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A new paper, co-authored by Associate Professor Nevin Cohen and colleagues from an NSF-funded study examines how much low-tech urban agriculture could realistically expand in five global cities: New York City, London, Paris, Dortmund in Germany, and Gorzów Wielkopolski in Poland.
Using high-resolution spatial modeling at one-meter resolution, the team found that between 12% and 24% of each city’s area is physically suitable for growing food, with individual home gardens representing the single largest category of expandable space in every city studied. Under average yield assumptions, scaled-up urban agriculture could supply anywhere from 16% in NYC to 95% in Gorzów of current non-tropical vegetable demand, and the expanded growing spaces could absorb more than 100% of each city’s vegetable food waste through composting.
The authors say the main barrier for scaling up urban agriculture in this way is not land but labor. Even in the most optimistic scenarios, the number of volunteers and workers needed to manage all the available growing space would require dramatic increases in participation, sometimes approaching impractical levels in smaller cities. In larger cities like New York and Paris, the participation threshold is more achievable but still steep, requiring roughly 2% to 6% of residents to actively cultivate food. The paper also highlights important co-benefits: nearly all residential properties in the study cities would fall within a 15-minute walk of a farm or garden under the scaling scenarios, and expanded composting and rainwater harvesting could meaningfully advance urban circularity goals.
The research has practical applications for city planners hoping to expand urban food production by applying a single analytical approach across diverse urban contexts, overcoming a longstanding limitation in the field where city-to-city comparisons have been unreliable due to inconsistent methods. The policy takeaways center on enabling home gardening, securing land tenure for community gardens, investing in gardener training, and pairing urban agriculture expansion with composting and water-harvesting infrastructure.
“Urban agriculture has always been about more than food production,” says Dr. Cohen. “This research shows that with the right investments in land access, training, and community participation, cities can use food growing as a means to improve dietary health, expanding access to active green space, and building the kind of circular resource systems that reduce environmental health burdens on the communities that bear them most.”
