Just Grow Project: Co-designing justice-centric indicators and governance principles to intensify urban agriculture sustainably and equitably

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 promises to shorten supply chains and reconnect producers with consumers, improving socio-ecological sustainability and resilience. Sustainable urban agricultural intensification 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 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: 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 internationally working to intensify food production. To help these diverse city regions holistically achieve sustainable systems of consumption and production of food, we will develop new tools for designing justice and equity into the policy and governance structures of city regions.

The research team from the Radboud University, led by Dr. Adam Calo, will focus on the land access and labour justice dimensions of urban agricultural intensification. The goal is to develop a participatory method for co-defining key land access and labour justice indicators for Urban Agricultural Intensification with community and governance stakeholders in the Netherlands; evaluate the data infrastructure needs for these indicators and pilot these two methods at selected city regions.

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