Chiara Tornaghi

Coventry University | CU · Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience

Drawing on the authors' personal experience in the Edible Public Space project (Leeds, UK), this paper explores the “spheres of influence” and contradictions that shaped the project's trajectory. We identify and analyse the dynamics and contradictions at play in the formation of an urban gardening group grown out of a coming together of scholarly a...

Urban agriculture is a broad term which describes food cultivation and animal husbandry on urban and peri-urban land. Grassroots as well as institution-led urban agricultural projects are currently mushrooming in the cities of the Global North, reshaping urban landscapes, experimenting with alternatives to the capitalist organization of urban life...

Recent literature has pointed to the role of urban agriculture in self-empowerment and learning, and in constituting ways to achieve food justice. Building on this work the paper looks at the potential and constraints for overcoming the residual and contingent status of urban agriculture. The first part of the paper aims to expand traditional class...

In recent years, urban contexts and urban-rural linkages have become central for scholars and activists engaged in agrarian questions, agroecological transitions and food system transformation. Grassroots experimentations in urban agroecology and farmers’ engagement with urban policies have marked the rise of a new agenda aiming to bridge urban and...

Building on 15 years of research in the field of urban agriculture, this chapter discusses key issues that refrain urban agriculture from achieving its full potential, in terms of human and non-human health, and offers a few pointers for informing policy and practice. First, the author offers a brief overview of how the key challenges of western ur...

The demand for alternative methods of providing informed consent is increasing, especially in research with marginalised (or illiterate) research participants. This article discusses the co-creation of a visual informed consent (VIC), in collaboration with an artist. The VIC was inspired by the experience of obtaining informed consent from a group...

The development of urban food policies has shed light on the strategic role of public landownership for strengthening farmers capacities in the context of rising land values. Despite attention on a few pioneering farming initiatives promoted by local authorities on public farmland, however, there is often little understanding of the extent of publi...

The three months of intensive teaching in the postgraduate programme European Module in Spatial Development Planning (EMSDP) have been a life-changing experience for many people like us. We attended the EMSDP in 2006, and life has not been the same since! In this short piece, we hope to give a flavour of how the programme worked, what it generated...

Community gardening is the cultivation of edible and ornamental plants, commonly, although not exclusively, by groups of nonprofessional gardeners in urban or peri‐urban areas. Following a short historical overview, the entry discusses the three main dimensions that characterize community gardening as a phenomenon (land access, organizational struc...

While most of the existing literature on community gardens and urban agriculture share a tendency towards either an advocacy view or a rather dismissive approach on the grounds of the co-optation of food growing, self-help and voluntarism to the neoliberal agenda, this collection investigates and reflects on the complex and sometimes contradictory...

In this article we capture three things at once: the reason for this special issue of UAM on Urban Agroecology, the thinking behind the 8th Annual Conference of the AESOP Sustainable Food Planning (SFP) group (Coventry, 2017) and the core mission of the International Forum for an Agroecological Urbanism. The Forum and the Magazine will be launched...

Urbane Gärten sind aus vielen Städten nicht mehr wegzudenken. Gemeinschaftlicher Gemüseanbau wird dabei oft als rebellischer Akt der Stadtgestaltung von unten verstanden. Gleichzeitig taucht »urban gardening« immer häufiger in Stadtentwicklungsplänen und Werbebroschüren auf. Die Beiträger_innen des Bandes liefern eine kritische Analyse grüner urban...

In different cities and in diverse ways, we-the authors of this chapter-are connected to gardens, to building the urban commons and to knowledge creation. We met at the International Conference of Critical Geography " Precarious Radicalism on Shifting Grounds: Towards a Politics of Possibility " in Ramallah (Palestine) in July 2015. The organisers...

This report can be downloaded here: http://www.urbanfoodjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Tornaghi_How-to-set-up-your-own-urban-agricultural-project-_2014.pdf

This report can be downloaded here: http://www.urbanagricultureeurope.la.rwth-aachen.de/files/stsm_end_of_mission_report_tornaghi_final.pdf

This chapter is based on academic-activist research into grassroots urban agricultural initiatives which are experimenting – with different degree of legality – with new and convivial ways of sharing urban spaces while producing food. Some of these initiatives start and evolve within marginal/liminal urban spaces while others are seeking a more sys...

This paper presents an English case of urban agriculture, the Edible Public Space Project in Leeds, contextualised in a context of urban agriculture initiatives committed to social-environmental justice, to the reproduction of common goods and the promotion of an urban planning which promotes the right to food and to the construction of urban space...

The paper examines a multi-level and multi-sectoral territorial policy for neighbourhood regeneration: the Urban Italia programme in Cinisello Balsamo, Italy. Within the debate on the contemporary shift from well structured government dynamics towards more indefinite and participatory governance practices, the article contributes with observations...

The application of spatial analysis techniques to the daily urban tracks of the elder people can help to better profiling the time-space use of the urban resources; furthermore, it can give monitoring material to city planners, developers and community groups on how to manage elder’s mobility issues in their communities from a morphological perspec...

This paper will evaluate the Urban Italia regeneration programme in Cinisello Balsamo, a former industrial town in the Milan urban fringe. The programme, financed for the period 2003-2006 by the Italian government, was aimed at tackling social exclusion and urban decay, by transforming three unused areas in collective spaces for a convivial city, e...

After introducing and analysing the main assumptions that lie behind claims and criticisms regarding the social engagement of the arts in urban regeneration, this paper draws on empirical material collected in Newcastle upon Tyne and Gateshead (UK) to shed light on the main problems of integrating artworks, place-making and social policies within u...