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As an important part of the movement for local and sustainable food in our cities, urban farming has the potential to actively involve urban dwellers in environmental, social, and economic issues of a global scale. When assessed according to a three-pillar model of sustainability, it can offer solutions to many

As an important part of the movement for local and sustainable food in our cities, urban farming has the potential to actively involve urban dwellers in environmental, social, and economic issues of a global scale. When assessed according to a three-pillar model of sustainability, it can offer solutions to many of the major problems associated with the industrial food model that currently dominates the United States market. If implemented on a larger scale in the Phoenix metropolitan area, urban farming could improve overall environmental conditions, stimulate the local economy, and help solve food access and inequality issues. Through interviews with both amateur and established local urban farmers, this thesis attempts to identify and analyze some of the main barriers to the widespread participation in and incorporation of urban agriculture in the Phoenix Valley. Problems encountered by newcomers to the practice are compared with the experiences of more successful farmers to assess which barriers may be circumvented with proper knowledge and experience and which barriers specific to the Phoenix region may require greater structural changes.
ContributorsRay, Emily Catherine (Author) / Puleo, Thomas (Thesis director) / Peterson, Greg (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor)
Created2014-12
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Description
City governments are increasingly incorporating urban and peri-urban agriculture into their policies and programs, a trend seen as advancing sustainability, development, and food security. Urban governance can provide new opportunities for farmers, but it also creates structures to control their activities, lands, and purposes.

This study focused on Mexico City,

City governments are increasingly incorporating urban and peri-urban agriculture into their policies and programs, a trend seen as advancing sustainability, development, and food security. Urban governance can provide new opportunities for farmers, but it also creates structures to control their activities, lands, and purposes.

This study focused on Mexico City, which is celebrated for its agricultural traditions and policies. The study examined: 1) the functions of urban and peri-urban agriculture that the Government of Mexico City (GMC) manages and prioritizes; 2) how the GMC’s policies have framed farmers, and how that framing affects farmers’ identity and purpose; and 3) how the inclusion of agrarian activities and lands in the city’s climate-change adaptation plan has created opportunities and obstacles for farmers. Data was collected through participant observation of agricultural and conservation events, informal and semi-structured interviews with government and agrarian actors, and analysis of government documents and budgets.

Analysis of policy documents revealed that the GMC manages agriculture as an instrument for achieving urban objectives largely unrelated to food: to conserve the city’s watershed and provide environmental services. Current policies negatively frame peri-urban agriculture as unproductive and a source of environmental contamination, but associate urban agriculture with positive outcomes for development and sustainability. Peri-urban farmers have resisted this framing, asserting that the GMC inadequately supports farmers’ watershed conservation efforts, and lacks understanding of and concern for farmers’ needs and interests. The city’s climate plan implicitly considers farmers to be private providers of public adaptation benefits, but the plan’s programs do not sufficiently address the socioeconomic changes responsible for agriculture’s decline, and therefore may undermine the government’s climate adaptation objectives.

The findings illuminate the challenges for urban governance of agriculture. Farms do not become instruments for urban sustainability, development, and food security simply because the government creates policies for them. Urban governments will be more likely to achieve their goals for agriculture by being transparent about their objectives, honestly evaluating how well those objectives fit with farmers’ needs and interests, cultivating genuine partnerships with farmers, and appropriately compensating farmers for the public benefits they provide.
ContributorsBausch, Julia Christine (Author) / Eakin, Hallie C (Thesis advisor) / Lerner, Amy M (Committee member) / Manuel-Navarrete, David (Committee member) / Redman, Charles L. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
Drawn from a trio of manuscripts, this dissertation evaluates the sustainability contributions and implications of deploying underutilized spaces for alternative uses at multiple scales: urban, regional and continental. The first paper considers the use of underutilized spaces at the urban scale for urban agriculture (UA) to meet local sustainability goals

Drawn from a trio of manuscripts, this dissertation evaluates the sustainability contributions and implications of deploying underutilized spaces for alternative uses at multiple scales: urban, regional and continental. The first paper considers the use of underutilized spaces at the urban scale for urban agriculture (UA) to meet local sustainability goals in Phoenix, Arizona. Through a data-driven analysis, it demonstrates UA can meet 90% of annual demand for fresh produce, supply local produce in all food deserts, reduce areas underserved by public parks by 60%, and displace >50,000 tons of carbon-dioxide emissions from buildings.

