cutting-edge technology to transform underutilized urban spaces into vibrant ecosystems that support themselves. Urban agriculture can ease pressure on rural farms while simultaneously decreasing carbon emissions and providing city residents with food security by encouraging them to cultivate crops themselves within urban settings.
Farmers can reuse rainwater to water plants while adding living and dead organic matter to keep soil healthy, stimulate plant growth, and decrease land disturbance. Conservation tillage strategies also can be employed to limit disruption while increasing soil infiltration rates.
The use of technological systems can maximize resource use while monitoring plant health in real-time, leading to greater productivity and yields while decreasing environmental impact.
2. Energy Efficiency
Utilizing modern, energy-saving equipment and maintaining it properly will reduce energy usage while opting for renewable sources may further lower costs. Farms can save even more by selling their produce locally.
Concerns related to hygiene standards present a major barrier for livestock-based urban agriculture initiatives, but these can be overcome through educational and assistance programs aimed at helping urban farmers improve their practices while upholding quality assurance.
As such, architects and developers increasingly turn to agricultural consultants for guidance in designing and creating green and sustainable urban agriculture (UA) spaces. By harnessing their expertise, architects and developers are better able to unleash UA’s potential within smart cities.
3. Food Security
Food security is one of the fundamental needs essential to survival, yet we face an unprecedented food crisis due to climate change and economic instability.
Food insecurity is an ongoing challenge that’s made worse by climate-related disasters like drought, floods, and storms – events that reduce crop production and thus limit the availability of food to communities.
UA provides an opportunity to address these challenges by providing food security to city residents. UA can be integrated into city life in various ways, including:
4. Reduced Carbon Footprint
Community gardens and urban farms allow residents to engage in local food production, reducing their reliance on imported produce while simultaneously decreasing their carbon footprint through reduced use of fossil-fuel-derived fertilizers and pesticides.
Furthermore, urban agriculture (UA) increases green space in cities, helping reduce urban heat island effects by 0.5-4 degrees Celsius and sequester carbon at higher rates than conventional farming (Tuijl et al. 2018).
Researchers from the University of Michigan collaborated with citizens in France, Germany, Poland, and the UK to monitor daily inputs and harvests at 73 urban farms located throughout those four countries. Their extensive study, published in Nature Cities magazine is the largest ever undertaken comparing emissions between urban farming and conventional agriculture.
5. Health Benefits
Many community gardens and UA farms employ various strategies to foster sustainability, such as artificial intelligence to identify and scare away birds that might harm their gardens. The software analyzes images captured by surveillance cameras to generate an alarm signal that can be played over speakers directly to any birds that appear.
High-density urban agriculture uses technology to minimize energy usage and environmental impact, including using greenhouses with CRISPR Cas 9 genetic editing for more food production in less space.
Bringing production directly into cities can reduce carbon emissions by eliminating lengthy transport distances and refrigeration needs, creating access to healthy and fresh food for the people living there.
6. Economic Benefits
Community farms can offer local residents an additional source of income by selling their produce or hosting community workshops, while also helping promote food education and reduce waste and refrigeration needs.
Urban agriculture (UA) can also enhance urban environments by creating more green space. Furthermore, UA can conserve energy by shortening transportation distances and decreasing refrigeration needs.
However, it is critical that any urban agriculture (UA) project does not become part of a larger gentrification process and instead works toward supporting social justice movements within communities. To accomplish this objective, the policies of any UA project should be accessible and transparent enough to support social justice movements within them.
7. Increased Community Engagement
Community engagement can be defined as “the practice of enabling individuals and communities to access valued social settings and activities, feel capable of contributing meaningfully within them, and develop functional capabilities necessary for participation”.
Community farms allow city residents to learn sustainable farming techniques while growing and harvesting their food, strengthening bonds within communities and expanding knowledge on environmental sustainability. Integrating urban ecological systems into community farms further boosts sustainability by conserving water, reducing runoff, capturing dust and carbon dioxide, and organically cultivating without synthetic chemicals – all essential benefits both to the environment and local economies.
8. Environmental Benefits
Urban farms play an essential role in mitigating the urban heat island effect, which occurs when a city becomes warmer than surrounding rural areas due to dense buildings and lack of greenery. Furthermore, urban farms foster biodiversity by providing habitats for native plants, animals, and pollinator species.
Utilizing technologies from Urban Agriculture such as vertical farming and stacked greenhouses, food waste can be reduced while water and energy can be recycled, helping reduce its environmental impact while creating a more circular economy.
Urban agriculture can bring numerous advantages to communities by expanding access to fresh produce and encouraging healthy lifestyles. Furthermore, urban agriculture may help address environmental and social issues outside food production such as poverty, health inequality, and climate change.
