Urban Agriculture as Living Local Heritage
At INSUAH, we are committed to preserving and promoting the invaluable culture and its inscribed knowledge associated to locally evolved urban food production and the infrastructure linked to it. Our mission is to safeguard and promote the heritage embedded in urban agriculture as a means of transforming urban settings towards more sustainable cities. We believe that the best way to achieve our goal and to gain insights into urban agricultural heritage (UAH) is through a living-lab approach that combines mixed methods such as case studies and literature analysis, as an action research.
For us, heritage is a potential to retrofit urban agriculture and, thus, an enabler of SDGs. In a nutshell: INSUAH reevaluates UAH as a cultural enhancer which has the potential to enrich ecosystem services and strengthen all dimensions of sustainability in city development. We see a broad understanding of heritage not primarily as a solution but as an inspiration and a source of knowledge with high potential to democratize access to healthy food and lead to a novel socio-technical transition towards urban sustainability – based on the cultural richness and specificity of cities.
As INSUAH Partners, we are committed to working collaboratively and creatively to explore innovative solutions to the challenges the heritage of urban agricultural systems is facing. We recognize the importance of transdisciplinary approaches and value the contributions of all actors, including local communities, CSOs, academic institutions, politicians and government bodies. Together, we strive to create more sustainable urban settings and promote the cultural, economic, ecological, and social values of UAH. In a multiscalar perspective, UAH can unveil alternative practices that not only can counter the monoculture, toxic, highly carbon footprint, wealth concentration agriculture model hegemony in a global scale, but also in local one, valuing the role of family farming, traditional peoples and communities in the generation, management, conservation, and sustainable use of biocultural diversity. For this reason, INSUAH by recovering and considering indigenous and traditional knowledge, can actively work to dismantle power imbalances to create an inclusive, sustainable, and culturally relevant understanding of urban agriculture heritage.
In order to achieve our mission, we understand the importance of promoting sustainable urban agriculture and recognize the need for new models, such as business and non-business models for actor-based value creation. Therefore, UAH comprises, not only the activity of farming and gardening but also as how they are live genetic heritage as species libraries but also socio-biodiverse spots of knowledge guardians and transmitters. We believe that strengthening the idea of living local heritage as a global strategy is key to achieving this goal. By exploring community-led principles and opportunities for international contextualization, we aim to develop guidelines and present findings to key stakeholders. Our ultimate goal is to provide insights to FAO and UNESCO on how to safeguard and develop UAH with the aim of realizing decarbonized urban food system. We will achieve this by combining the findings from our living labs in the meta study, elaborating on them, defining guidelines, and presenting our findings to key stakeholders who will also be informed through publications and other communication channels.
This is the INSUAH mission
We are working as an international team to frame the topic of UAH scientifically using the approach of transdisciplinary action research. In the process, we strive to ensure that the resulting concept takes into account as many different contexts as possible so that it can be applied as globally as possible.
If you would like to give us feedback or share interesting UAH cases with us, we would be happy to hear from you.