Urban Agriculture Design for Resilient Cities

149 Pages·2015·5.27 MB·English

Urban Agriculture Design for Resilient Cities

Katharine Frances Archdeacon

Submitted in total fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Philosoph y
May 2015
Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning
The University of Melbourne

Produced on archival quality paper
Abstract
How might urban agriculture practices be more explicitly designed and managed to
contribute to the resilience of urban socio-technical-ecological systems?
The observed and potential impacts on cities of climate change and resource scarcity are being
identified as motivations for theoretical and practical research into urban resilience. Urban agriculture
(UA)–the production of food in urban environments–is argued by theorists and practitioners as one
way to increase the resilience of cities by reducing vulnerabilities of current food supply systems. The
anticipated value of UA in resilient cities contributes in part to a growing field of theory and practice
focused on the task of designing and integrating UA into existing urban landscapes.
This thesis reframes UA as a socio-technical-ecological system (STES) in which
practitioners–consciously or otherwise–manage resources and relationships to produce ecosystem
services. Framing UA in this way informed the selection of four case studies–three in the UK and one
in the Netherlands–that seek to generate multiple benefits by creating UA networks across several
sites in a city.
Design research methods used in the fieldwork data collection and analysis stages revealed
patterns that describe methods of working with UA as a STES that has cycles of growth and collapse.
The patterns tested positively for coherence through discussion with urban agriculture practitioners in
Melbourne.
A comparison of the case studies and patterns with resilience methods and principles revealed
correlations and gaps between the two. Working with social and ecological diversity, embracing
experimentation and risk in socio-ecological systems are resilience-building principles that occurred in
the case studies. Working at multiple scales and preparing innovative projects in anticipation of
disturbance in the STES are resilience-building principles that were not identified in the case studies
or patterns.
The scope of the case studies in this thesis was limited to those that worked on multiple sites
in a city because the presence of distributed urban agriculture is anticipated to contribute to urban
resilience. The thesis found, within these limitations, that there are some correlations between
resilience-building principles developed from rural and peri-urban case studies and the UA practices
investigated. It also found gaps between the principles and the UA practices. The UA case studies
demonstrated some common patterns of practice that were recognisable, if unusual, to UA
practitioners in Melbourne. There is some possibility that UA network practices might be more
explicitly aligned with resilience-building principles and that patterns might continue to be drawn
from them, allowing such methods to be applied in different cities.
Urban agriculture design for resilient cities 2
Declaration
This is to certify that (i) the thesis comprises only my original work towards the degree of
Masters of Philosophy, (ii) due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used,
(iii) the thesis is fewer than 50,000 words in length, exclusive of words in tables, maps, bibliographies
and appendices
Signed:

Katharine Archdeacon
Urban agriculture design for resilient cities 3
Acknowledgements
Many, many people helped me to develop and deliver this thesis. There are too many to
thank individually here, but some I must acknowledge as being central to this work:
o My VEIL colleagues past and present, especially Kirsten Larsen and Dianne Moy, who
first introduced me to this field of research.
o My supervisors, Professor Chris Ryan and Dr Kate Shaw, who patiently walked me
through the immersive process of developing a Masters thesis.
o My ABP RHD colleagues who shared their own journeys and experiences, especially
Fiona Johnson, Tanja Beer, Isun Kazerani and Solmaz Hosseinioon.
o The research support staff in the ABP faculty, especially Jane Trewin, and in the
Melbourne School of Graduate Research, without whom this thesis would not have
survived to maturity.
o The urban agriculture practitioners here in Melbourne and overseas who gave so much of
their time, especially everyone involved in the Middlesbrough project.
o My parents, Anne and John and my sister, Joanne, who were unflagging in their
encouragement and support and helped me keep body and soul together and sane.
o Finally, Rob Eales, who went first and showed me where to step, thank you. This
couldn't have happened without you.

