JUST GROW: Co-designing justice-centric indicators and governance principles to intensify urban agriculture sustainably and equitably

• Applicant: Dr. Kathrin Specht
• Subject Area: Urbanism, Spatial Planning, Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, Landscape Planning ; Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Policy, Agricultural Sociology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 513092657

City regions are a major proposed site for sustainably intensifying agricultural production to meet global food needs in the 21st century. Greater investment in localizing city region food systems—combining food production in cities and their peri-urban landscapes—promises to shorten supply chains and reconnect producers with consumers, improving socio-ecological sustainability and resilience. Sustainable urban agricultural intensification (UAI) is likely to entail greater use of technologies that decouple food production from environmental constraints including seasonal climates and available land base. Proposed technological systems range from capital-intensive approaches such as vertical farms, which fully control the growing environment, to more knowledge-intensive approaches such as urban agroecology that balance environmental modification with crop diversity and agronomic adaptation. Researchers have begun to question the relative resource requirements, environmental footprints, and productivity of these technological production systems in terms of energy and land-use intensity, life cycle impacts, and yield. While conducting sustainability assessments for different food production systems along different dimensions is critical, another major gap remains largely unacknowledged: comparatively evaluating the equity and justice implications of different pathways toward a sustainable city-region food system. This project will fill the gap by conducting transnational, transdisciplinary research across six city regions—the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area (Germany), the Greater Providence Metropolitan Area (USA), the Randstad, Rotterdam–Amsterdam–The Hague Metropolitan Area (Netherlands), Keihanshin (Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe) Metropolitan Area (Japan), Trondheim-Trondelag Region (Norway), and Greater Stockholm Region (Sweden)—to produce two output streams: (1) Concise sets of credible and legitimate indicators for land access, labor equity, food security, environmental implications, and cultural sustainability that city regions can use to evaluate the equity impacts of specific UAI plans as a transition toward SSCP of food; (2) Recommendations for transformative, justice-centric policy innovations and principles that city region governance networks should adopt to steer UAI towards equitable SSCP of food.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Japan, Norway, Sweden, USA
• Partner Organisation: Japan Science and Technology Agency; JST; National Science Foundation (NSF); The Research Council of Norway (RCN); The Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (FORMAS)
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Patrick Baur; Professorin Dr.-Ing. Kiyoko Kanki; Professor Dr. Michael Martin; Professorin Dr. Heidi Vinge