The role of food gardening in addressing urban sustainability – A new framework for analysing policy approaches

In recent years, urban gardens have received increased interest from urban citizens as well as urban planners as a tool to promote sustainable urban development. The increased demand by citizens and planners for different forms of garden areas, however, is at odds with a densifying city and the loss of green spaces. Urban planners are therefore faced with the challenge of rethinking the functions and objectives of city gardens and, in turn, adapting the governance mechanisms with regard to sustainable urban development. The aim of this paper is to develop a new framework to analyse governance mechanisms, expressed as policy approaches to urban food garden development, which can serve as an analytical tool to enable comparison of cities and to analyse their efforts to achieve urban sustainability. The framework is based on case study analysis of public policies towards urban food gardening in the Swiss cities Berne, Lausanne and Zurich. We identified three core dimensions to characterise policy approaches in cities for the further development of city gardening: frames, level of institutionalisation, and policy-society relationship. Frames refer to the perception of gardening which is expressed by the objectives set by the city policy and the contributions gardening should fulfil in urban development. Level of institutionalisation provides information on the extent to which garden support is anchored in urban policy. Policy-society relationship refers to the type of leadership by city politics and the possibility for non-political actors to participate. For the further development of urban food gardening, the challenge for urban planners is to find the best possible combination of the three elements for their cities, adapted to the respective city context, the dominant sustainability goals and the social actors involved.