1.1 The Multidimensional Benefits of Urban Agriculture to Public Life and Well-being in Cities

Over the past few decades, urban dwellers have shown greater interest in growing food. This has been accompanied by a resurgence of strategies and policies addressing urban agriculture at different governance levels and geographical scales from the transnational to the municipal and the local. While the benefits of urban agriculture to the resilience of food supply have been documented (FAO, 2019), the popularity of urban agriculture and its increased acceptance have allowed the emergence of new forms of cultivation that integrate opportunities for community building (Carolan & Hale, 2016), place-keeping and stewardship (Piso et al., 2019), and access to greener and more inclusive public spaces (Wadumestrige et al., 2021). Contemporary urban agriculture functions as an arena for hands-on learning new sustainable food production cycles and more informed consumption choices (Puigdueta et al., 2021).

Urban agriculture is also an important arena for health promotion, through increased physical activity, stress reduction, and restorative experiences (Koay & Dillon, 2020). It benefits the environment by enhancing biodiversity in highly urbanised areas (Clucas et al., 2018) and enriching the experiential qualities of urban landscapes through innovative landscape architecture and urban design solutions (Viljoen & Bohn, 2014). Local food production might not be able to satisfy the entirety of our needs, but it can specialise in producing nutritious food and social economy by making resources available to inspire new forms of cooperative food production (Wadumestrige et al., 2021). When taken as a gestalt of all the previously listed benefits, today’s urban agriculture emerges as a multifaceted practice with systemic benefits across many domains of human well-being from the individual household and the immediate community to the public health sustainability, and resilience of an entire city’s population (Langemeyer et al., 2021).

To leverage its greatest impact, opportunities to join in urban agriculture practices should be widely accessible to all segments of urban population, close to everyone’s home. Worldwide, due to the scarcity of and high value of land in dense inner-city areas, integrating urban agriculture in existing and planned public spaces may be the most feasible and impactful strategy. Our book wants to support this process by providing theoretical and practical insights on the integration of urban agriculture in public space development – addressing its well-being, design, organisation, educational, and urban planning implications. The relationship between public space and urban cultivation yields benefits to both. Public space offers conveniently accessible land for urban agriculture projects. In turn, urban cultivation can enhance the inclusiveness and multifunctionality of public space, which is crucial in addressing liveability and adaptation of urban neighbourhoods (Gehl, 2010; Madden, 2018).

Urban agriculture integrated in public space differs from private and semi-private projects (allotment gardens, backyard projects, rooftop gardens, or commercial farms) in management models and design, but perhaps most prominently in the accessibility to a broad range of users, not only those individuals primarily engaged in urban agriculture projects, but also secondary and tertiary users, like locals who may occasionally visit and participate, the passers-by and those who may be affected in more indirect, subtle or symbolic ways. The broader accessibility means more extensive impacts on urban population in terms of:

  1. (a)

    Symbolic representation

    As Frank Lohrberg point out in his Foreword to this volume, urban agriculture actors occupy public space to not only practice cultivation, but also to demonstrate their mindsets, values, and agendas in a contested public domain. This in turn may lead towards a societal transition, as the activities that are permanently accepted in public space can claim to be settled in urban society at large, making urban agriculture both a space for food production and a space for interpretive purposes (ibid.).

  2. (b)

    Individual well-being

    Urban agriculture situated in public space has a potential to benefit a greater diversity of individuals and their needs, and empower those who have often been neglected by city planning and policy. It offers opportunities for cultivating of virtues and sustaining capabilities as discussed in Chap. 2 and illustrated through our empirical studies (Chaps. 4 and 6).

  3. (c)

    Community well-being

    This type of impacts includes opportunities for cultivation of civic friendship and communities of virtue (Chap. 3), placemaking (Chap. 7), participatory action learning (Chaps. 8 and 9), co-creation and bottom-up participation (Chaps. 5 and 11), biocultural diversity and social justice (Chap. 13).

Embedding urban agriculture in public space, is not immune to disputes and compromises. In Chap. 4, the authors propose a framework for an analysis of different dimensions of publicness of urban agriculture projects and possible conflicts among these.

