Growing food in vacant spaces: the challenge of including urban agriculture initiatives in urban planning. A comparative case-study analysis of Athens, Barcelona, Brussels, Detroit and Leipzig

Sammanfattning: Conventional urban planning doesn’t fit anymore the complexity of new urban challenges (heat island effect, biodiversity loss, human health issues). Instead, alternative methods must coexist with existing strategies for municipalities to be more flexible to changes and stay innovative. This research advocates the use of vacant land in cities for urban agriculture. As a nature-based solution, vacant land presents multi-dimensional and multi-scaled benefits that can contribute to the sustainable development of cities while addressing local issues. Yet, urban gardens in vacant lots are not common in cities, which made the author wonder what may limit urban planners to adopt this strategy. Therefore, this research aims at identifying factors influencing municipalities to include the use of vacant spaces for urban agriculture in urban planning. Existing literature on the topic of vacant spaces, urban agriculture and urban planning were reviewed to help the author identify research gaps and find a relevant framework that could be used as the basis for the analysis of the five case-studies: Athens, Barcelona, Brussels, Detroit and Leipzig. The Nature Based Innovation System (NBIS) framework was used to analyse the secondary and tertiary data collected for each city under nine (sub)dimensions and compile factors that appears to influence urban planners’ decision-making to use vacant space for urban agriculture. The findings highlight twenty factors of influence: accessibility to human labour, capacity to adapt, capacity to collaborate, citizen participation in decision-making, commitment level of land users, contextual factors, funding opportunities, governing style, hierarchical position, knowledge-sharing, land accessibility, land ownership, local needs, paradigm between own beliefs and attitude, perception of sustainability, perception of UA projects, perception of vacant spaces, quality of human interactions, sense of belonging, and urban challenges. The research observes that despite the good functioning of the framework to analyse the results and identify factors of influence, the revised NBIS is not adapted to answer entirely the two research questions. This is explained by the lack of empirical data collected and the overall research gap in understanding how land vacancy is managed in the European cities selected in this thesis.