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Beyond Urban Agriculture

Urban Farming is Not the Answer (and We Need More Urban Farming)
A new wave of high-tech urban farming initiatives promise significant gains in the fight against hunger and environmental destruction. But does this focus on the biophysical overlook the more substantial social, cultural, and political potential of urban agriculture?
Mark Bomford
Director Yale Sustainable Food Program
Yale University
Mark Bomford is the Director of the Yale Sustainable Food Program and was the founding Director of the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems at the University of British Columbia (UBC). His current research, in cooperation with the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and Environment, explores Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA), more-than-human ecologies, and enclosure in practice and theory. Mark belongs to settler family, raised on and off-grid in northern British Columbia on Treaty 8 territory. He farmed for a decade on the unceded ancestral territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people and currently lives, works, and vicariously farms on traditional Quinnipiac lands. He’s been interested in climate change and sustainable agriculture since the mid-1990s, exploring and attempting to work with its challenges and contradictions through physics, philosophy, art, agroecology, commercial farming, community activism, science and technology studies, and human geography.
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