Civic Agriculture: Towards a Local Food Web for Sustainable Urban Development

The past decades have seen an accumulating body of studies assessing the benefits of smaller-scale enterprises on the level of civic and community welfare in the United States and elsewhere. In the context of producing subsistence, agriculture practice is now under a transition from large scale commodity enterprises to small scale self-sustaining civic activities. In practice, recent urban development projects emphasized the production of local food within the urban development site to promote a healthy, ecologically and economically sustainable lifestyle. This is of particular importance to the United States where more than 20 per cent of petroleum consumption goes to food processing and transportation due to the contemporary industrialized agriculture practice. This paper uses a housing development project in the United States to exemplify that civic agriculture can be integrated into urban development in the forms of community supported agriculture (CSA), kitchen gardens, farmer's market, and so on, to create a local food web, which will provide a working farm as a civic amenity on the site, allowing community members the opportunity to interact with each other and with nature, and become actively engaged with the new sustainable ways of living. The study suggests that neighborhoods that embrace a community-based environmental capitalism model of housing development can enhance the level of civic engagement among their residents, contribute to rising levels of civic welfare and socioeconomic well-being, maintain the landscape authenticity, enhance local and regional ecosystem services, reduce carbon footprint, and ultimately, promote long-term sustainability by reconnecting farm, food, and community.