These scenarios were then enacted using three Farm Personas. Much agricultural and environmental assessment literature utilize case studies and scenarios as a means to demonstrate problem areas, exemplify good practices, to provide guidance to the agricultural community, and to create public awareness. These materials provided supplements to the data and findings presented in Chapters 3 and 4 and were valuable substitutes for domain-expert guidance.The structure of each persona-scenario set, as articulated for the scenario-based evaluation, is outlined in Table 6.7 . The subsequent scenarios describe sustainable agricultural practices and environmental assessments that involve modeling farm components, activities, resources, and data. An overview table containing all persona-scenario sets is available in 6.8 .Scholars have published extensively on the multifunctional benefits of urban agriculture including: promoting urban sustainability, reducing air and water pollution, building social cohesion, promoting community health and nutrition, teaching food literacy, and creating radical economic spaces for resistance to the capitalist political economy and structural inequities embedded in the “neoliberal city” . Despite growing evidence of these diverse health, education, and environmental benefits of urban agriculture, these vibrant spaces of civic engagement remain undervalued by city policy makers and planners in the United States. Thriving urban farms and gardens are under constant threat of conversion to housing or other competing, vertical grow rack system higher-value land uses due to rising land values, and other city priorities.

This land use challenge and threat to urban farm land tenure is especially characteristic of U.S. cities like San Francisco, one of the most expensive land and housing markets in the country. Under the current urban agriculture paradigm in the U.S., food justice scholars and advocates either try to quantify and highlight the multiple benefits of UA  or pursue a critical theoretical approach, arguing that urban agriculture can yield unfavorable results if pursued without an equity lens, especially in cities with intense development pressures and gentrification concerns . A productivist focus is problematic, because, while urban agriculture can be an important component of community food security, its other social and ecological benefits are just as, and sometimes more, significant . In this article, we suggest that the current debates around “urban agriculture” in the U.S. often lead to an unhelpful comparison with rural farms regarding yield, productivity, economic viability, and ability to feed urban populations, most notably in the policy arena. Defined in these ways, the radical, transformative potential of urban food production spaces and their preservation often gets lost or pushed to the side in city planning decisions in metropolitan regions such as the San Francisco Bay Area, where the threat of displacement is ubiquitous given high levels of economic inequality and extreme lack of affordable land. In order to facilitate what scholars such as Anderson et al. 2018a refers to as the “agroecological transition,” already underway in many urban food ecosystems around the globe , we argue that applying an agroecological approach to inquiry and research into the diversity of sites, goals, and ways in which food is produced in cities can help enumerate the synergistic effects of urban food producers. This in turn encourages the realization of the transformative potential of urban farming, and an articulation of its value meriting protected space in urban regions. Urban agroecology is an evolving concept that includes the social-ecological and political dimensions as well as the science of ecologically sustainable food production .

UAE provides a more holistic framework than urban agriculture to assess how well urban food initiatives produce food and promote environmental literacy, community engagement, and ecosystem services. This paper presents a case study of 35 urban farms in San Francisco’s East Bay in which we investigated key questions related to mission, production , labor, financing, land tenure, and educational programming. Our results reveal a rich and diverse East Bay agroecosystem engaged in varying capacities to fundamentally transform the use of urban space and the regional food system by engaging the public in efforts to stabilize, improve, and sustainably scale urban food production and distribution. Yet, as in other cities across the country, urban farms face numerous threats to their existence, including land tenure, labor costs, development pressure, and other factors that threaten wider adoption of agroecological principles. We begin by comparing the concepts of UA and UAE in scholarship and practice, bringing in relevant literature and intellectual histories of each term and clarifying how we apply the term “agroecology” to our analysis. We pay particular attention to the important nonecological factors that the literature has identified as vital to agroecology, but seldomly documents . We then present findings from a survey of 35 diverse urban farm operations in the East Bay. We discuss the results, showing how an agroecological method of inquiry amplifies important aspects of urban food production spaces and identifies gaps in national urban agriculture policy circles. We conclude by positing unique characteristics of urban agroecology in need of further studies and action to create equitable, resilient and protected urban food systems.Agricultural policy in the United States is primarily concerned with yield, markets, monetary exchange, and rural development. The United States Department of Agriculture defines agricultural activities as those taking place on farms. Farms are defined as “any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold, or normally would have been sold, during the year” . Urban agriculture has been proliferating across the country in the last decade on both public and private lands, as both for-profit and nonprofit entities, with diverse goals, missions and practices largely centered on food justice priorities and re-localizing the food system.