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Table of Contents
Abstract .................................................................................................................................................................................. 2
Declaration ........................................................................................................................................................................... 3
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................................................... 4
Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................................................... 5
List of figures and tables ................................................................................................................................................. 7
Chapter 1. Introduction and overview ................................................................................ 8
Context .................................................................................................................................................................................... 8
Motivation ............................................................................................................................................................................. 9
Aim ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 9
Research question .............................................................................................................................................................. 9
Scope ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 9
Significance ......................................................................................................................................................................... 10
Thesis Overview ................................................................................................................................................................. 10
Chapter 2. Urban resilience, vulnerable cities & food systems ......................................... 13
2.1. Vulnerable cities ...................................................................................................................................................... 13
2.2. Vulnerable food systems ...................................................................................................................................... 14
Peak oil and climate change impacts on food systems .................................................................................... 14
Industrial-scale food system practices .................................................................................................................... 15
2.3. Urban resilience ....................................................................................................................................................... 16
Socio-ecological system resilience ............................................................................................................................. 18
Managing socio-ecological system services .......................................................................................................... 18
2.4. Building urban resilience ..................................................................................................................................... 19
Principles for building resilience ............................................................................................................................... 19
Chapter 3. Urban agriculture: a socio-technical-ecological system ................................... 23
3.1. Urban agriculture .................................................................................................................................................... 23
Re-localised food and food security .......................................................................................................................... 24
Hobby-level, household supply and commercial food production .............................................................. 26
3.2. Urban agriculture and ecosystem services .................................................................................................. 27
Trade-offs in urban agriculture practice ............................................................................................................... 30
3.3. Working with UA-as-STES ................................................................................................................................... 31
Design professions working with urban agriculture ........................................................................................ 31
Chapter 4. Fieldwork case studies and research methods ................................................ 33
4.1. Integrating UA into cities ..................................................................................................................................... 33
UA networks ........................................................................................................................................................................ 33
Integrated physical, social and ecological networks ........................................................................................ 34
4.2. Four case studies of UA integrated into cities ............................................................................................. 35
Bristol Food Network (BFN) ........................................................................................................................................ 35
Middlesbrough Environment City (MEC) ............................................................................................................... 36
Urbaniahoeve ..................................................................................................................................................................... 36
The London Orchard Project (LOP) .......................................................................................................................... 37
4.3. Research Methodology .......................................................................................................................................... 37
Patterns and pattern languages ................................................................................................................................ 37
Design Research Methods ............................................................................................................................................. 38
Chapter 5. Fieldwork data from the case study visit s....................................................... 40
5.1. Bristol Food Network (BFN) .............................................................................................................................. 40
The context: sustainability and food in Bristol .................................................................................................... 40
The network ........................................................................................................................................................................ 45
Maintaining the network .............................................................................................................................................. 50
5.2. Middlesbrough Environment City (MEC) ..................................................................................................... 51
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The background of the network: Designs of the Times (Dott) Festival 2007 ......................................... 52
The network: Post-Dott .................................................................................................................................................. 59
The context of the network in 2013 .......................................................................................................................... 62
Grown in Middlesbrough: Urban farming in 2013 ............................................................................................. 66
Managing the network ................................................................................................................................................... 77
5.3. Urbaniahoeve ............................................................................................................................................................ 90
The context for the network: Urbaniahoeve’s goals and philosophy ......................................................... 91
Sites in the network ......................................................................................................................................................... 92
How does Urbaniahoeve compare to the Dott 07 project? ............................................................................. 98
5.4. The London Orchard Project (LOP) ................................................................................................................. 99
The Orchard Festival ....................................................................................................................................................... 99
Urban orchards .............................................................................................................................................................. 102
An expanding network ................................................................................................................................................ 106
5.5. Fieldwork Summary ............................................................................................................................................ 107
Chapter 6. Fieldwork data analysis ................................................................................. 108
6.1. Pattern language use in urban agriculture ................................................................................................ 108
6.2. Drawing out patterns from the fieldwork ................................................................................................. 109
Interview trends ............................................................................................................................................................. 109
Emerging patterns ........................................................................................................................................................ 111
Key theme analysis to confirm patterns .............................................................................................................. 112
6.3. Patterns and contextual descriptions .......................................................................................................... 115
Networks ........................................................................................................................................................................... 115
Collaborate & Connect ................................................................................................................................................. 116
Catalyse & Step Back .................................................................................................................................................... 117
Celebrate ........................................................................................................................................................................... 119
6.4. Testing the patterns' coherence .................................................................................................................... 120
Melbourne UA practitioners working with networks .................................................................................... 121
Response to patterns .................................................................................................................................................... 122
Cultivating Community discussion ......................................................................................................................... 123
Moreland Food Gardens Network discussion .................................................................................................... 125
6.5. Analysis summary ................................................................................................................................................ 129
Chapter 7. Conclusion: Answering the research question ............................................... 131
7.1. Context and scope of the thesis ...................................................................................................................... 131
7.2. Fieldwork collection methods and data ..................................................................................................... 133
7.3. Data analysis and emerging patterns .......................................................................................................... 133
7.4. Comparing urban agriculture methods with resilience principles ................................................. 134
7.5. Research outcomes and significance ........................................................................................................... 138
References ..................................................................................................................... 140