In the neoliberal city restrictions to the use of public space by certain users and the displacement of noncommercial, community-oriented uses, and those catering to low-income families and fragile individuals make the presence of non-commercial uses of public space like urban agriculture essential to ensure a heathy, inclusive and democratic public life (Nemeth & Schmidt, 2011). Further, additional threats to the inclusiveness of public space come from the compact city development model, which since the 1990s has been dominant in Norway and other European countries (Hanssen et al., 2015). This model of urban development typically offers high-quality, accessible outdoor areas that fail to perform as democratic public spaces, i.e. as sites that encourage social exchange (not just casual encounters) between social groups (Hajer & Reijndorp, 2001:11), identity and symbolic significance construction, and the claiming and eventual renegotiating of shared values and beliefs. The densities required by the compact city also greatly limit space availability for agricultural production, biodiversity, and ecology, making public space a natural ground for cultivation of highly productive urban ecosystems.

Urban agriculture initiatives have a great potential to sustain a collective stewardship of accessible and inclusive public landscapes (Murphy et al., 2022). As authors McIvor and Hale (2015:727) argue, urban agriculture is ‘well positioned to help citizens cultivate lasting relationships across lines of difference and amidst significant power differentials—relationships that could form the basis of a community’s collective capacity to shape its future’. By engaging residents in the cultivation of community bonds, urban agriculture has great potential as a systemic, collaborative, emergent, and constantly evolving civic practice necessary to tackle the ‘wickedness’ of community development in the face of uncertainty (Rittel & Webber, 1973).

Urban agriculture can be an instrument for the exercise of the right to the city (Lefebvre, 1996), a principle reaffirmed in 2016 by The New Urban Agenda adopted at the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III). The United Nations define the right to the city as ‘the right of all inhabitants … to occupy, use and produce just, inclusive and sustainable cities’ (UN, 2017:26). Further, they describe it ‘as a common good essential to the quality of life’ (ibid.), emphasising in this context the importance of public space as an arena for social interactions and political participation, sociocultural expression, diversity, and social cohesion. By offering citizens opportunities for participation in urban decision-making and appropriation of urban spaces based on their needs, urban agriculture projects can contribute positively to these objectives and to advance livability in cities.

The right to the city has recently evolved into an emerging dialogue around the right to landscape and landscape democracy (Egoz et al., 2018). Landscape democracy views access to the landscape as a foundation for equity in advancing human health, delight, respite, and healing. Far from being just a theory, landscape democracy speaks of an ethos, a way of being. It refers to the community-based practices and interactions that cultivate democratic dialogue and action. Central to landscape democracy is the idea that it can be achieved through mutuality and cooperation, entailing rights and responsibilities for everyone (Council of Europe, 2000:2). To build a more equitable and inclusive society, citizens must actively practice their role as community members, learning how to dialogue, learn, and interact to form a shared understandings of what it means to be a community. As a socially oriented practice of landscape stewardship, urban agriculture is the ideal ground for learning and practicing landscape democracy. By connecting people around the shared task of growing food in public and semiprivate spaces, urban agriculture offers a critical space for collective action and the exercise of a right but also a responsibility essential to prepare ourselves to increasingly unpredictable socio-economic and ecological challenges.

Viewing urban public space as a locus of individual and social well-being, we situate ourselves in the neo-Aristotelian tradition, including the capability approach (Nussbaum, 2011) and virtue theory (MacIntyre, 2007, 2016). These approaches call for a non-reductionist, multidimensional, and cross-sectorial framework to evaluate the quality of urban landscape in terms of its ability to sustain human flourishing, both on the individual and communal level (Chaps. 2 and 3). The neo-Aristotelian tradition offers a more convenient vantage point to approach human well-being in cities on the micro-level of a neighbourhood, than the perspective of social justice based on the Rawlsian approach, which concentrates on ‘macro’ questions of equitable distribution of burdens and benefits in urban development (Fainstein, 2010). Simultaneously, this book acknowledges the importance of socially just arrangements for human well-being in cities – including securing an equitable access to high-quality, safe, inclusive public spaces, with a diversity of functions, addressing the needs of different segments of urban population. A systematic integration of publicly accessible urban agriculture interventions in urban development is illustrated in Chaps. 11 and 12, focusing on strategic planning and public policy in Norway.

The motivation behind this book is a deep concern for human well-being in cities. It is, however, essential to remember that we cannot discuss well-being in separation from the question of human-nature interaction. Cities are essentially socio-ecological systems, and any decision-making aimed at sustainable and resilient urban development should always consider an urban system’s different components and scales (Walker & Salt, 2012). Many important questions emerging in this context, that could be addressed through the lenses of urban agriculture, belong to the quickly developing domain of food geography. It is a domain concerned with a variety of topics—from our relation with food, changing consumption patterns and the nature of our supply chains, to the spatial patterns of our food production, the ever-pressing need for sustainable agriculture, and the complex relationships between food, place, and space (Kneafsey et al., 2021). While the subject lays beyond the necessary boundaries we set for our work, Chap. 13 addresses some of these issues advocating urban agriculture practices that challenge commodification of food, promoting biocultural diversity, and cultivation of knowledge practices that heal the nature/society rift.

