Will Doubling Urban Agriculture in the Twin Cities Improve Self-Reliance?

Abstract

Urban agriculture is being promoted through city level policies to achieve goals in improving food security, increasing healthy food access, contributing to nutrition education, ensuring equity, and promoting economic development. Yet achieving these multiple goals through a single policy is complex and measurement of progress towards these multiple goals is even more difficult. This difficulty stems, in part, from a lack of information on the current size and distribution of existing urban farms. Urban agriculture has been promoted for multiple objectives and as a strategy to meet those objectives in international, national, state, and city scale policies. These policies promote urban agriculture as a means for sustainability and self-reliance. Often these goals also promote equity. However, this promotion is ill-informed in terms of the current actual size and distribution of urban agriculture and therefore the ability to meet sustainability and self-reliance goals. This study seeks to describe the stated benefits of urban agriculture in urban food policies, define the current size and distribution of urban home and community gardens in the Twin Cities, and understand any differences in that size and distribution by income level.