It’s Time to Make Cities More Rural
Enough with the urban vs. rural binary. When rurbanization brings agriculture into cities, everyone benefits.
By Matt Simon
Wired
Sept 8, 2022
Excerpt:
Urban agriculture can help insulate individual cities against food shocks, like if a particular mass-produced crop fails—which is increasingly likely as climate change spawns longer, more intense droughts. “You depend less on globalized supply chains,” says environmental scientist Florian Payen, who authored that review paper on yields. (He’s now at Scotland’s Rural College, but did the research while at Lancaster University.) “And so you are maybe less vulnerable to all of the different things like we’ve seen with Covid, or with climate change, that can impact the supply chain.”
Urban agriculture should also, in theory, reduce some of the emissions associated with conventional farming, which uses carbon-spewing machinery and requires shipping food vast distances to customers. But there isn’t much data to back that up yet, Payen says.
“The evidence so far is not really conclusive as to whether producing in urban areas for urban dwellers actually is associated with a lower carbon footprint than rural production,” says Payen. “And that is really based on the fact that there are lots of different ways of producing the food, and lots of different modes of transportation.” Wheat production, for example, is highly mechanized and relies on massive harvesting vehicles. And different crops travel different distances to get to market.