Given the richness and diversity of urban agriculture forms in public space, we decided to narrow our scope to projects integrated in densely populated neighbourhoods, in Norwegian and selected Northern European cities, with only brief excursions in the North American continent. This focus prevents us from drawing broad generalizations across the variety of urban agriculture forms worldwide, yet from our unique point of view, we are able to speculate about main differences in the motivations for urban agriculture in our European context and the rest of the world. Globally, we observed an urban agriculture deeply involved in strengthening local food supply and food justice (improving access to fresh and healthy food), reducing climate impacts of food production by establishing short supply chains, and sustaining livelihoods through opportunities for income generation and employment (FAO, 2022). In Northern Europe the main motivation is primarily social – pertaining to different aspects of individual and social well-being in cities, discussed throughout this book. Despite our choice to begin with the contexts closest to us, we hope our findings will be relevant as a source of inspiration, or comparison for researchers, decision makers, and civil society actors seeking to advance the well-being and empowerment of urban communities globally, suggesting strategies and actions that could be exploited in a variety of geographical, cultural, and socio-economic contexts.

1.2 The Structure and Content of This Book

The structure of this book reflects the unfolding of our research project Cultivating Public Space (CPS), starting with its conceptual foundations (Chaps. 2 and 3), followed with discussions of urban agriculture cases (Chaps. 4, 5, 6, and 7), educational contexts (Chaps. 8, 9, and 10), planning/policy dimensions (Chaps. 11 and 12), and concluding with critical reflections on future urban agriculture trajectories (Chaps. 13 and 14). Still, all chapters were written independently by different project partners and could be read individually. This book emerges from a Norwegian context where our project originated (Chaps. 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, and 12) but has expanded to include international urban agriculture cases from the Netherlands, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and the United States (Chaps. 4, 5, 9, and 13). Its novelty lies in the interdisciplinary and cross-sectorial perspectives included, ranging from urban planning to design, from public health to agroecology, from human geography to philosophy. We have also included a variety of voices – academics, scholars-activists (Chap. 13), and practitioners (Chaps. 7 and 10).

With our multifaceted, yet locally situated discussions we respond to the knowledge gap about a holistic understanding of urban agriculture, the social groups benefiting most from it, and the government support mechanisms created in support of it (Wadumestrige et al., 2021). Given that urban agriculture is highly influenced by idiosyncratic local factors, ‘studying more about opportunities and challenges for urban agriculture under different socio-economic contexts and different agriculture models could be more beneficial to connect farming practices in cities with urban planning’ (ibid., p.1).

Part I: Conceptual Foundations: Urban Agriculture for Human Flourishing offers the theoretical foundations for our investigation rooted in the Aristotelian/neo-Aristotelian perspectives on individual and communal well-being in cities.

In Chap. 2, Beata Sirowy proposes an operationalisation of human well-being in cities based on the Aristotelian notion of eudaimonia and elements of Martha Nussbaum’s capability approach, referring also to the theory of affordances. This operationalisation may be used to evaluate the potential of public spaces (both actual and planned) to sustain human flourishing – an alternative to valuation models driven by an instrumental rationality, such as cost-benefit analysis. In the framework she proposes, the relationship between affordances, capabilities, and virtues in urban placemaking can be understood as a continuous process of negotiating a space’s optimum set of affordances – environmental and social – so it sustains a variety of central capabilities and offers opportunities for cultivation of related virtues, moral and intellectual. This model calls for citizen participation in the process of altering the affordances of their environments for the benefit of all.

By problematising eudaimonic well-being in cities, this chapter contributes to a growing discussion on the relationship between the qualities of the built environment and human well-being in cities. This research typically focuses on the range of pathways through which the built environment may affect human well-being, not so much on the operationalisation of well-being, and typically adopts a hedonic view of human well-being. The author postulates that the distinction between eudaimonic and hedonic well-being needs to be pronounced more clearly in urban research, and more attention needs to be paid to the eudaimonic well-being construct which is much more concerned with the achievement of full human potential than the hedonic models.

