Urban agriculture (UA), also called urban food production or urban farming, can be defined as the growing of food and nonfood plant and tree crops and the raising of livestock (cattle, fowl, fish, and so forth), both within (intra-) and on the fringe of (peri-) urban areas (Ganapathy, 1983; Ford Foundation 1993, as per Siau and Yurjevic, 1993: 45).
Horticulture is only one of the many farming systems, in any given city, for practising UA. UA is more than just the production of food and it is being recognised in most of the South and in at least some countries in the North as an integral part of urban food systems.
Other components of UA include:
Ganapathy (1983) submitted a short, comprehensive, definition of the concept; Smit and Nasr (1992) developed a very complete typology of farming systems, based on observation in 40 cities and towns in 18 countries. Sawio's Ph.D. dissertation (1993) reviewed previous research on the rapidly evolving field of city farming in anglophone Africa.
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revised, June 12,1995
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