URBAN FOOD JUSTICE - Research projects

Research projects

This section includes a short description of a selection of my research projects that help shedding light on one or more aspects of the intersection between agroecological farming and urbanisation. When available, I have included external links to their respective project websites, or to an additional page where to find more resources. The most interesting outputs, resources or publications produced through these research projects are collected and accessible from the "Publications" tab of this website

Landed Community Kitchens in North England

Funder: Farming the Future (£50,000)

Role: co-lead

Ongoing project - 15 September 2024- 14 September 2026

Building on a workshop we held in Leeds in February 2024 as part of the Agroecological urbanism in Action project (funded through a ESRC IAA minigrant), with a group of participants we have developed a research project to support the establishment of eight regional coalitions of agroecological farmers and food-sovereignty oriented organisations to establish 8 prototype landed community kitchens. The research group is composed of myself, Maddy Longhurst (Urban Agriculture Consortium), Gareth Roberts (Regather), Suzy Russels (CSA Network UK), and Jade Bashford (Real Farming Trust). We are working with partners based in Leeds, Sheffield, Calderdale, Greater Manchester, Lancaster, Newcastle/Durham area (Chester-Le-Street), Hull & the Humber, and Nottingham.

In the first year of the project, through workshops and knowledge exchange activities, we are supporting the articulation, grouding and strategising process in the 8 regional coalitions to develop unique, food-system transforming, landed community kitchens aligned to the vision of an agroecological urbanism. In the second year we will be supporting the implementation of these 8 unique prototypes and reflect on their consolidation and outscaling.
More details on this project: here

Agroecological food production for health and net zero: exploring implementation pathways for an agroecological urbanism (PAU!)

Funder: UKRI/EPSRC (via a grant to the University of West of England -UWE) (£50,000)
Role: PI

Ongoing project - 1 October 2024-30 September 2025

Land in urban areas, greenbelts and urban fringes could host more agroecological food enterprises and ensure a stable supply of nutritious, fairly produced food for communities while reducing carbon impacts, rebuilding nature and increasing resilience to climate change, future pandemics and other shocks. However, policy makers don’t often have up-to-date knowledge on agroecology and how to implement it. Building on the concept of Agroecological Urbanism and the "Food Zones" framework, we aim to identify pathways to bring agroecology in to the heart of the UK net-zero agenda.Working with farming businesses around Leeds and Bristol we will collect key evidence to help policy makers understand the systemic benefits of (and barriers to) shifting to agroecological food systems. Through relational, immersive and convivial events we will co-design plans and concrete steps for accelerating change.

More details on this project: here

Agroecological Urbanism in Action (2023-24)

Funder: ESRC IAA (Impact Acceleration Account) at Coventry Universirsity, £5,000

Role: Lead

In this project (which is still ongoing), I bring together peri-urban agroecological farmers and urban food sovereignty and food justice oriented community kitchens to explore their collaboration in the joint transformation of the food system. Alongside disseminating research results from the Urbanising in Place project, we began forming seven regional coalitions of actors in the North of England, and began to explore pathways to uptake research results, strenghten existing farmer-kitchens coalitions and explore their research needs. We will release a blog about this experience soon. The project will lead to a larger research project.

Gaza Foodways: towards resilient women-led urban agroecological food systems
(2021-24)

Funder: International Research and Development Centre (IDRC) – Canada (US $ 864,000)
Role: project partner

"Gaza Foodways: towards resilient women-led urban agroecological food systems" is a transdisciplinary research collaboration between: the Palestinian Hydrology Group, the Gaza Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture Platform, the University College of Applied Science (Gaza), and the Centre for Agroecology, Water & Resilience, Coventry University (UK) to contribute toward a ‘just transition’ to diversified low-carbon urban food and farming systems. Together with the Urban Women’s Agripreneur Forum (UWAF), we aim to support a shift toward women-led agricultural research, practice and policy formulation, and advance women’s socioeconomic and political participation in food system planning, organisation and resourcing in ways that support food sovereignty.

Project website: agroecology.world/gaza-foodways/

This project has been impacted by the current war, with many of our partners having lost children, siblings, colleagues and family members, their houses destroyed, and some of their family divided across borders. We are currently crowd funding to help one of our partner and her children in Gaza to reunite with her husband in Belgium. You can support this here.