In Chap. 3, authors Beata Sirowy and Kelvin Knight expand on the discussion of human flourishing (eudaimonic well-being) started in Chap. 2 with considerations of virtues (excellences of character and understanding) and civic friendship. In determining how to better integrate these concepts in urban development, they employ the neo-Aristotelian concept of practices, as distinct from organisational institutions and introduce a concept of communities of virtue (MacIntyre, 2016, 2007). They posit that the development of urban public space should be viewed in terms of citizens’ participative practices, not just (as is typically the case) administratively conceived functions. This approach to the development of urban public space addresses individual and communal well-being to a much higher extent than the pragmatic multifunctionality demands prevalent in local policies.

Enhancing the conditions for participation in shared practices in urban settings facilitates the development of communities of virtue – localities consolidated by shared goals and standards of excellence, which are a setting for cultivating virtues (intellectual and moral) and development of civic friendship (ibid.) This discussion is illustrated with references to urban agriculture – understood as practice in the MacIntyrean sense, and therefore a potential setting for the development of communities of virtue that could be integrated in development of public space. Importantly, an urban agriculture project can potentially offer settings for cultivation of multiple, additional practices beyond food production – such as culinary arts, herbal medicine, mindfulness, carpentry, or even chess or raft building – as exemplified in some of our project cases (Chaps. 4, 5, 6, and 7).

Part II: Public Urban Agriculture in Northern European Contexts offers evidence from case studies of urban agriculture in Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands. The focus is on the systematic integration of urban agriculture in public spaces to ensure access for large and diverse segments of the urban population to an increasingly privatised public realm. The major challenge here is reconciling the needs and expectations of different groups of users, i.e. how to facilitate urban agriculture projects that benefit the public (the secondary and tertiary users) while allowing individuals directly engaged in urban agriculture (the primary users) to fulfil their objectives.

In Chap. 4, Melissa Anna Murphy and Pavel Grabalov explore how urban agriculture can contribute to the capabilities of gardeners and the larger urban community. They tell the story of urban agriculture case studies in Aarhus (Denmark) and Rotterdam (the Netherlands) to understand how different municipalities facilitate urban agriculture and how various urban agriculture initiatives perform in public spaces. In their analysis, they draw on a conceptualisation of publicness focused on the interactions in and products from physical space that link people. With an emphasis on an understanding of the public that is greater than the gardeners involved, the authors identify four trajectories in publicness supported by urban agriculture, serving the public through (a) increasing access and animation in public space, (b) contributing to social services, (c) producing and distributing food, and (d) building communities to spread cultivation knowledge. While not mutually exclusive, the four trajectories place different strains upon the public space ideal of physical access. The authors conclude that food production and social services may be ill-suited to urban spaces that demand high levels of public access. However, these benefits can reach a broader public if appropriately situated and facilitated.

In Chap. 5, Bettina Lamm and Anne Tietjen introduce four urban agriculture projects started between 2011 and 2013 in and around the city of Copenhagen and their efforts to cultivate food and community. The sites share a common emphasis on urban agriculture as a tool for cultivating citizenry. All four urban gardens were community-based efforts, open to the wider public, yet they varied widely in their organisation, management, funding, and context. While two of the gardens were started by cultural activists, the others were the initiative of municipal agency and a private land developer. All of them shared a vision to not only grow produce, but also create spaces for social inclusion and community gatherings. Looking into their underlying value system and organisational structure allows us to compare how the different typologies of urban agriculture would impact people’s ability to thrive. The authors are particularly interested in the agendas pursued by the communities who managed the gardens, how these agendas related to the specific site and context, and how the communities negotiated public access requirements with creating an enduring gardening community. The fact that some of the gardens did not become permanent is a reflection on city’s prioritisation of urban agriculture goals, and clearly reflects a weakness in the policy and implementation about the needs to build resilient and lasting community bonds. These sites have nonetheless been testing grounds for new forms of relationships between individuals and community groups.

In Chap. 6 Katinka Horgen Evensen and Vebjørn Egner Stafseng present eight case studies from the Oslo metro area, in which they explore ways of integrating urban agriculture in public spaces. The authors collected experiences of project initiators and managers from urban agriculture initiatives of various typologies, scales, and organisational models; from the city farm to small experimental cultivation projects. They learned that the main motivation behind those urban agriculture projects was the creation of social meeting places and learning arenas for cultivation and ecological knowledge. Urban agriculture in Oslo has also been a tool in local urban space development to improve city dwellers’ well-being, activate and make unused space safer, and integrate cultivation in green space management in innovative ways. The authors conclude with a discussion of factors that can support or hinder the practice of urban agriculture in public space. They contend that the most pressing design challenge may be to enhance and ensure for urban agriculture projects an image and perception of being truly public and welcoming to all.