Yet U.S. agriculture policy has been struggling to keep up. In 2016, the USDA published an Urban Agriculture Toolkit, which aims to provide aspiring farmers with the resources to start an urban farm including an overview of the startup costs, strategies for accessing land and capital, assessing soil quality and water availability, production and marketing, and safety and security . The 2018 U.S. Farm Bill provides a definition of urban agriculture to include the practices of aquaponics, hydroponics, vertical farming, and other indoor or controlled environment agriculture systems primarily geared towards commercial sales. In both the Toolkit and Farm Bill, non-profit, subsistence, and educational urban farming enterprises are not well integrated or included in the conceptualization of UA. While there are many definitions of urban agriculture in the literature from the simplest definition of “producing food in cities” to longer descriptions of UA such as that of the American Planning Association that incorporate school, pipp racks rooftop and community gardens “with a purpose extending beyond home consumption and education,” the focus of many UA definitions used in policy arenas continues to center around the production and sale of urban produced foods. Accordingly, food systems scholars have recognized that “Urban agriculture, [as defined], is like agriculture in general”, devoid of the many political, educational, and food justice dimensions that are prioritized by many U.S. urban farming efforts. Thus the social-political nature of farming, food production, and food sovereignty are not invoked by formal UA policy in the U.S. Many goals and activities common in urban food production, including education, nonmonetary forms of exchange, and gardening for subsistence are obscured by the productivist definitions and can be thus neglected in policy discussions. Furthermore, UA policy in the U.S. remains largely agnostic about the sustainability of production practices and their impact on the environment. While U.S. agriculture policy narrowly focuses on the production, distribution and marketing potential of UA, broader discussion of its activities and goals proliferate among food systems scholars from a range of fields including geography, urban planning, sociology, nutrition, and environmental studies. These scholars are quick to point out that UA is much more than production and marketing of food in the city, and includes important justice elements . In the Bay Area context, we continue to see the result of this dichotomy: thriving urban farms lose their leases , struggle to maintain profitability or even viability and encounter difficulties creating monetary value out of their social enterprises. In light of the ongoing challenge to secure longevity of UA in the United States, there is a need for an alternative framework through which food and farming justice advocates can better understand and articulate what UA is, and why it matters in cities.Agroecology is defined as “the application of ecological principles to the study, design and management of agroecosystems that are both productive and natural resource conserving,culturally sensitive, socially just and economically viable” , and presents itself as a viable alternative to productivist forms of agriculture.

Agroecology in its most expansive form coalesces the social, ecological, and political elements of growing food in a manner that directly confronts the dominant industrial food system paradigm, and explicitly seeks to “transform food and agriculture systems, addressing the root causes of problems in an integrated way and providing holistic and long-term solutions” . It is simultaneously a set of ecological farming practices and a method of inquiry, and, recently, a framework for urban policy making ; “a practice, a science and a social movement” . Agroecology has strong historical ties to the international peasant rights movement La Via Campesina’s food sovereignty concept, and a rural livelihoods approach to agriculture where knowledge is created through non-hegemonic forms of information exchange, i.e. farmer-to farmer networks . Mendez et al. describe the vast diversity of agroecological perspectives in the literature as “agroecologies” and encourage future work that is characterized by a transdisciplinary, participatory and action-oriented approach. In 2015, a global gathering of social movements convened at the International Forum of Agroecology in Selengue, Mali to define a common, grassroots vision for the concept, building on earlier gatherings in 2006 and 2007 to define food sovereignty and agrarian reform. The declaration represents the views of small scale food producers, landless rural workers, indigenous peoples and urban communities alike, affirming that “Agroecology is not a mere set of technologies or production practices” and that “Agroecology is political; it requires us to challenge and transform structures of power in society” . The declaration goes on to outline the bottom-up strategies being employed to build, defend and strengthen agroecology, including policies such as democratized planning processes, knowledge sharing, recognizing the central role of women, building local economies and alliances, protecting biodiversity and genetic resources, tackling and adapting to climate change, and fighting corporate cooptation of agroecology. Recently, scholars have begun exploring agroecology in the urban context. In 2017, scholars from around the world collaborated on an issue of the Urban Agriculture magazine titled “Urban Agroecology,” conceptualizing the field both in theory and through practical examples of city initiatives, urban policies, citizen activism, and social movements. In this compendium, Van Dyck et al. describe urban agroecology as “a stepping stone to collectively think and act upon food system knowledge production, access to healthy and culturally appropriate food, decent living conditions for food producers and the cultivation of living soils and biodiversity, all at once.” Drawing from examples across Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia and the United States, the editors observe that urban agroecology “is a practice which – while it could be similar to many ‘urban agricultural’ initiatives born out of the desire to re-build community ties and sustainable food systems, has gone a step further: it has clearly positioned itself in ecological, social and political terms.” . Urban agroecology takes into account urban governance as a transformative process and follows from the re-emergence of food on the urban policy agenda in the past 5-10 years. However, it requires further conceptual development. Some common approaches in rural agroecology do not necessarily align with urban settings, where regenerative soil processes may require attention to industrial contamination. In other cases, the urban context provides “specific knowledge, resources and capacities which may be lacking in rural settings such as shorter direct marketing channels, greater possibility for producer-consumer relations,participatory approaches in labour mobilisation and certification, and initiatives in the area of solidarity economy” . Focusing on the social and political dimensions of agroecology, Altieri and others have explicitly applied the term “agroecology” to the urban context, calling for the union of urban and rural agrarian food justice and sovereignty struggles . Dehaene et al. speak directly to the revolutionary potential of an agroecological urban food system, building towards an “emancipatory society” with strong community health and justice outcomes.