Much of the literature is theoretical, focused on the production potential of urban agriculture, while more work is needed to understand and overcome barriers to access and distribution among communities in need. Without understanding the actual links between UA and food security or which specific characteristics, models or approaches reduce insecurity, urban policymakers and advocates risk backing policies that could have unintended consequences or negative impacts on vulnerable individuals and communities. This literature review explores the intersection between UA and food security to better understand how and to what extent UA addresses food access challenges facing low-income communities in urban areas, and the conditions that either enable or inhibit UA initiatives. The landscape of what constitutes “urban agriculture” is extremely heterogeneous: UA encompasses vertical and rooftop farming, urban foraging, community and residential gardens, and commercial urban farms. Some urban farms operate as for-profit businesses, whereas others operate as nonprofits reliant on grants, subsidies and donations to sustain their operations. For the purposes of city planning, the American Planning Association defines UA as the “production, marketing, and distribution of food and other products in metropolitan areas and at their edges, beyond what is strictly for home consumption or educational purposes” . In its simplest form, UA is “growing food in cities” . We define UA broadly to encompass the full range of activities involved in urban food production including self-production and subsistence agriculture. In doing so, we follow scholars who have sought to measure the contributions of a wide range of UA activities . We see three trends in current scholarship on UA in relation to community food security: a focus on the production potential of urban lands, case studies highlighting various nutritional, health, and other community benefits or outcomes from urban gardening initiatives,trim bin tray and more critical analyses of UA through food justice and equity lenses. Some scholars, for example, have mapped vacant lots in Oakland and backyard gardens in Chicago , predicting yield, to illustrate the production potential of UA.
Others demonstrate, through case studies, the productivity of urban gardens and the value of the food they produce in meeting nutritional needs of low-income communities, particularly households involved in gardening directly . Robust theoretical analyses have emerged critiquing the risks of UA when approached without an equity lens, potentially reinforcing structural injustices and racism and negatively impacting the communities they purportedly serve . Deeper historical and structural challenges including poverty, racism, and divestment in specific communities and neighborhoods are increasingly being recognized as the root causes of the current problem of unequal access to sufficient supplies of safe, nutritious, affordable, and culturally acceptable food facing cities . Designating land for agricultural use in urban areas may conflict with other city planning priorities around affordable housing, gentrification, and living. Because of the persistent legacy of systemic discrimination, it is neither inevitable nor guaranteed that urban agriculture will redress food system inequities; in fact, urban farms can sometimes lead to displacement through eco-gentrification . This is a particularly acute concern in areas experiencing housing pressures and population growth, such as the San Francisco Bay area and New York City. UA can also perpetuate positions of privilege within the food system by benefiting those who already hold power . Critical food systems scholars question, “who really benefits, and who loses in specific efforts to promote urban farms in the ‘sustainable city’ landscape?” and, “how can white food activists reframe their work so as not to fuel displacement of residents of color?” . We examine the role of urban agriculture in addressing food insecurity from a systems perspective, one that considers the policies and institutions that govern the process in which food is produced, processed, distributed and consumed, in order to ask four central questions: How and to what extent are urban produced foods reaching low income consumers, and to what effect? What are the approaches, technologies, institutions and relationships that support or detract from UA in achieving food security goals? What are the political, institutional, cultural, historical, and civic action conditions that enable or inhibit urban agriculture to address food insecurity?
Lastly, How can policies be designed to support the urban farmer in earning a living wage, and support low-income consumers in accessing affordable, locally produced healthy foods? We begin by describing our literature review methodology, followed by a review of the food access and food distribution literatures as they relate to the question of how low-income communities access urban produced food. In the food access literature, we review spatial analyses and other studies that identify challenges and opportunities for expanding healthy food access in low-income communities, with a particular focus on urban produced foods. Next, we explore what is understood about the distribution of urban-produced foods especially the challenges and tradeoffs urban farmers face between securing a viable income and meeting the food needs of low-income customers. Lastly, we bring together the literatures on access to and distribution of urban produced foods to identify effective strategies urban farms employ to meet food access needs of urban communities. Our analysis reveals three key factors mediating the effect of UA on food security: the economic realities of achieving an economically viable urban farm, the role of city policy and planning, and the importance of civic engagement in the urban food system. We seek to highlight examples from both the scholarly and gray literatures that demonstrate how UA can improve food access, distribution, and justice, in a way that supports both consumers and producers of food in cities. Results of this systematic review will guide a three-year research project to investigate and address urban food access challenges in the eastern region of the San Francisco Bay Area, where interest in UA abounds, yet levels of gentrification, food insecurity, and income inequality are growing.Our systematic review of the food access and distribution literature builds on critical food systems research in order to better understand when, where and how urban agriculture can improve food access and dismantle structures that perpetuate inequality within the larger food system. We focus on literature from the United States, in order to generate ideas relevant to the political climate surrounding city and regional planners in this country, but results are applicable for comparison or potential transferability in other countries as well. We consider both peer reviewed scholarship and gray literature from food policy organizations Urban Food Policy Institute, Detroit Food Policy Council, and Race Forward). Both theoretical scholarship and case studies are drawn out below to illustrate the question of whether UA improves food access . Building on a set of 150 articles from the researchers’ personal databases , we added an additional 200 sources from five months of Google Alerts for “urban agriculture” and from bibliographies of articles in the database. The Google Alerts provided valuable additions from new studies, local news outlets,pollen trim tray and gray literature. In many ways, the Google Alerts service better captures current trends and innovative ideas in urban agriculture than the scholarly literature, and points out important areas for future academic study, especially with respect to novel distribution methods, technology, and food recovery efforts. For example, topics such as mobile food trucks, gleaning, “agrihood” developments, participatory urban food forest projects, online food exchanges , and food distribution apps receive better coverage in local news outlets than the current body of peer reviewed literature, where these emerging ideas are largely absent. Many of the online platforms that allow farmers and backyard gardeners to sell, donate, or receive volunteer harvest assistance represent especially promising areas for future scholarly research .