In Chap. 7 Helene Gallis, Kimberly Weger, and Adam Curtis share Norwegian experiences of a pioneering urban agriculture social non-profit enterprise Nabolagshager (Neighbourhood Gardens). The chapter is a rich memoir of the stories associated with the development of urban agriculture projects in Oslo seen through the lens of its founder, activist Helene Gallis. The chapter makes the case for a more systematic application of placemaking principles to enhance the social well-being impact of urban agriculture projects. Gallis argues that combining placemaking with urban agriculture can enable community members, residents, and marginalized groups to participate in the co-creation of urban agriculture and exercise their human capabilities. The stories highlight the transformative impact of placemaking principles – key among them that of triangulation. They are told here as inspiration for innovative new forms of reappropriation and co-production of democratically conceived, accessible, and inclusive public spaces.

Part III: When Education Gets in the Urban Agriculture Mix addresses various educational experiences related to action research, practice, and engaged-learning efforts inspired by the Cultivating Public Space project. In these processes project partners and students entered into a rich and transformative dialogue with and across communities of urban farmers, residents, and design and planning professionals. The theories, knowledge, and explanations emerging from the research were tested, redefined, and reinterpreted against the real-life experiences of urban agriculture practitioners. The students’ work fed back into the CPS research, supporting the generation of an urban agriculture toolbox that was developed as a part of the project.

In Chap. 8, Vebjørn Egner Stafseng, Anna Marie Nicolaysen, and Geir Lieblein describe the participatory action learning process involving NMBU Agroecology students and faculty to envision a change in seven urban agriculture sites and communities in the Oslo region. The chapter critically reflects on the visions that emerged through co-creation and the forces that could hinder or support the ideas that emerged. The process reveals a rich educational experience that greatly benefited students, project partners, and locals but also a resistance by urban agriculture coordinators against solidifying their organic, adaptable efforts into generalisable steps and actions for the future. They fear that a fixed vision might prevent adaptation and, in the long run, restrict urban agriculture’s ability to be resilient and long-lasting. The authors find that policy and plans from municipalities may also play a critical role in limiting the development of new and diverse forms of urban agriculture in favour of uniformity and standardisation.

In Chap. 9, Deni Ruggeri reflects on the educational experiences connected to the Cultivating Public Space project. From the onset, the project has sought to engage students in creating a toolbox for urban agriculture in public space. By embedding the research findings, activities, and knowledge co-produced by the project partners within the global classroom, students played an instrumental role in translating the research findings into concrete sustainable development and urban regeneration strategies based on urban agriculture. This required thinking of it as more than just a collection of objects – boxes, tool sheds, fences, and paths – but as holistic multifunctional landscapes to cultivate food, health, and community. Another crucial finding relates to the uniqueness of each urban agriculture site and the need to build upon each context’s distinctiveness, placeness, and identity to shape stories of future transformation that communities can coalesce around and activate.

Chapter 10 by Arild Eriksen, with Deni Ruggeri and Esben Slaatrem Titland, approaches urban agriculture from the perspective of an architect and urban farmer/beekeeper practicing bottom-up, participatory design in Oslo. It touches on a few critical dimensions of urban agriculture in public space, which relate to the private and corporate claim on these landscapes, and their potentiality as multifunctional and abundant contributors to sociocultural and ecological diversity, food security, health, and democratic discourse. The authors conclude with a reflection on their efforts to develop an urban agriculture toolbox, drawing from knowledge collected by the Cultivating Public Space researchers, supplemented with the analyses and solutions produced by a multidisciplinary group of students enrolled in a project-funded continuing education course taught by the authors at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in 2018/19. Rather than a collection of prescriptive design solutions, the toolbox has an innovative form of a graphic novel produced in cooperation with cartoonist and urban farmer Esben Slaatrem Titland and presents a rich account of the motivations, personal sacrifices, successful actions, and setbacks emerging from our urban agriculture case studies that other urban agriculture actors might empathise with and be inspired by. It is an Open Access publication, available here (in Norwegian): Byens Bønder.