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List of figures and tables
Table 1: Principles for managing for resilience in SESs ............................................................................................................ 22
Fig.1: Packaged produce from the Co-operative in Bristol. ..................................................................................................... 41
Fig.2: Produce from the Bristol farmers’ market. ........................................................................................................................ 42
Fig.3: Produce is sold loose, by weight or by piece at the Bristol farmers' market. ...................................................... 42
Fig.4: Food Sovereignty in 21st Century Bristol exhibition description ............................................................................. 43
Fig.5: Food Sovereignty in 21st Century Bristol map ................................................................................................................. 44
Fig.6: An integrated wildlife- and human-food producing garden at the Ecohome in Bristol. ................................ 45
Fig.7: Banners on Feed Bristol’s front gate displaying partnerships involved. ............................................................... 47
Fig.8: Intensive tomato production in the CSA greenhouse on the Feed Bristol site. ................................................... 48
Fig.9: ‘Sunburst’ productive garden; forage flowers in foreground, food forest in the background at Feed
Bristol. ............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 48
Fig.10: Forage flowers for pollinating insects planted outside food-producing polytunnels at Feed Bristol .... 49
Fig.11: Productive rows on the CSA section of the Feed Bristol site. ................................................................................... 49
Fig.12: Information sign about pollinator insects at Feed Bristol. ....................................................................................... 50
Fig.13: Map of Opportunities for a Green and Edible Middlesbrough ................................................................................ 62
Fig.14: Dott planter boxes in Middlesbrough, 2013 ................................................................................................................... 66
Fig.15: Saltersgill Allotments–Traditional (Middlesbrough) ................................................................................................. 68
Fig.16: Saltersgill Allotments –Community (Middlesbrough) ................................................................................................ 69
Fig.17: Entry to Peoples Park (Middlesbrough) ........................................................................................................................... 73
Fig.18: Peoples Park, surrounded by housing estate (Middlesbrough) .............................................................................. 73
Fig.19: Hub built from shipping container (Middlesbrough) .................................................................................................. 74
Fig.20: Young food forest with apple trees at Peoples Park (Middlesbrough) ................................................................ 75
Fig.21: Veg bag assembly in the MEC garage (Middlesbrough) ............................................................................................ 80
Fig.22: Allocating foods according to their food groups in the Grow It Cook It Eat It class (Middlesbrough) . 82
Fig.23: Cooking vegetable soup in the class from very simple ingredients (Middlesbrough) ................................... 83
Fig.24: Stewart Park garden (Middlesbrough) ............................................................................................................................. 86
Fig.25: Apprentice at work, Stewart Park (Middlesbrough) ................................................................................................... 87
Fig.26: Harvesting fruit for juicing and pressing (Middlesbrough) ..................................................................................... 88
Fig.27: Fruit collected from one back garden (Middlesbrough) ............................................................................................ 89
Fig.28: Backyard fruit trees, formerly part of an orchard that has been subdivided (Middlesbrough) .............. 89
Fig.29: Pressing pulped fruit at the Juicing Day (Middlesbrough) ....................................................................................... 90
Fig.30: The Demo Garden, Urbaniahoeve ........................................................................................................................................ 93
Fig.31: Crates and the polytunnel, Demo Garden, Urbaniahoeve ......................................................................................... 94
Fig.32: Freshly-harvested lunch ingredients, Demo Garden, Urbaniahoeve .................................................................... 95
Fig.33: Foodscape Wildeman, looking towards the second site (Urbaniahoeve) .......................................................... 96
Fig.34: Beauty but fewer edible plants in Autumn, Foodscape Wildeman (Urbaniahoeve) ..................................... 97
Fig.35: Very young fruit trees at Foodscape Wildeman's second site (Urbaniahoeve) ............................................... 98
Fig.36: Site of the London Orchard Project's 2013 Festival ................................................................................................. 100
Fig.37: Apple varieties on display at the London Orchard Project's 2013 Festival .................................................... 101
Fig.38: Apple crushing and pressing equipment at the London Orchard Project's 2013 Festival ....................... 102
Fig.39: Partial map of London Orchard sites .............................................................................................................................. 103
Fig.40: Wilton Orchard in Hackney, London ............................................................................................................................... 106
Fig.41: Annotated interview notes ................................................................................................................................................... 110
Fig.42: Pattern analysis colour key ................................................................................................................................................. 113
Table 2: Iterative data configurations ........................................................................................................................................... 115
Table 3: Are these patterns 'good'? ................................................................................................................................................. 121
Table 4: Resilience comparison ......................................................................................................................................................... 137