Urbanising in Place
(2018-22)

Funders: JPI Urban Europe, Belmont Forum, ERA-Net (ESRC + Innovate UK for the UK component); Euro 1.7 millions

Role: Co-lead

Processes of urbanisation tend to marginalise the role of small holders in managing the food-water-energy nexus: farmers and food producing communities are often spatially interstitial, and operate within precarious conditions in which nutrient cycles, energy conservation, water harvest, soil management and food production happen under marginal and residual conditions. Nonetheless, peri-urban areas and the urbanising fringes of metropolitan areas tend to harbour a rich variety of farming practices and there is empirical evidence that urban farmers play a key role as localized and distributed operators of the food-water-energy nexus. In this project we explored how farming and food growing practices on the metropolitan fringe, threatened by an ever expanding urbanisation, may be reimagined and reconfigured within what we call ‘agroecological urbanism’: a model of urbanisation which places food, urban metabolic cycles and an ethics of land stewardship, equality and solidarity at its core. The project explore the physical and metabolic context, scenarios for economic valorisation and political processes that can enable alternative metabolic capabilities, and the specific practices and configurations that farmers and food growing communities could develop in order to regain control over resources and claim an active role as agroecological urban food-water-energy actors.

Project website: urbanisinginplace.org
Interim project update (Youtube video): here

Key outcomes: web incubator www.agroecologicalurbanism.org and various publications (see publication section).

RECOMS - Building Resourceful and Resilient Communities
(2018-22)

Funder: EU Marie Sklodowska- Curie (Grant No. 765389); Euro 3.5 millions

Role: co-applicant with lead partner, and doctoral supervisor

RECOMS (Building Resourceful and Resilient Communities through adaptive and transfomative environmental practice) trained a number of early career researchers in participatory and creative practices to engage communities in environmental transformation. Alongside my contribution to the whole team around urban agroecology, I worked in particular with two PhD students: Sergio Ruiz Cayuela and Mai Abbas.

Sergio's work was focussed around building urban reproductive commons. Together, we hosted a session at the International Conference of Critical Geography, in Athens, in 2019, where we hosted intereasting dicussions on the limitations of commoning material, reproductive goods (i.e. food), and the tension between struggles for authonomy and struggles for a welfare state. We reflect on the session in this blog.

Mai's work was focussed on exploring the transformative potential for women encountering agroecology while transitioning to motherhood. This work has been more heavily impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, and the writing up is still ongoing, but you can find a first published work here.
Project website: recoms.eu

Catalyze I and II
(2020-2022)

Funder: Coventry University/Research England (£40,000 and £45,000)

Role: partner

These impact-related funds were granted to our collective of 14 scholars 'AgroecologyNow!' for a series of training, engagement and dissemination initiatives. Through this funding I organised a workshop with Rob Logan (previously Research Assistant within the Urbanising in Place project), to disseminate project results and develop a follow-up partnership with a selection of key organisations involved in the UK agroecology movement, including Sustain, Shared Assets, CSA UK, UAC, LWA, Granville Community Kitchen and Compost Mentis (this then led to the recent project "Agroecological Urbanism in Action").

I also used the funds to work with Spanish artist Kiko, to produce the comic-strip like poster on Landed Community Kitchens (in the picture above), and to produce a Policy Brief on "Why we need an agroecological urbanism" (link to follow).

Soil Nexus
(2020-2022)

Funder: Future Earth ($ 68,000)

Role: Lead

Healthy urban and peri-urban soils are essential for the local food production. Urbanisation, however, is the cause of their ongoing degradation, pollution and loss, alongside water pollution, particularly around industrial sites or human settlements with poor waste management. Farmers and soil caring communities can play an important role in the regeneration and remediation of these soils in line with agroecological principles, particularly using existing natural and organic resources (i.e. urban waste water and food and green waste). However, their knowledge and practice are often undervalued, when not directly obstructued, and soil protection and regeneration are hardly addressed in urban policies, with circular metabolism being often advocated but rarely enabled in practice. Policy barriers and lack of knowledge in the assessment of safety and quality of urban wastes prevent the uptake of these agroecological-based approaches in soil remediation. Building on the experience of three cities - Rosario in Argentina, Franschhoek in South Africa, and London in the UK, and from a rich international community of practice (Soil Care netowork), in this project we carry out ad-hoc data analysis and novel policy dialogues, to address the gap between practice and policy in the use of urban wastes for the remediation of urban soils. Project page: here You can read research results on our Argentinian case study here.DOI:

