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Growing a Sustainable City?

The Question of Urban Agriculture

Christina D Rosan author Hamil Pearsall author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Toronto Press

Published:12th Dec '17

Should be back in stock very soon

Growing a Sustainable City? cover

Urban agriculture offers promising solutions to many different urban problems, such as blighted vacant lots, food insecurity, storm water runoff, and unemployment. These objectives connect to many cities’ broader goal of “sustainability,” but tensions among stakeholders have started to emerge in cities as urban agriculture is incorporated into the policymaking framework.

Growing a Sustainable City? offers a critical analysis of the development of urban agriculture policies and their role in making post-industrial cities more sustainable. Christina Rosan and Hamil Pearsall’s intriguing and illuminating case study of Philadelphia reveals how growing in the city has become a symbol of urban economic revitalization, sustainability, and – increasingly – gentrification. Their comprehensive research includes interviews with urban farmers, gardeners, and city officials, and reveals that the transition to “sustainability” is marked by a series of tensions along race, class, and generational lines. The book evaluates the role of urban agriculture in sustainability planning and policy by placing it within the context of a large city struggling to manage competing sustainability objectives. They highlight the challenges and opportunities of institutionalizing urban agriculture into formal city policy. Rosan and Pearsall tell the story of change and growing pains as a city attempts to reinvent itself as sustainable, livable, and economically competit

"This book is a solid contribution to this growing field and will be informative to those interested in the topic of urban farming, especially anybody working in public policy who intends to implement programs in their own city."

-- John Harner, University of Colorado-Colorado Springs * The AAG Review of Books, Spring '19 *

"The book supports the following idea: urban agriculture is a city planning challenge for land use and who gets to access it. A key take-away is that urban agriculture is not merely a contemporary food systems trend, but an under-developed mechanism for city sustainability. The authors conclude with helpful suggestions on how city planners and organizers might better integrate urban food production into social and environmental sustainability city planning."

-- Alana N. Chriest, Ohio State University * Agriculture and Human Values no

ISBN: 9781442628557

Dimensions: 229mm x 150mm x 15mm

Weight: 300g

208 pages