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Chapter 1. Introduction and overview
How might urban agriculture practices be more explicitly designed and managed to
contribute to the resilience of urban socio-technical-ecological systems? This chapter introduces the
context, motivation, aim, scope, significance and outline of the thesis. The context describes the
conditions under which urban agriculture is seen as important to urban resilience, while the
motivation is that the complexity and trade-offs of building resilience are not explicitly acknowledged
in urban agriculture practice. The aim of the thesis is to look for ways to align the practice and the
goals more explicitly. The method, from design research and practice, draws patterns of practice from
a limited set of relevant case studies and checks them for coherence in a new context. The
significance of the thesis is that the case study analysis, conducted in several stages, yielded points of
correlation between UA practice and resilience-building principles as well as gaps between them,
suggesting opportunities to align the two more closely. The chapter outline provides more detail about
the progression of the thesis.
Context
The observed and potential impacts on cities of climate change and resource scarcity are being
identified as motivations for theoretical and practical research into urban resilience.
Changing conditions due to climate change and resource scarcity are expected to increase the
vulnerability of many cities’ embedded socio-ecological-technical systems (STES). The resilience of
cities is described by researchers in this field as their ability to continue to function in conditions of
extreme and sustained shocks to their environment and resource systems. Resilience is identified by
ecosystem researchers as a function of healthy social and ecological systems that are complex and
interdependent.
Urban agriculture (UA)–the production of food in urban environments–is argued by theorists
and practitioners as one way to increase the resilience of cities by reducing vulnerabilities of current
food supply systems. From this perspective, UA is seen as a way to increase food security–the supply
of sufficient healthy, culturally appropriate food–for urban residents where the existing food system
fails to do so. UA is further seen as a way to increase resilience by co-locating food production with
consumption and potentially decoupling some food systems from fossil fuels. Under some
circumstances, UA is seen as a way to shorten supply chains that are highly vulnerable to climate-
related impacts and resource scarcity because of their long global links. The anticipated value of UA
in resilient cities contributes in part to a growing field of theory and practice focused on the task of
designing and integrating UA into existing urban landscapes in cities.
Urban agriculture design for resilient cities 8
Motivation
This thesis reframes urban agriculture as a socio-technical-ecological system in which
practitioners–consciously or otherwise–manage resources and relationships to produce services. The
management of these complex systems is known to create trade-offs but the correlations in urban
agriculture practice are not well understood. Methods for building resilience are emerging from
ecosystem management research and this thesis seeks to explore the potential for alignment between
resilience-building and urban agriculture practice.
Aim
This thesis seeks to draw out patterns from urban agriculture case studies that describe
methods of working with urban agriculture as a socio-technical-ecological system and compare them
with resilience methods and principles, so that the two might be more explicitly aligned.
Research question
How might urban agriculture practices be more explicitly designed and managed to
contribute to the resilience of urban socio-technical-ecological systems?
Scope
This thesis is limited in scope to case studies of urban agriculture that exhibit behaviours or
attributes that reflect current research on the potential role of urban agriculture in resilient cities.
