Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
11
Complex Ecologies and City Spaces:
Social-Ecological Networks of
Urban Agriculture
Laura J. Shillington
1
I
NTRODUCTION
Urban agriculture is about more than just growing food in cities; it has to do
fundamentally with human-environment interactions and relations in urban
areas. How urban residents relate to and interact with the natural environment
in cities shapes how UA materializes, and these relations differ between cities
and between residents of the same city. Yet this aspect of UA has rarely been
explored despite the fact that agriculture in cities presents an excellent situation
for examining human-environment relations. The broader issue of urban
human-environment relations has received little attention primarily due to the
way in which the urban and rural are generally understood: as separate spaces
at opposite sides of the social (human)/nature divide. This separation arises out
of dominant Western conceptualizations that have structured the world around
binaries (Demerrit, 2002). Accordingly, the urban is considered a predominantly
human (social) space outside of nature, whereas the rural is the space of
'nature' (Wolch et al, 2001; Braun, 2005; Swyngedouw, 2005). While there is
ample research on human-environment relations in rural areas, especially in
political, ecological and earlier peasant studies literature, there is a lack of
similar analyses on human-environment relations in cities. Urban agricultural
research has, for the most part, continued to maintain the binary of urban and
rural. For instance, a main concern has been to ask what is urban about urban
agriculture, thus equating agriculture as a fundamentally rural activity. Yet such
a question is rooted in the binary of urban-rural and in a lack of understanding
about human-'natural' environment relations in cities. Indeed, this is visible in
many urban agricultural studies which link agriculture taking place in cities to
that in rural areas, and suggests that this link to rural
'natural' areas is
