Rosan - Growing A Sustainable City?: The Question Of Urban Agriculture

Urban agriculture offers promising solutions to many different urban problems, such as blighted vacant lots, food insecurity, storm water runoff, and unemployment. The objectives of urban agriculture connect to many cities broader goal of sustainability, but tensions among stakeholders have started to emerge as urban agriculture is incorporated into municipal policy-making frameworks.

Growing a Sustainable City? offers a critical analysis of the development of urban agriculture policies and their role in shaping post-industrial cities. Christina Rosan and Hamil Pearsalls case study of Philadelphia demonstrates how growing food in the city has become a symbol of urban economic revitalization, sustainability, and increasingly gentrification. Their 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 North American city struggling to manage competing environmental and economic objectives. While highlighting the challenges and opportunities of institutionalizing urban agriculture into formal city policy, Growing a Sustainable City? tells the story of a citys growing pains as it attempts to reinvent itself as a green, attractive, and prosperous place to live.

(UTP Insights)

CHRISTINA D. ROSAN is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University.

HAMIL PEARSALL is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University.

UTP Insights is an innovative collection of brief books offering accessible introductions to the ideas that shape our world. Each volume in the series focuses on a contemporary issue, offering a fresh perspective anchored in scholarship. Spanning a broad range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, the books in the UTP Insights series contribute to public discourse and debate and provide a valuable resource for instructors and students.

BOOKS IN THE SERIES

Christina D. Rosan and Hamil Pearsall, Growing a Sustainable City? The Question of Urban Agriculture

John Joe Schlichtman, Jason Patch, and Marc Lamont Hill, Gentrifier

Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson, Economics in the Twenty-First Century: A Critical Perspective

Stephen M. Saideman, Adapting in the Dust: Lessons Learned from Canada's War in Afghanistan

Michael R. Marrus, Lessons of the Holocaust

Roland Paris and Taylor Owen (eds.), The World Wont Wait: Why Canada Needs to Rethink its International Policies

Bessma Momani, Arab Dawn: Arab Youth and the Demographic Dividend They Will Bring

William Watson, The Inequality Trap: Fighting Capitalism Instead of Poverty

Phil Ryan, After the New Atheist Debate

Paul Evans, Engaging China: Myth, Aspiration, and Strategy in Canadian Policy from Trudeau to Harper

The Question of Urban Agriculture

Christina D. Rosan and Hamil Pearsall

University of Toronto Press

Toronto Buffalo London

University of Toronto Press 2017
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utorontopress.com
Printed in the U.S.A

ISBN 978-1-4426-5061-9 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4426-2855-7 (paper)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Rosan, Christina, author
Growing a sustainable city? : the question of urban agriculture / Christina D. Rosan and Hamil Pearsall.

(UTP insights)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4426-5061-9 (hardcover). ISBN 978-1-4426-2855-7 (softcover)

1. Urban agriculture. 2. Urban agriculture Pennsylvania Philadelphia Case studies. 3. Sustainable agriculture. 4. Sustainable agriculture Pennsylvania Philadelphia Case studies. 5. Sustainable urban development. 6. Sustainable urban development Pennsylvania Philadelphia Case studies. 7. City planning. 8. City planning Pennsylvania Philadelphia Case studies. I. Pearsall, Hamil, 1981, author II. Title. III. Series: UTP insights

S494.5.U72R67 2017630.9173'2C2017-904603-9

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

For Robert Mason