Critical geography of urban agriculture

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 mushroom- ing in the cities of the Global North, reshaping urban landscapes, experimenting with alternatives to the capitalist organization of urban life and sometimes establishing embryonic forms of recreating the Com- mons. While this renewed interest in land cultivation and food production is attracting increasing interest in a wide range of disciplines – from planning to landscape and cultural studies – it remains a very marginal and almost unexplored field of human geography. Nonetheless, beyond the rhetoric of sustainability and health, urban agriculture raises several relevant questions of interest for a critical geographer. Starting by drawing a map of concepts and theories available in an interdisciplinary literature, and highlighting fields of possible inquiry, this paper aims to define the scope of and an initial agenda for a critical geography of urban agriculture.