Sustainability assessment of intra-urban farms

Abstract

France has seen an exponential growth of urban agriculture projects during the past decade, especially in intra-urban areas. Those projects can have various forms or goals (from high-tech to low-tech, from production oriented to educational farm), however they all claim their deep involvement in a sustainable development. Tools already exist to assess the sustainability of farms in a rural or peri-urban context, however to date no tool or framework has been designed to assess the sustainability of intra-urban farms at the farm scale, on the social, environmental and economic sides. Nowadays, funding stakeholders such as city councils, social landlord or real estate agencies who provide land or subsidies to urban agriculture projects need indicators to support their assessment of urban agriculture projects, but no consolidated method is available. Therefore the thesis will focus on the elaboration of a tool to assess the sustainability of intra-urban farms, aiming at supporting the evaluation process of funding stakeholders when they have to select a project. This tool will be designed with a participatory approach, involving stakeholders of the French urban agriculture value chain, to ensure that the tool designed will answer field challenges and is adapted to use situations.

Thesis supervisor

Jean-Marc Meynard (INRAE, SADAPT)