The size of the world's largest cities is increasing; the urbanization process is complicated and different in developed and developing countries. However, if well managed, urban spaces may offer valuable opportunities for economic and social development. This vision paper investigates the current challenges and opportunities in Urban Agriculture (UA) and discusses if the adoption of Urban Computing (UC) and Information and communications technologies (ICT) can aid urban dwellers, farmers and planners to progress UA in Global North or Global South countries Like Germany and Brazil. We also illustrate our point of view by introducing some applications designed to aid urban and rural users to face the soils security issues.
The urbanization process is complex and entirely different in Global North developed
countries and Global South developing countries
If well managed, urban spaces may offer valuable opportunities for economic and
social development
Developing agricultural capacity within or close to urban spaces either in developing
and or developed countries such as Brazil and Germany have the potential to reduce social
costs and environmental impacts, provide economic opportunities, increase access to
healthful food, and better use or urban soils. Regardless of these potential advantages,
there are several challenges to establishing the feasibility of urban production as compared
to conventional agricultural practices, including space availability, production scalability,
reuse of waters, labor costs, demographics
UA presents formidable opportunities and challenges in many cities around the world. For instance, in the case of the city of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), most of the inhabitants cannot take advantage of the natural resources and consume unconventional food plants (UFP) around them. Organic products and non-conventional food plants are still inaccessible from a logistical and financial standpoint for a large part of the population, especially urban favelas residents (Rekow, 2015 and Vieira et al., 2016).
On the other hand, in the last decade, the city of Berlin (Germany) has become a hot spot and the international “capital” of UA. It is very active when it comes to fostering a broad variety urban agriculture and gardening projects within the reunited city. Many of the endeavors are very light on the land, creating vegetable gardens that may be moved to accommodate the changes in urban spaces that characterize a developed city that is rapidly growing (such as Prinzessinnengarten and ROOF WATER-FARM (Steglich, 2017)).
Tackling these challenges seemed almost impossible years ago given the complexity of
the cities and the different maturity level of information and communication technology
(ICT), internet of thing (IoT)
This vision paper presents the opportunities and challenges of UA and UC in a
transdisciplinary way. Hence, the central thesis of this essay is to present the dimensions
of UA and UC and discuss if the adoption of data-centric techniques can aid urban
dwellers to expand UA either in Global North or Global South countries and explore new
jointresearch possibilities. We also invite the readers to learn about the mobile application
“Adubação Verde”
The term urban computing (Kindberg et al. 2007; Kostakos & O’Neill 2010), it is still an imprecise concept with many open research questions (Zheng et al., 2014). UC is an interdisciplinary concept fusing the computing science with traditional fields like engineering, architecture, ecology, economy, and sociology in the context of urban spaces. 1 www.opensoils.org
UC seeks to understand the nature of urban and social phenomena to better plan the future of cities, improve the urban environment, and increase the quality of life of its inhabitants. According to Zheng et al., (2014), UC is situated at the intersection of three dimensions: urban spaces, human resources, and technology (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1 describes the flows of data within the UC dimensions and the knowledge generation. Each dimension generates massive amounts of unstructured data that are consumed by the “technology” dimension. Such dimension is composed of several computational technologies (such as web, computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), cloud computing, IoT, IA, big data, deep learning, ethics, semantics, human-computer-interaction (HCI), mobile applications) that can compute the data and produce explicit knowledge used at the “human resources” dimension. The human resources dimension is composed of people that may perform different roles (such as urban dwellers, urban farmers, policymakers, urban planners).