The literature on UA draws from key works that emerged from development research in the
1960s–largely focused on the provision of food security in developing countries–and from UA
research in developed countries where food insecurity may not be considered as the predominant
reason for UA practice.
The literature on resilience is drawn from research into resilient ecosystems and the
characteristics and management of STES and their resilience. The resilience of embedded urban
STES is considered to be threatened by extreme changes in the environmental and resource supply
conditions that led to their evolution.
Literature on the design and integration of UA into urban landscapes is drawn from work
produced by the design professions of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design and planning
and industrial design. These provide much of the literature describing theoretically sustainable or
resilient cities.
Framing urban agriculture as a socio-technical-ecological system informed the selection of
case studies that that seek to generate multiple benefits by creating UA networks across several sites in
a city.. Four case studies in total were identified for the fieldwork of this thesis–three in England and
one in the Netherlands. A British Council Australia grant funded the fieldwork.
Urban agriculture design for resilient cities 9
Design research methods were used in the fieldwork data collection and analysis stages. The
fieldwork involved visiting case study sites, conducting interviews and working on projects with the
case study teams. Documents and web-based narratives provided background data and overviews of
the case studies. Photographs taken on site provided visual data about the case studies. During the
fieldwork process, writing fieldwork journal entries interview summaries provided opportunities to
identify emerging patterns from the data.
The analysis of the fieldwork data revealed patterns that describe common behaviours across
the case studies. The patterns were tested for coherence in an unfamiliar context through discussion
with urban agriculture practitioners in Melbourne. The patterns and the case studies were then
compared with a resilience principle framework drawn from the relevant literature.
Significance
The significance of this thesis lies in its attempt to frame urban agriculture practice as an
activity that manages socio-technical-ecological systems and that therefore has the capacity to be
designed as a method of developing urban resilience. The data analysis, conducted in several stages,
yielded points of correlation between UA practice and resilience-building principles as well as gaps
between them, suggesting existing opportunities to align the two more closely.
Thesis Overview
Chapter 1. Introduction and overview
How might urban agriculture practices be more explicitly designed and managed to
contribute to the resilience of urban socio-technical-ecological systems? This chapter introduces the
context, motivation, aim, scope, significance and outline of the thesis. The context describes the
conditions under which urban agriculture is seen as important to urban resilience, while the
motivation is that the complexity and trade-offs of building resilience are not explicitly acknowledged
in urban agriculture practice. The aim of the thesis is to look for ways to align the practice and the
goals more explicitly. The method, from design research and practice, draws patterns of practice from
a limited set of relevant case studies and checks them for coherence in a new context. The
significance of the thesis is that the case study analysis, conducted in several stages, yielded points of
correlation between UA practice and resilience-building principles as well as gaps between them,
suggesting opportunities to align the two more closely. The chapter outline provides more detail about
the progression of the thesis.
Chapter 2. Urban resilience, vulnerable cities & food systems
The previous chapter introduced the thesis through an overview of the aim, context,
motivation, scope and significance This chapter expands on the context and motivation for the thesis,
Urban agriculture design for resilient cities 10