Urban Agriculture: Urban Planning and the ahmedabad Experience

Cities all over the world are growing rapidly and the manifestations of the Urban Crisis in a variety of areas, viz., environment, food, health, energy, landuse, are quire evident. Urban landuse patters are changing dramatically due to the pressure of population and the role of agriculture in supplying food, fuel, forage and forest products has declined considerably. The urban poor’s access to food has become worse and they have to pay higher prices for food and fuelwood, while their incomes are growing more slowly. The food subsidies and public distribution systems for essential commodities defuse and contain the crisis in the short term but do not address the needs of the poor in the long term. The paper looks at the experience of Ahmedabad, an Indian city and the historical transition of urban food system and develops alternatives for urban planning what focus on urban agriculture. The current urban development programmes systematically ignore the basic needs of the urban poor and their social ecology. They largely concentrate on creating physical structures (roads, housing, water supply, sewage disposal etc.) involving new investment, benefiting some area and some groups. The possibilities of utilising existing urban physical resources (land, water idle production capacity, wastes) and social resources (state, market, household and collective nonmarket community institutions) more effectively to produce and distribute the basic needs of food and energy, are very promising. Urban agriculture can increase food self-reliance and security in cities, be environmentally sustainable and increase the democratic control of the urban poor in meeting their basic needs. There is very little understanding of this issue among decision makers, professionals and citizens. Historical experience and current practice in India cities (and elsewhere in Asia) show that it is possible for them to produce as high as 60 per cent of their basic food needs. There are several social, political and economic constraints, however, in promoting urban agriculture. This paper will discuss the planning issues involved in urban agriculture in India, review the specific case studies and experiments in Ahmedabad, based on an ongoing study, and generate public policy options for urban agriculture.