Growing Through Fragilities: Exploring the Complex Challenges and Tensions of Urban Agriculture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research aims to explore the challenges and opportunities experienced by practitioners of urban agriculture in Edmonton and Sheffield. Reflecting the complexity and uncertainty of contemporary society, these challenges are examined through a conceptual framework of fragilities. This includes an account of the everyday challenges of building and sustaining urban agriculture, as well as the uncertainties around the contribution of urban agriculture to satisfying the broad issues of sustainability and justice to which it is often attached. Drawing upon a community-based framework, this research project drew upon a small-m methodological approach to the qualitative analysis of the data. Data collection methods included semi-structured interviews and public workshops wherein participants were invited to view, check, and have a hand in preliminary analysis. Participants ranged from allotment garden organizers to urban farm managers and directors of social-service organizations working on food security and food justice issues. Where urban agriculture is often positively evaluated as a key aspect of current urban sustainability and food security approaches, this research charts uncertain efforts to build and sustain development, and to achieve the promises ascribed to it. A first contribution of this research is to bring forward the stories and experiences of communities with their hands in the dirt. A second contribution is that through these collaborations I identify needs and strategies for fostering innovation and resilience. Finally, future research interests and areas for organizational/institutional support were identified and explored by participants. Key findings of this research suggest that commonly identified challenges of urban agriculture, such as land access, are representative of systemic and institutional definitions of value as compared to value described by participants. As urban agriculture increasingly becomes a point of interest for municipalities as a sustainable solution to climate change and global food insecurity, these fragilities of urban agriculture will become more prescient as a framework of understanding local urban agriculture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".