Cultivating Public Space (2017-2020)

Funder: Social Science Research Council of Norway

Role: international project advisor

"Cultivating Public Spaces: Urban agriculture as a basis for human flourishing and sustainability transition in Norwegian cities" was aproject that aimed to reflect on the role of urban agriculture on issues of health and human flourishing in the context of dense city models who often sacrifice natural spaces in the name of space compact urbanisation models and space efficiency. In practice deepening the rift between humans and nature.

As international advisor to this project, my role has been to input into the earlier phases of the project by participating in field trips, giving a public lecture in Oslo, contributing to project team debates, acting as discussant to a PhD progress panel, and peer-reviewing project deliverables. I also contributed a chapter to the forthcoming book.

Project website: no longer exist, but a landing page with the Norwegian partners is here.

My chapter: (link to follow)

Food Justice: Health, Resilience and Food in the City (2016-17)

Funder: Coventry University (£10,000)

Role: Lead

This was my first exploration in building urban agroecology in Coventry. It's main outcome was the Coventry Food Charter, built collaboratively through a series of engagement activites over 2016 and 2017. With its focus on food justice, the inclusion of the right to food, and the explicit mentioning of the real living wage, this has been one of the most radical charters in the UK. A pity that ended up being (so far), considered by the Council as no more than a tick-box exercise, with no political commitment to use the charter actively to foster broader societal transformation.

Austerity Retail
(2016-18)

Funder: British Academy (£9,000)

Role: partner

Despite having the fifth highest GDP in the world, food poverty in Britain has steadily increased in the past decade. This project was the first investigation into models and initiatives which were emerging within the realms of shopping/retail in times of austerity. In particular we carried out the first sistematic analysis of ‘Social supermarkets’ - retail spaces which offer surplus or wasted food at heavily discounted prices - what type of food they serve, how they are funded, their organisational and accessibility models, and reflect on their long-term impacts, implications and limitations to counter Britain’s vulnerability to hunger and to build a sustainable and just food systems.

Project page here, and final Research Report here

Urban Agriculture Europe
(2012-2016)

Funder: EU COST Action (TD1106) (approx. €5M)

My role: Co-chair of WP5, and STSM grant recipient

I joined this action in 2013 and ended up chairing a newly created Working Group 5, bringing together social and natural scientists in unpacking the connection between urban agriculture and urban metabolism. During May 2014 I also received funding from this project for a Short Term Scientific Mission (STSM) in the Netherlands on Urban Metabolism in urban public space, and their interconnection with processes of commoning.

Project website: here

My STSM report: here
Key publication: you can see the book here, and access my three co-authored chapters from section 5 of the book at my Research Gate page here.

Urban agriculture, social cohesion and environmental justice
(2011-2014)

Funder: ESRC/UKRI, £99,000

Role: Lead/PI

Edible Public Space (2010-11)

Funder: Newcastle University (£3,000)

Role: Lead

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Research projects

Landed Community Kitchens in North England

Agroecological food production for health and net zero: exploring implementation pathways for an agroecological urbanism (PAU!)

Agroecological Urbanism in Action (2023-24)

Gaza Foodways: towards resilient women-led urban agroecological food systems(2021-24)

Urbanising in Place (2018-22)

RECOMS - Building Resourceful and Resilient Communities (2018-22)

Catalyze I and II(2020-2022)

Soil Nexus(2020-2022)

Cultivating Public Space (2017-2020)

Food Justice: Health, Resilience and Food in the City (2016-17)

Austerity Retail(2016-18)

Urban Agriculture Europe(2012-2016)

Urban agriculture, social cohesion and environmental justice(2011-2014)

Edible Public Space (2010-11)

Gaza Foodways: towards resilient women-led urban agroecological food systems
(2021-24)

Urbanising in Place
(2018-22)

RECOMS - Building Resourceful and Resilient Communities
(2018-22)

Catalyze I and II
(2020-2022)

Soil Nexus
(2020-2022)

Austerity Retail
(2016-18)

Urban Agriculture Europe
(2012-2016)

Urban agriculture, social cohesion and environmental justice
(2011-2014)