This case study examines attitudes of councils towards verge gardening in Greater Sydney. The research questions include: What are council attitudes towards edible plants in verge gardening? Are the policy approaches cautious and risk averse or explicitly aiming to reduce barriers?

Urban greening activities are underpinned by diverse organisational arrangements. Frameworks have been developed to articulate how such arrangements support the understanding and development of urban greening governance and practice. This paper builds on these frameworks with an additional consideration - levels of formality and informality.

Urban agriculture has a long history entwined with place creation, personal expression and activism (Steel, 2008; Cohen, 2012). Despite regulatory and design interventions that attempt to hinder urban agriculture activities, communities continue to use it as a platform for exploration, experimentation and demonstration. What is...

There are many advocates and critics of urban agriculture’s role in a sustainable food system but little quantitative data, potentially due the difficulties in collecting it. Urban food production is an example of a distributed system intrinsically linked to urban farmers and urban lifestyles and...

Using the Sydney peri-urban area as a case study, it will be shown that this food is grown in a landscape that is mostly rural residential in use. The juxtaposition of rural residential land use to food production creates land use conflict.

The aim of this paper is to understand whether an integrated approach that incorporates the ideas of planners, urban designers, landscape architects, health professionals and the food industry could improve food security.

The re-localisation of food production will support and enhance Australia’s food system and has the potential to increase access to nutritious, affordable food for the most vulnerable, argues this report.

This paper investigates the potential to produce vegetables in raingardens through a 5-month greenhouse (pot) experiment and a 1.5-year field trial. The results indicate that it is possible to produce adequate yield in raingardens and the function of raingardens in reducing urban runoff (in terms...

Urban agriculture has considerable potential to improve food security in the developing world. Key issues, such as urban sprawl, contamination threats and legality, must be addressed for urban farming to have a sustainable future.

This paper examines the role of weeds beyond the spatial, to consider their history, both social and evolutionary. The central focus is, however, the ‘culture’: the definition of place that makes the plant a problem. We are particularly interested in how changing cultural aesthetics in...

This paper explores the nature of industry and enterprise change in the context of Melbourne’s broad city region and surrounding landscapes. It seeks to determine the implications for agriculture of change in peri-urban land use, industry structures and landscapes.

Through an extensive analysis of land use planning instruments, this paper reviews the extent of urban agriculture planning in most Australian capital cities. A survey of local governments in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide provides a snapshot of urban agriculture planning in contemporary Australia...

Assisted by concerns and movements associated with concepts such as; ‘food miles’, grow local, ‘slow food’, farmers markets, food security, the social and community benefits of growing your own food, community gardens and the realization of the links between food and the local economy, urban...

Land use on the periphery of urban centres is of critical importance in the sustainability of healthy cities, food security, and natural resource management. The paper argues that it is essential to recognise the “public good” of open space and agriculture in the urban and...

This paper discusses the role of community gardens in building healthy and sustainable communities. Focussing on a large high-rise public housing estate in Sydney’s inner west, the community garden scheme studied was part of an urban renewal program designed to ameliorate ongoing social problems on...

In the contemporary context of urban development, the possibilities of looking anew at agriculture relates to implementing sustainability and addressing the structural changes brought about by globalization to communities, their food systems and quality of life for urbanites.