Fig. 1. Overview of the dimensions of the UC and UA, the flows of data, activities, and knowledge (blue and red arrows) and an example of UA/UC applications (e.g., OpenSoils.org and the “Adubação Verde” app). 2.2
Urban agriculture is the process of growing plants, raising animals and distributing
food products, using soil resources and local materials from the urban spaces where the
action takes place (FAO, 2018). UA is performed in small areas like backyards, terraces,
rooftops, patios, along rivers, roads, and railways, or under power lines with the purpose
of subsistence or small-scale sales in local markets. There are, however, more ambitious
urban farming initiatives in community lots in gentrified urban spaces in Asia, Europe and
North America
UA offers the potential of producing high-quality food at an affordable cost, have the
potential to ameliorate urban environmental problems by increasing vegetation cover and
therefore contributing to a decrease the urban heat island intensity and increase the reuse
of waters.
As far as we are concerned, on a conceptual level, dimensions produce lots of heterogeneous datasets that can be explored at the shared “technology” dimension, addressing several challenges of UA and UC. We stress that the “technology” is an extensive and evolving dimension because it may encompass several related topics like agronomic techniques (such as aquaponics, aeroponics, vertical farming, water reuse, soil security), social technologies and computational technologies, to name a few. Furthermore, the “technology” dimension operate as a platform upon which knowledge generation and social interaction occur.
The datasets in UA are composed of unstructured and heterogeneous data which is either machine or human generated (Fig. 1). Unstructured data do not have pre-defined models or is not organized in a pre-defined manner, it is typically text but may contain information such as dates, numbers, images, multimedia, and facts as well (Liu & Ozsu, 2009). Here, we summarize the data produced by each UC dimension (Table 1). Dimension Social Environment Economic Health & Educational
Description Consists of data about the social and urban spaces, such as youth development and education, food security, soil security, sociality integrated aging, gender participation, gentrification of depressed urban areas. When used aggregately with demographic data, these data sets can aid the visualization and mapping of city assets or understand urban anomalies.
Consists of meteorological data (humidity, temperature, pressure, wind speed, and weather conditions); air quality data (concentration of CO2 NO2, and SO2); ecological data (awareness of food system ecology, stewardship, storm and waste waters management, soil improvement); soil data (profiles and boreholes). When used aggregately with sensors and satellite data, these data sets be used to identify a city’s issues (such as polluted and drought/flooding areas, heat islands) Consists of economic data representing a city’s economic dynamics. For example, local economic stimulation, job growth, land use, job readiness, food affordability, carbon emissions, stock prices, transportation bottlenecks, housing prices, and people’s incomes. When used aggregately, these data sets can capture the economic rhythm of a city, therefore predicting the future of the economy.
There are already abundant educational and health care and disease data generated by schools, hospitals, and clinics. When used aggregately, these data sets can show the impact of education and food/soil quality change on people’s health. 2.3
Soils security is an emerging concept of soil sciences that is related with the dimensions of
UA and UC. It is motivated by sustainable development and tightly connected to the
maintenance and improvement of the global soil resource to produce food, fibers and fresh
water, human health, contribute to energy and climate sustainability, and to maintain the
biodiversity and the overall protection of the ecosystem
Considering the merits of UA, urban farms are popping up across the mentioned countries. However, the benefits and limitations that urban planners, dwellers, and growers face must be fully understood and addressed if urban farms are to become widespread, profitable and even sustainable. Tables 2 indicates the main opportunities and challenges associated with the dimensions discussed in Section 2.
Opportunities Challenges • Increase employment and household, particularly • UA projects may offer job opportunities for low-income and socially excluded populations; that require additional knowledge be• Increased property values surrounding urban gar
dens, particularly in gentrified neighborhoods; • Entrepreneurial UA may attract venture capital and make profitable business opportunities, particularly in repurposed urban spaces.
Opportunities • Engage, activate and train youth and educators in schools; youth can play an essential role in increasing knowledge and understanding about healthy eating and gaining access to fresh food; • Learn about the provenance of food, agricultural processes, nutrition, and sustainability; yond technical farming skills, which may need more staff or higher labor costs; • UA projects may require financial and political support; several projects cannot survive on profits from produce, mainly if incorporating other social missions.
