Food growing in the city: Exploring the productive urban landscape as a new paradigm for inclusive approaches to the design and planning of future urban open spaces

This special issue considers food growing in the city. It presents a series of papers which explore the interface between urban growing initiatives and the planned city, and identifies the development of the movement in different world regions and situations. It explores the characteristics of different food growing and urban gardening scenarios regarding the inherent properties of the urban agriculture/food growing complex as an urban movement, its drivers and the niche that it occupies within the city. The papers address circumstances of food growing in highly developed western planning systems, typically represented in Europe, but also other global regions which show different historical and development contexts. These demonstrate that urban food growing initiatives are largely activist-led and tend to fall outside of, or conflict with current city planning models. Where these initiatives are incorporated, they have the potential to provide effective urban landscape solutions that respond to local circumstances, new markets, engendering social and environmental improvement. Taken together, the papers suggest that urban agriculture models need to be recognised more widely within mainstream urban planning and the urban development process.