We used this body of literature to generate a list of key terms for several Web of Science searches to systematically identify the peer-reviewed literature from 1900 to present. The dataset construction and selection criteria are summarized in Figure 11.Other searches for key terms relating to food access including “food justice”, “food security”, “food sovereignty”, “food apartheid”, and “critical food geographies” added small numbers of articles to our systematic review. Terms were chosen based off keyword lists from articles in the database and results were screened for geographic relevance and mention of urban produced foods. These terms and search results bring up important questions of who prefers and uses which terms, and why. The struggle over terminology mirrors broader struggles for control, power, and self-determination. Going beyond ‘food security’, the term “food sovereignty” originates from La Via Campesina and the predominantly rural small producers movement in the 1990s; it is applied to the urban space by scholars such as Alkon and Mares and Block et al. as a distinctly political concept that is “a transformative process . . . to recreate the democratic realm and regenerate a diversity of autonomous food systems based on equity, social justice, and ecological sustainability” . Those who use “food apartheid” aim to directly implicate the segregation that is reproduced in the modern food system and food movements with respect to who can access healthy, locally produced food along racial lines . These scholars foreground issues of race in their analyses in effort to name and dismantle racist legacies in the food system. To identify the body of literature pertaining to the distribution of urban-produced foods, it was necessary to expand our search terms beyond “urban agriculture” and “food distribution”, and start with “food systems”, “distribution”, and “urban” as key search terms. We then filtered the results of this search to exclude articles pertaining solely to location of supermarkets in food deserts, a common area of research but not the focus of this study . We also conducted searches for “urban foodshed” , “alternative food networks”, “informal food distribution” and “short food supply chains”, in order to track down missing literature from our collection investigating the transfers of food produced in cities. This iterative search process on the distribution side reveals the difficulties in tracking informal food distribution networks, but also the importance of doing so to better understand the real impact of urban agriculture on food insecurity in cities. Data analysis comprised content analysis of article abstracts to identify key findings among the case studies considered, and closer reading of other review articles to identify trends and gaps in the literature. Themes were extracted from articles considered, and grouped by study type to determine which types of studies provide which data.Community food security is defined by the Community Food Security Coalition as “all persons obtaining at all times a culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through local non-emergency sources”, with urban agriculture playing an important but integrated role in this effort. According to Horst et al. , expanding urban agriculture operations across cities “does not guarantee that people experiencing food insecurity will access that food…Distribution and access matter.” Food access, closely related to the term food security, constitutes the process of obtaining certain foods and includes educational, cultural, geographic, and economic dimensions. The literature on fresh food access in low-income communities often focuses on food desert analyses studying lack of grocery stores; however, focusing on “lack of stores” does not address historical under investment patterns and underlying structural causes of food insecurity and oversimplifies the solutions landscape . Other literature studies efforts to bring in fresh food through farmers markets locating in underserved communities, or through offering fresh produce in corner stores . Both efforts have met with limited success . Less is known about the actual consumption of urban produced foods by low-income communities. When certain literature reviews claim that urban agriculture improves food access among food insecure households and communities, it is often from a productivist conceptualization of “access.” This productivist focus in the literature conflates existence of urban farms with increased access, without examining where the food actually goes and who consumes it. As critical food scholarship points out, “the focus of food access as an issue goes beyond the particular connections to health to be a way that issues of power, control, and inequality are written into the American landscape” . Below we outline barriers to accessing urban produced foods, including physical proximity, cost of food, cost of land, cultural acceptability, and nutrition education, identified from an interdisciplinary body of literature spanning urban agroecology, public health, development economics and food geography.