The case of community gardens

Urban agriculture plays a unique role in the food systems of London and Dar es Salaam. In London, urban agriculture serves primarily a social function: community gardens bring people together around a healthy, educational, and fulfilling activity that connects people to the food they eat. Urban agriculture provides many of the same social benefits in Dar es Salaam, but there it also provides a significant source of food and income for city residents.

The case of London

London is the capital of a country that struggles to decentralise. The city accounts for 13% of England’s population and 22% of its national economy. It is a global city that is strongly multicultural and highly sensitive to fluctuations in the global market. A temperate island with a cold winter, England relies heavily on imports for its food supply. Domestic production is mainly productivism-focused, monocultural, and mechanised. Food consumption in London depends especially on imported goods due to a food culture centred around non-local products. Food is distributed across London through a vast network of supermarkets, as well as some farmers’ markets and tourist-attracting food halls like Borough Market or Spitalfields Market. London is also a city characterised by high land pressure, soaring housing prices, and urban sprawl. It is not easy to find land to grow food within London.

A community garden in London. Source: https://goexplorer.org/london-communities-urban-gardens/

Despite the entrenchment of its current food system and the challenges to expanding urban agriculture within its borders, there are many reasons to strive to grow food in London. The transportation networks required to import food from all over the world to London are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Urban agriculture would diminish the carbon footprint of London’s food system by shortening its supply chain. Furthermore, urban agriculture would help address concerns about the origins of London’s food. Imported food often derives from questionable sources whose impact–whether ethically, environmentally, or socially–is difficult to verify. By growing food in London, it is easier to keep track of farm environmental practices and worker conditions. Another benefit to growing food in London is that it increases the food system’s resilience to shocks. The coronavirus pandemic and Brexit both showed London how vulnerable it is to disruptions in the global food supply chain. Growing food locally could provide an important buffer to future shocks. Finally, urban agriculture could alleviate some health concerns. Food grown in London could provide a healthy and accessible alternative to processed foods or foods grown with pesticides and hormones.

One avenue for expanding urban agriculture in London is community gardens. They are characterised by their plurality in terms of size, forms of management, and even aims, as the degree to which they focus on food provision fluctuates from one garden to the next. Community gardens have strengths and weaknesses as urban food providers. One of their strengths includes their focus on education and militantism. They permit urban dwellers to increase their capacity to grow their own foods and implement what they learn within the garden elsewhere. Furthermore, because community gardens are community focused, they function on a very different basis in comparison to agribusinesses in terms of population implication. It is notably apparent when compared with another tentative of local urban food system development in London: vertical farms. The latter, as businesses, mainly focuses on providing precise (and limited) types of food to local businesses such as restaurants and cafes, building up a high-end offer for specialised or high revenue consumers. For the moment, they are not scaled up enough to concern a lower-revenue population, more impacted by food deserts and poor-quality products. Which is a contrast with community gardens: volunteers tend to not be part of these vulnerable populations, but because of their social focus, they carry stronger interest in identifying and relating to these populations and alleviate food inaccessibility problems.

The second point is that they hold an important potential for collaboration as non-profit focused collectives: through multi-garden network schemes and collaboration (such as the network Capital growth), they can engage and serve vulnerable populations by identifying their needs and granting them access to healthy food options. Community gardens also offer mental health benefits to those involved, help city dwellers develop new skills and connect to their food, break up food deserts, facilitate better diets, and improve fitness through the physical act of gardening. They can also address urban segregation concerns by bringing together people from different backgrounds toward a common goal.

On the other hand, community gardens currently lack the capacity to feed a significant fraction of London’s population. Because they are usually tended by volunteers, garden projects can be unstable and vulnerable to population turnover. They experience a large decrease in activity during the winter due to inherent nature of the species cultivated, unpleasant gardening conditions and the voluntary nature of the work. Last, their land to production ratio is quite low (much lower than that of real estate), and so they struggle to compete economically with vying land interests.

The case of Dar es Salaam

In Dar es Salaam, 70% of the egg supply is provided by urban producers. Moreover, almost all the city’s vegetables are grown within the city limits. Not only does urban agriculture play a major role in producing the city’s food, but it also offers a significant source of income to many urban farmers. Clearly, urban agriculture occupies a more essential niche in the food system of Dar es Salaam than it does in that of London. The sustainability reached in Dar es Salaam in terms of food provision relies on the multiplicity of individual and small-scale initiatives, the diversity of both production and distribution modes, and the flexibility permitting to accompany the increase of the population with higher productions through the continual apparition of new actors. As community gardens carry an educative purpose, they inform urban dwellers with food production, food origins, how to grow food in a city and permit them to question the current urban food system in place in London. Since community gardens struggle to appear and maintain themselves under soaring land pressure, they also inform the citizens about the importance of land availability and land occupation. Their volunteering nature limits the scale of implication, but their commitment to community-involvement and their politicising nature permit to hope for the apparition of an increased diversity and multiplicity of food-producing actors in London, thanks to their influence. In addition, their social focus enhances reactivity against crises and pushes the organisation into networks in order of pursuing more pressing goals of poverty alleviation.

The Massani open space garden in Dar es Salaam. Source: https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/reimagining-urban-food-systems-after-covid-19/

The case of urban food production in Dar es Salaam: urban eggs production