Urban agriculture — A necessary pathway towards urban resilience and global sustainability?

The Covid-19 pandemic newly brings food resilience in cities to our attention and the need to question the
desired degree of food self-sufficiency through urban agriculture. While these questions are by no means new and
periodically entering the global research focus and policy discussions during periods of crises — the last time
during the global financial crisis and resulting food price increases in 2008 — urban and peri-urban agriculture
continue to be replaced by land-uses rendering higher market values (e.g. housing, transport, leisure). The loss of
priority for urban agriculture in urban land-use planning is a global trend with only a few exceptions. We argue
in this essay that this development has widely taken place due to three blind spots in urban planning. First, the
limited consideration of social and ecological vulnerabilities and risk-related inequalities of urban inhabitants,
food shortage among them, in the face of different scenarios of global change, including climate change or
pandemic events such as Covid-19. Second, the disregard of the intensified negative environmental (and related
social) externalities caused by distant agricultural production, as well as lacking consideration of nutrient recycling
potentials in cities (e.g. from wastewater) to replace emission intensive mineral fertilizer use. Third,
the lack of accounting for the multifunctionality of urban agriculture and the multiple benefits it provides beyond
the provision of food, including social benefits and insurance values, for instance the maintenance of cultural
heritage and agro-biodiversity. Along these lines, we argue that existing and new knowledge about urban risks
and vulnerabilities, the spatially explicit urban metabolism (e.g. energy, water, nutrients), as well as ecosystem
services need to be stronger and jointly considered in land-use decision-making.