Urban farming initiatives are increasingly considered to contribute to the development of sustainable cities—not only regarding increased circularity and resource efficiency but also to address and improve the social and economic dimensions of city regions’ sustainability. However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding upscaling and how urban farms can become more viable. The aim of this study was to explore the current business development of urban farming as well as the drivers and barriers for their upscaling. The study employs a qualitative case study on 10 commercial urban farms in the Stockholm region, where data were collected through semi-structured interviews. The analysis showed that the market consists of a large variety of urban farm types, with business models adapted to their situation. The competition for gaining a larger market share in terms of yield is challenging, so some farms have instead aimed to offer their technological knowledge or diverse packages of other societal and professional services. This shift toward technology and services is apparent for several of the urban farms in the study and requires a completely new set of skills for employees. By expanding through decentralized food production, on-farm gastronomy, technical product-service systems, or by providing societal services, there are ample opportunities for increasing the market share of the farms.

Urban centers located on the coast expose some of the most vulnerable populations to the effects of climate change. In addition to the challenges faced by high population densities and interdependent social-ecological systems, there is an increasing demand for resources. Exposing the pinch points that are already sensitive to extreme weather, highlights the urban systems that will be least resilient in the face of climate change. We map the projected changes in water availability onto the components of the food-water-energy Nexus at several spatial scales. Resilience thinking acknowledges the different spatial scales at which governance operates, resilience occurs, and Nexus systems function. We use a case study to illustrate how the effects of climate change at locations remote from the city could impact resilience of urban communities in multiple ways through cascading effects from the Nexus. This article underscores the need to examine resilience from multiple spatial and governance angles.

The field of urban agriculture has seen an increase in development and attention in recent years, with a large share of literature addressing whether urban agriculture may pose a solution for food insecurity and combat environmental impacts. However, few studies have examined the many sustainability claims of urban agriculture systems, especially for urban farms intended for larger output and commercial ends. In this study, we analyze sustainability assessments of urban agriculture for commercial implementation. We do this by exploring the methods employed for conducting sustainability analyses, outlining the different urban agriculture cultivation systems, analyzing which sustainability aspects are considered, looking into what the sustainability analyses conclude, and studying how authors anticipate the knowledge gained from their sustainability assessments can be used. Environmental aspects of sustainability were more often assessed than other sustainability aspects, and LCA research practice was used for the majority of environmental assessments. Some studies compared the environmental benefits of different types of urban agriculture systems, but this was not conclusive overall as to what systems would be more environmentally beneficial. This suggests that urban agriculture’s sustainability cannot be universally categorized but should be assessed in relation to specific environmental conditions and urban contexts. Future research should aim to develop more nuanced frameworks for evaluating the environmental, social, economic and governance impacts of urban agriculture.

This article explores how locally oriented organic businesses adapt to handle crises during a growth process to build resilience, how these businesses maintain the local orientation when growing and what the implications are for the relationship between territoriality and organic production. We explored four cases of organic businesses in Sweden, Norway, Germany and Austria. The cases can be described as Values-based Territorial Food Networks. All cases experienced challenges and crises during their growth processes and sought to provide stability and flexibility in order to deal with change. The restructuration process required internalising learning into their organisations, using diversity in a strategic way and forming long-term partnerships within their value chains. While organic certification was never at stake, the meaning of ‘local’ shifted in some of the cases. 

While there is evidence that commons have the potential to counteract socio-spatial injustices unleashed by neoliberal and capitalist forms of urbanisation, less is known about how commons lead to emancipatory change. Anchored in dialectical social theory, this article explains commoning as a mechanism through which people reproduce/transform their structural context and agency, arguing that the potential for emancipation through commoning lies in the commoners’ ability to induce processes of structural/agential transformation. Empirically grounded in interviews with urban community gardeners in the City of Stockholm, Sweden, we show that collective gardening conceptualised as practice of commoning contributes to structural change in that female volunteer labour collectivises the mandate over municipally managed public space, transforming socio-spatial relations. Yet, garden commoning proves to reproduce structural whiteness and middle-class agency in public space, fails to establish autonomy from waged-labour relations, and is unable to abolish the separation from the sources of reproduction and subsistence.

Although food retailers have embraced organic certified food products as a way to reduce their environmental loading, organic sales only make up a small proportion of total sales worldwide. Most consumers have positive attitudes towards organic food, but attitudes are not reflected in behaviour. This article addresses consumers’ attitude–behaviour gap regarding their purchase of organic food and reports on how visualization of personal shopping data may encourage them to buy more organic food. Through the design of the visualization tool, the EcoPanel, and through an empirical study of its use, we provide evidence on the potential of the tool to promote sustainable food shopping practices. Of 65 users that tested the EcoPanel for five months, in-depth interviews were made with nine of these. The test users increased their purchase of organic food by 23%. The informants used the EcoPanel to reflect on their shopping behaviour and to increase their organic shopping. We conclude that the visualization of food purchases stimulates critical reflection and the formation of new food shopping practices. This implies that food retailers may increase sales of organic food through using a visualization tool available for their customers. In this way, these retailers may decrease their environmental impact.