The second paper considers marginal agricultural land use for bioenergy crop cultivation to meet future liquid fuels demand from cellulosic biofuels sustainably and profitably. At a wholesale fuel price of $4 gallons-of-gasoline-equivalent, 30 to 90.7 billion gallons of cellulosic biofuels can be supplied by converting 22 to 79.3 million hectares of marginal lands in the Eastern United States (U.S.). Displacing marginal croplands (9.4-13.7 million hectares) reduces stress on water resources by preserving soil moisture. This displacement is comparable to existing land use for first-generation biofuels, limiting food supply impacts. Coupled modeling reveals positive hydroclimate feedback on bioenergy crop yields that moderates the land footprint.

The third paper examines the sustainability implications of expanding use of marginal lands for corn cultivation in the Western Corn Belt, a commercially important and environmentally sensitive U.S. region. Corn cultivation on lower quality lands, which tend to overlap with marginal agricultural lands, is shown to be nearly three times more sensitive to changes in crop prices. Therefore, corn cultivation disproportionately expanded into these lands following price spikes.

Underutilized spaces can contribute towards sustainability at small and large scales in a complementary fashion. While supplying fresh produce locally and delivering other benefits in terms of energy use and public health, UA can also reduce pressures on croplands and complement non-urban food production. This complementarity can help diversify agricultural land use for meeting other goals, like supplying biofuels. However, understanding the role of market forces and economic linkages is critical to anticipate any unintended consequences due to such re-organization of land use.
ContributorsULUDERE ARAGON, Nazli Zeynep (Author) / Georgescu, Matei (Thesis advisor) / Hanemann, William M (Committee member) / Parker, Nathan C. (Committee member) / Rey, Sergio (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
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Description
Urban community gardens hold the potential to serve as a form of multifunctional green infrastructure to advance urban sustainability goals through the array of ecosystem services they afford. While a substantial body of literature has been produced that is dedicated to the study of these services (e.g., providing fresh produce,

Urban community gardens hold the potential to serve as a form of multifunctional green infrastructure to advance urban sustainability goals through the array of ecosystem services they afford. While a substantial body of literature has been produced that is dedicated to the study of these services (e.g., providing fresh produce, promoting socialization, and enhancing urban biodiversity), less attention has been paid to the strategic planning of urban community gardens, particularly in an expansive urban setting, and in the context of the co-benefit of mitigating extreme heat. The research presented in this dissertation explores the potential of community gardens as a form of multifunctional green infrastructure and how these spaces can be planned in a manner that strives to be both systematic and transparent. It focuses on methods that can (1) be employed to identify vacant or open land plots for large metropolitan areas and (2) explores multicriteria decision analysis and (3) optimization approaches that assist in the selection of “green” spaces that serve as both provisioning (a source of fresh fruits and vegetables) and regulating (heat mitigation) services, among others. This exploration involves three individual studies on each of these themes, using the Phoenix metropolitan area as its analytical backdrop. The major lessons from this piece are: (1) remotely sensed data can be effectively paired with cadastral data to identify thousands of vacant parcels for potential greening at a metropolitan scale; (2) a stakeholder-weighted multicriteria decision analysis for community garden planning can serve as an effective decision support tool, but participants' conceptualization of garden spaces resulted in social criteria being prioritized over physical-environmental factors, potentially influencing the provisioning of co-benefits; and (3) optimized urban community garden networks hold the potential to synergistically distribute co-benefits across a large metropolitan area in a manner that systematically prioritizes high-need neighborhoods. The methods examined are useful for all metropolises with a preponderance of open or vacant land seeking to advance urban sustainability goals through green infrastructure.
ContributorsSmith, Jordan Paul (Author) / Turner, Billie L (Thesis advisor) / Meerow, Sara (Committee member) / Tong, Daoqin (Committee member) / Grebitus, Carola (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021