"The core activities of urban agriculture are involved with producing, processing, marketing, distributing, and consuming food. Urban agriculture also provides services and outcomes through transforming neglected or damaged landscapes, lives, and livelihoods. This book focuses on the so-called 'ancillary benefits' of urban agriculture in terms of healing economies, connections, aesthetics, heritage, and sites and societies - in short, what might be referred to in an holistic sense as the emerging paradigm of 'agrourbanism'. More than seventy case studies from around the world are reviewed through the social-ecological lens of regenerative landscape design. Many of these cases have never before been discussed in the literature. Topics examined include entrepreneurship, gastro-tourism, food literacy, foodscaping, heritage, and social and societal wellbeing. The methodological approach undertaken is layered-narrative scholarship based on the phenomenology of experiencing landscapes, and is facilitated through a linked website containing photo-essays documenting the site visits.
Robert L. France is a world-renowned scientist in the Faculty of Agriculture at Dalhousie University, where he teaches courses on urban agriculture, ecohydrology, watershed management, conservation biology, and environmental restoration. For more than a decade he taught and conducted research on landscape architecture, land-use planning, and urban design at the Harvard Design School. Dr. France is the author or editor of twenty-two books and more than two hundred journal articles on a wide range of environmental subjects, which together have been cited more than ten thousand times in the professional literature. In 2010, he organized the first international academic conference on urban agriculture in Canada, which led to the publication of the edited volume Integrated Urban Agriculture: Precedents, Practices, Prospects. His previous book with Wageningen Academic Publishers is about the pre-plastic environmental history of fishery bycatch: Disentangled: Ethnozoology and Environmental Explanation of the Gloucester Sea Serpent."