Health & Education
Challenges • Develop UA projects which provide comprehensive education beyond technical farming skills require additional expertise, which may require more staff, time and elevated labor costs; • UA projects may not be supplying enough food to communities in which they are located; 3.1
OpenSoils is an example of application described by the common “technology” dimension shared by UC/AC. OpenSoils is an open, elastic, provenance-oriented and lightweight computational e-infrastructure that collects, stores, describes, curates, harmonizes soil data resources and delivers knowledge to the users. It adopts the official Brazilian soils classification and stores large datasets of soils profiles/boreholes; generate soils reports; offer data and web services and curated documents and open data sets. OpenSoils is the first open science-based computational framework of soils security in the literature. According to Cruz et al. (2018b). Today, OpenSoils has three primary uses: (i) Offer diverse, integrated, timely and trustworthy digital repositories with georeferenced data to researchers, farmers and decision makers (e.g., statistical studies of the quality of soils, soils mapping, soils usage recommendation, evaluation of contamination by heavy metals and organic waste management system). (ii) Offer free computational tools to aid city planners, agronomists, rural/urban farmers to make better decisions using high-quality harmonized data (e.g., studies to erosion, risk of landslides, risk of flooding, potential for agricultural use of soils; environmental and economic and ecological zoning, insurance of agronomic enterprises, land classification for irrigation; support in the recommendation of fertilizers and limestone). (iii) Help citizens (e.g., students, professors or researchers) to increase their knowledge about Brazilian soils, the infrastructure can connect to other sites like the Brazilian Soils Museum, where users can explore the collection of soil monoliths, soil artifacts, soils images, soils maps and browse the large datasets of curated soils data.
“Aducação Verde” 2 is another example of the use of “technology” dimension shared by UC/AC. It is a mobile application designed to increase the use of green manure (adubação verde in Portuguese) among the Brazilian (urban or rural) small farmers. It offer easy to use information to field agronomist and mainly disseminate the usage of ecological management practices that can be employed in organic agriculture, such as the use of mulch and organic fertilizers, to increase the yield of crops without impacting production costs.
Green manure (Espíndola et al., 1998) favor agricultural activities, which are characterized by the minimal use of external inputs and a limited amount of mineral fertilizers, on small properties. The application was developed by a multidisciplinary team composed of agronomists and system developers. One part of the team conducted the field experiments in Seropédica, RJ, Brazil (22º 46’ S and 43º 41’ W), from January to December 2017, the experiments were conducted using a split-split-plot scheme (5m x 3m x 2m), with four replicates with 25 species of the Leguminosae, one of the botanic families most used in green manure. The other part of the team used the botanical data collected from these experiments used in the development of the mobile application and deliver to small farmers. 4
In this work, we presented the dimensions of UA and UC and showed how they could be connected. Besides, we listed the challenges and opportunities of UA projects in the Global North and South Countries and finally illustrated how these challenges can be faced with the use of low-cost devices and applications (e.g., OpenSoils and “Adubação Verde”). The projects we have reported in the previous sections have the potential to aid several rural and urban communities. However, we stress that few projects are being conducted in the area. Besides, we advocate the need to embrace the emerging UC and ICT trends, such as the rise of social networking applications, big data, data science and the increasing ubiquity of mobile technology and real-time sensor networks to name a few, to deliver more products to urban dwellers.
This vision paper was written in the hope that sharing the underlying thinking and expectations as well as hopes and aspirations of a group of interdisciplinary researchers will enable a new level of constructive study that contributes to pushing the UA and soils security agenda forward.
This work was supported in part by the Brazilian funding agencies CAPES, FNDE and PIBIC/CNPq. The authors thanks the programs PET-SI/UFRRJ, PETFARMÁCIA/UFRJ, and MEC/SESU. We also thank the CYTED networks – BigDSSAgro and SmartLogistcs@IB. 2 The app is available at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=siufrrj.adubacaoverde
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