[EBOOK] Growing better Cities: URBAN AGRICULTURE FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, by Luc J.A. Mougeot, Published by INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH CENTRE

This little book distills two decades of research and development in urban agriculture (UA) and related issues by IDRC and its partners. Its publication, in conjunction with the Third World Urban Forum (WUF) in Vancouver, Canada, is particularly timely. It was in Vancouver, 30 years ago, that the first United Nations Conference on Human Settlements was held. That 1976 conference led the ƯN to create its Centre for Human Settlements — now called UN-HABITAT — an agency that is widely referenced for its work with IDRC in these pages.
 

One striking conclusion from developments in UA policy over the last 30 years is that, contrary to common perception, UA is neither the short-lived remnant of a rural culture nor a nasty symptom of arrested urban development. The real paradox is that, on the political agenda, UA is far more advanced in Northern countries than it is in the South — even where its practice would be comparatively less critical to the wellbeing of city dwellers.

In cities of the North, public UA initiatives initially promoted household and community gardening for food security in times of economic crisis (for example, the British Allotments Act of 1925 and the War Gardens of Canada, 1924-1947). Today, cities such as Amsterdam, London, Stockholm, Berlin, and St Petersburg in Europe, or New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver in North America have connected UA with resource recycling and conservation, therapy and recreation, education and safe food provision, community development, green architecture, and open space management.
 

-► Montreal has incorporated UA as a permanent land use of municipal parks; it has the largest community garden program in Canada, now managed at the borough level.

Lisbon’s pedagogical gardens, promoted city wide in the 1990s, led the city to develop a city farm, now visited by more than 100 000 people every year.

-► Delft, in the Netherlands, has combined UA with several other land uses in a heavily populated polder area.

► In Parisian suburbia, inclusive local land development and management now protects cultivated landscapes for their nonagricultural services, which arc highly valued by the public and various urban actors.

-► Vancouver has created its Food Policy Council, which allows the city to integrate and coordinate the activities of its various departments in UA and other aspects of its policies on food and environmental sustainability.
 

National community garden associations and virtual resource centres have sprung up in various places: City Farmer in Vancouver, the Developing Country Farm Radio Network (DCFRN) in Toronto, and the International Network of Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security (RUAF) in Leusden, the Netherlands, to name but a few.

It is clearly evident that UA has come to involve an ever-widening range of production systems, technical solutions, actors, and policy instruments.

More importantly, the migration of people from Southern to Northern cities is adding diversity to local values and culture. UA enables many minority groups to connect in a very meaningful way among themselves and with their foreign host culture. Italian immigrants, for example, spearheaded the community gardens movement in Montreal in the 1970s. This translates into more UA, enabling cities to reduce their ecological footprint. UA, therefore, can act as a practical entry for our cities into a more sustainable world.

In the South, however, those very countries that have the most to gain from policies positive to UA arc, by and large, the ones where such policies arc less developed. Over the last 10 to 15 years, however, the picture in the South has changed rapidly. As you will read in this book, more and more governments in Southern countries and cities arc revisiting UA. True, the experience of the North bears some relevance, but Southern cities realize they need to innovate and learn from each other — their approach must fit their own conditions, meet their own needs, and fall within their own means. More and more, cities in developing countries arc experimenting and sharing their innovations with other cities of the South as well as, increasingly, cities of the North.

This book provides a brief overview of the current state of UA and of IDRC’s approach to supporting UA through targeted research. By describing a variety of research projects in diverse settings, the book shows the complex issues at hand as well as their human implications. It examines the lessons provided by the many projects funded through IDRC and its partners and makes some recommendations for future action by the international community as well as by national and municipal bodies. The book concludes by speculating on future directions for UA and assesses its continued role in providing a larger measure of food security for the world's burgeoning cities.

This book, however, is only one element of a much larger “knowledge pyramid,” which includes detailed ease studies and an extensive range of source materials on urban agriculture, all of which readers are invited to access at www.idrc.ca/in_focus_cities.
Luc J.A. Mougeot joined IDRC in late 1989, directing the Urban Environment Management program from 1992 to 1995. In 1996, he founded idrc's Cities Feeding People program and, from 1996 to 2004, managed over 40 projects on urban agriculture in the developing world. Dr Mougeot is currently a senior program specialist with idrc’s Special Initiatives Division. He holds a doctorate in geography from Michigan State University (1981) and conducted post-doctoral studies in environmental impact assessment in the UK and Germany (1987). From 1978 to 1989, Dr Mougcot was an adjunct professor at the Federal University of Para, Brazil, where he supervised graduate research, served as consultant to development agencies, and coordinated international research projects. He has served as member of various international steering, advisory, editorial, and selection committees on urban agriculture. He is currently a permanent reviewer for the International Science Foundation and sits on the international advisory board for un-habitat’s State of the World Cities Report 2006. Dr Mougcot has authored or edited over 60 publications, including his most recent, AGROPOLÍS.- the Social, Environmental, and Political Dimensions of Urban Agriculture (Earthscan/IDRC 2005).

[EBOOK] Growing better Cities: URBAN AGRICULTURE FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, by Luc J.A. Mougeot, Published by INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH CENTRE

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THIS EBOOK

Keyword: ebook, giáo trình, Growing better Cities, URBAN AGRICULTURE FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, URBAN AGRICULTURE, SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, nông nghiệp đô thị, phát triển đô thị, nông nghiệp đô thị phát triển bền vững