Urban Agricultural Practice in Residential Areas of Pune (India) and the Contribution to Urban Sustainability

Urban agriculture (UA) is regarded as an emerging tool and strategy for sustainable urban development as it addresses a wide array of objectives, such as climate change adaptation, social equality, food security or the restauration of environmental and living conditions. This is particularly important in the case of rapidly growing cities and metropolitan regions of developing and transition countries. Therefore it gains increasing attention among the academic and planning community. We have carried out a survey among 120 gardeners in residential neighbourhoods of the city of Pune (India). We investigated prevailing UA cultivation practices, socio-economic situations, motivation, knowledge and networking of individual household and external framework conditions to analyse the contributions to the environmental, economic and socio-cultural dimensions of urban sustainability. An analytical framework using composite indicators with index values was applied to enable comparability between the two UA types of terrace / rooftop and backyard / kitchen gardens. Our results show that both types contribute differently to urban sustainability at indicator level, but rather similarly at the aggregated level of the sustainability dimension. Sustainability benefits can be expected for the environmental and socio-cultural side, especially for urban biodiversity conservation and aesthetic green urban spaces, but less for economic contributions. Acknowledgement : The authors would like to thank FLOW social sciences research organization for their kind support to conduct the survey among urban gardeners. This work was supported by a fellowship within the Postdoc-Program of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).