In climate change mitigation, backcasting scenarios are often used for exploring options for achieving a single environmental goal, albeit at the expense of other goals. This paper assesses potential conflicts and synergies between multiple environmental policy goals based on four future scenarios on Swedish rural land use, assuming zero GHG emissions in 2060. The assessment shows that goal conflicts are apparent, and policy makers need to make trade-offs between goals. The choice of strategy for dealing with these trade-offs yields conflicts or synergies. The assessment shows that a transition to zero GHG emissions provides opportunities for Sweden to shift to carbon free land-use planning. Overall, there are alternative ways with different underlying assumptions to achieve zero GHG emissions, which will feed discussions on new opportunities to overcome multi-scale and multi-sectoral goal conflicts. Multi-target backcasting scenarios are considered more suited to account for the multi-dimensional aspects of goal conflicts. This requires a comprehensive multi-target backcasting approach, which combines the strengths of multicriteria analysis, nexus approaches and backcasting, for supporting a transition to zero GHG emissions.

Uncertain and changing agricultural contexts challenge the resilience of farms to disturbances. Organic farming has long been considered a niche practice and has provided farmers with a market that is more protected and regulated than that for conventional farming. However, the organic market is globalising, especially for the dairy sector. This globalisation exposes farms to higher volatility in organic milk price. Thus, identifying resilience factors for organic dairy farms is necessary to support farmers" strategic decisions. Our objective was to identify factors that promote resilience of organic dairy cattle farms over time. We surveyed 81 organic dairy-cattle farms in six French regions. We collected data on farm structure (e.g. utilised agricultural area, number of cows) and on farmers' practices (e.g. calving period, grazing duration, date of turnout to grazing). Unlike most resilience assessments, which rely on technical and economic indicators and threshold values defined by experts, we used the evolution of farmers' satisfaction since they converted to organic farming as a surrogate for subjective (i.e. self-perceived) resilience. We postulated that stable or increasing well-being of farmers, which is visible through their satisfaction, would demonstrate subjective resilience of farms in a holistic way. Using sparse Partial Least Square regression, we related the evolution of farm structures and farmers' practices over time to the evolution of farmers' satisfaction in the face of a variety of disturbances (e.g. droughts, decrease in milk prices). Results showed that practices that focused on self-sufficient pasture-based grazing systems improved farmers' satisfaction and thus the subjective resilience of organic dairy cattle farms. On average, farmers who improved their satisfaction increased the duration of full grazing (i.e. no other feedstuff distributed) by 0.7 months and advanced the date of turnout to grazing by 6.5 days over a 10-year period. We developed an original method, based on farmers' perceptions, to assess the subjective resilience of farms to multiple disturbances (e.g. climatic, economic, health-related) and for the first time showed the potential of pasture-based grazing systems to promote the subjective resilience of organic dairy farms.

The increasingly uncertain and changing agricultural context raises questions about the resilience, i.e., ability to cope with disturbances, of farms to climate change and other disturbances. To date, the resilience concept has been discussed mainly in the scientific field leading to an abundant literature on social-ecological system resilience and on livelihood resilience. A farm resilience framework is developing and borrows from those two frameworks. However, consistent application of the farm resilience concept remains difficult and requires better consideration of farmers' perspectives. Our objectives in this study were to highlight farmers' perceptions of farm resilience to the variety of disturbances they have to cope with in their daily farm management and to highlight resilience factors. We conducted 128 semistructured interviews on French organic dairy cattle (85) and sheep (43) farms. We asked farmers six open-ended questions about resilience in organic dairy farming. Inductive content analysis of the data was conducted. According to farmers, a resilient farm relies on a high degree of autonomy in investments, animal feeding, and decision making, and is economically efficient. Other resilience indicators include consistency of the farming plan, with, e.g., herd size corresponding to the production potential of the land, and transferability of the farm to relatives, through, e.g., the financial capital required to take over the farm. Farmers also highlighted different ways to achieve resilience. Because of the higher cost of organic inputs, converting to organic farming indirectly promotes adaptations of farms toward autonomy and economic efficiency, and is thus regarded as a major resilience factor. Farmers also highlighted the central role of pastures and grazing to achieve autonomy and improve cost control. Diversification within the farm via crop rotations, herd composition, and farm products was also considered to improve farm resilience. In this study, we are the first to explore organic farmers' perception of farm resilience. Better understanding farmers' perceptions is necessary for developing training and advisory programs to support farm resilience to a variety of disturbances.

This study analysed Swedish stakeholders’ views on future developments of organic production and consumption based on Organic 3.0, a strategic initiative by the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM). Focus group discussions were carried out with actors representing different parts of the organic value chain in Sweden. These identified a number of tensions, four of which represented an unresolved dichotomy in the way forward for the organic movement and its relevance for organic production in most settings. The first tension was between the drive for increased efficiency to achieve higher yields and an agroecological approach with broader sustainability values. The second concerned availability of plant nutrients in organic agriculture including safe recirculating of nutrients from society. The third tension set new technology against the precautionary principle and the notion of naturalness. The fourth concerned the role of organic as an innovation system; whether organic should be a forerunner, i.e. performing well above average and fostering innovation, or whether organic should be a broader movement including more farmers but then requiring more regulations that may hinder innovation. These tensions will result in important choices on direction for the organic sector as it pursues the Organic 3.0 goal of sustainably feeding a growing population based on farming systems based on organic principles.