Growing better Cities

Abstract

The UN system’s interest in urban agriculture began to grow in the early 1980s. This was about the time that a survey in Uganda by UNICEF and Save the Children concluded that urban agriculture (UA) supplied sufficient food and that there was no need for supplementary feeding programs, despite ongoing civil dislocation at the time. The steady rise of urban agriculture on the international development agenda over the next 25 years paralleled a rising involvement in many parts of the UN system, often in collaboration with pioneering research being supported by Canada’s International Development Research Centre. Publication of this book could not be more timely. It reflects on IDRC’s 20-year experience in a wide variety of urban settings in the developing world and draws from this experience a series of valuable principles that will help city governments to integrate urban agriculture into their strategies to meet the Millennium Development Goals. And it will help them do so in ways that will be comprehensive and flexible, inclusive and effective.