rban agriculture, urban farming or urban gardening is the practice of cultivating, processing,

and distributing food in or around a village, town, or city.[1] Urban agriculture can also involve
animal husbandry, aquaculture, agroforestry, urban beekeeping, and horticulture. These activities
occur in peri-urban areas as well, and peri-urban agriculture may have different characteristics.[2]

Urban agriculture can reflect varying levels of economic and social development. In the global
north, it often takes the form of a social movement for sustainable communities, where organic
growers, ‘foodies,’ and ‘locavores’ form social networks founded on a shared ethos of nature and
community holism. These networks can evolve when receiving formal institutional support,
becoming integrated into local town planning as a ‘transition town’ movement for sustainable
urban development. In the developing south, food security, nutrition, and income generation are
key motivations for the practice. In either case, more direct access to fresh vegetables, fruits, and
meat products through urban agriculture can improve food security and food safety.

1. Renewed local economies. Local neighbor-to-neighbor commerce generally doesn’t happen

in our communities. Residential areas almost never include common spaces where community
exchanges might happen. Likewise, because selling homemade bread to your neighbors is illegal
in most areas, the law discourages community commerce, and instead encourages you to
purchase from the supermarket chain. 

In my own community, the urban farming movement has reinvigorated local commerce. Instead
of buying oranges, I now trade pumpkin for oranges from my neighbor’s tree. If urban farming
continued to grow, it would cause a massive and positive economic disruption by introducing
local food production that would compete with the corporate mainstream on price, quality,
convenience, and level of service.

2. Environmental stewardship. Industrial agriculture is a major source of fossil fuel pollution.

Petrochemicals are used to fertilize, spray, and preserve food. Plastics made from oil are used to
package the food, and gasoline is used to transport food worldwide. Urban farming unplugs us
from oil by minimizing the transport footprint and using organic cultivation methods. 

While industrial agriculture often maneuvers to avoid paying for environmental externalities,
urban farmers directly bear the ecological costs of their actions. This makes urban farmers better
stewards of their land because they draw their nutrition from it. Rather than using chemicals that
destroy soil biology, urban farming culture stresses sustainable organic techniques that enrich the
topsoil. 

3. A focus on local politics. Urban farming makes it clearer and easier for people to be involved
in local politics by bringing issues that directly affect neighborhoods to the fore. Local
regulations become far more relevant to the day-to-day life of a person attempting to cultivate
their own food than most issues normally discussed on CNN. The growth of urban farming has
already resulted in large-scale legal pushes like the California Cottage Food Act, which will
allow people to legally sell certain homemade goods like jams and breads. Other neighborhood
issues such as the raising of chickens, beekeeping for the production of honey, or the
chlorination of water are already in the sights of urban farmers and environmentalists alike. 
4. A revolution of health and nutrition. Increased awareness about the negative health effects
of food from the industrial food chain is itself a big reason why urban farmers grow their own
food. When you feed your produce to your family, you’re less likely to douse it in poisons. Local
food has more freshness, flavor, and nutrient retention because it goes through less transportation
and processing. As the urban farming movement grows, it will mean more accessibility to
nutritious local food and more time spent doing the healthy physical work of gardening. This
could result in less obesity, less chronic disease, and decreased healthcare spending.

5. A flowering of community interaction. Urban farming is a lifestyle inherently centered on

community. Growing food is, after all, a cooperative effort. In my own community, I see that the
knowledge of how and what to grow is exchanged, seeds are swapped, labor is shared, and the
harvest is traded. As urban farming grows, a stronger interdependence within communities is
likely to result as local food systems bring more community interaction into people’s daily lives. 

The most important movement of our time. Although there are many other notable initiatives
today, the influence of urban farming is uniquely widespread because more people live in cities
than rural areas and food is a central necessity that affects everything at once. The seeds of
change are already being planted in homes like mine across the world. For these seeds to grow
and blossom, we need to demand more local food so that the market for urban-grown produce
expands. We also need to put pressure on our legal system to allow easier local trade and more
local food production.