Part IV: Planning for Urban Agriculture in Norway addresses motivations of urban agriculture municipal actors in Norway to support urban agriculture initiatives and policy developments in major Norwegian cities. Although urban planners are generally keen on integrating urban agriculture in a city development, it has been limitedly integrated into policy and planning. More extensive research is needed on how cities can legally and effectively integrate urban agriculture into spatial planning holistically, filling a critical knowledge gap in our understanding of how food production and delivery may become more strategically planned, financed, and governed.

In Chap. 11, Inger-Lise Saglie dives into planning documents and strategic urban agriculture planning efforts from three of Norway’s largest cities: Oslo, Bergen, and Trondheim. The paper seeks evidence in the documents and in the discourses used by municipal leaders and government officials interviewed on motivations for their urban agriculture policies and strategic efforts. The author groups policy key motivations into five categories. First, urban agriculture is set into an urban greening development discourse, particularly in Oslo and Bergen; second, food production and alternative food systems are important policy motivations, particularly in Trondheim and Bergen, where urban agriculture is engaged in a dialogue with peri-urban, professionalised agriculture; third, urban agriculture as social meeting spaces and community building; fourth, urban agriculture as a tool for municipal welfare and employment training services; and fifth, as a practice of active citizenship and co-creation in city development.

In Chap. 12, Inger-Lise Saglie seeks to answer the question: “How have Norwegian public policies for urban agriculture emerged and got institutionalized?” In Norway, urban agriculture has been initially associated with citizen activism and local, volunteerism-driven bottom-up initiatives. However, municipalities have been interested in the development of strategic urban agriculture public policies. The three Norwegian cities introduced in the previous chapter – Oslo, Bergen, and Trondheim – show many common traits in the institutionalisation of urban agriculture policy. There are also marked differences regarding the role of voluntary groups and bottom-up and top-down processes, degree of networking, relationship to professionalised peri-urban agriculture, and the implementation. Oslo shows a politically driven participatory approach with plans and visions for developing urban agriculture as a social activity in green/urban spaces. In Bergen, the non-profit/volunteerism sector has an active role in strategy development and in directing practice through their competence centre. In Trondheim, the policy is co-produced and refined yearly in partnership with professional farmers, a unique example of a synergy between tradition and innovation. Having been at the forefront of developing public policies for urban agriculture in Norway, the cases of Oslo, Bergen, and Trondheim offer insights into the state of the art in the policy development around urban agriculture in Scandinavia.

Part V: A Way Forward for Urban Agriculture in Cities and Communities serves as a moment of reflection on the current state of urban agriculture and ponders on its future trajectories. It also seeks to suggest a series of threads for an emergent dialogue around principles and practices that may facilitate or hinder urban agriculture’s progress towards making the greatest impact on individual and communal well-being, and becoming an integral and permanent part of the resilient city of tomorrow.

In Chap. 13 Chiara Tornaghi reminds us to be vigilant about the way urban agriculture is applied in our cities and of the potential deleterious consequences of advancing urban agriculture without being aware of the systems it affects, from ecology to community, justice and human rights. The author sets out to describe an agroecological approach to urban farming, which combines resource conservation, regeneration, and biodiversity, while also advancing reparation by tackling past injustices and the hegemony of profit over human flourishing. The chapter offers useful recommendations for an agroecology-inspired urban agriculture in public space: biocultural diversity, knowledge practices that heal the nature/society rift, and the creation of urban agriculture practices that challenge commodification. It also reflects on the epistemology of urban agriculture and the need for it to be defined in terms of the stories and experiences of the people it affects, especially the underserved.

Chapter 14 by Beata Sirowy and Deni Ruggeri concludes with a short reflection on the future trajectories for urban agriculture in the compact city, building upon the findings of CPS research project. Cities are changing rapidly under new and old pressures, and they are reorganising and planning in response to the local consequences of global challenges, like the recent COVID-19 pandemic. What does a resilient urban agriculture look like in the future Norwegian/Northern European and global city? The goal is to co-design, plan, and implement forms of urban agriculture that can increase productivity and reduce land consumption, while also serving as a social arena for the cultivation of citizens’ virtues and community identity and collective action to celebrate human capabilities. No strategic plan, policy, design, and implementation can succeed unless it is adapted and enriched by the uniqueness of the context in which it embeds itself. Aside from the diversity urban agriculture approaches and practices shared, this book’s most important contribution may be simple sharing of stories and experiences of urban agriculture practices in public space that illustrate motivations, successes, failed attempts, and the adaptations necessary to make it a part of our daily life.