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Paper short abstract

We explore women’s urban horticulture in Medellín and Bissau as heritage-based innovations: low-tech, gendered gardening practices that, amid exclusion from agri-tech schemes, adapt to climate stress and urban inequality while sustaining diets, income and more plural visions of food-system futures.

Paper long abstract

This paper argues that women’s urban horticulture in Medellín (Colombia) and Bissau (Guinea-Bissau) constitutes heritage based innovation that remains invisible in technocentric development debates. It asks whose knowledge counts when food system futures are imagined.

In Medellín, women displaced by climate and conflict establish household and collective plots on steep slopes and residual urban land in low income neighbourhoods, producing vegetables and seasoning plants for cooking and small sales. In and around Bissau, women cultivate household and peri-urban plots on wetland margins and in expanding neighbourhoods, adapting longstanding horticultural repertoires to flooding, salinisation and competition over land and water. Across both sites, they draw on intergenerational repertoires to manage urban plots through intensive routines rooted in domestic and community rhythms. These largely low tech agroecological practices maintain connections to rural food cultures under urban inequality and environmental stress, contributing to dietary diversification and partially buffering food insecurity.

The two sites are contemporary expressions of a historically connected South Atlantic food system. African staples such as rice, plantain and yam travelled from Upper Guinea to Afro-Colombian territories through the slave trade, while American crops including cassava, maize, beans and peanuts moved into Upper Guinea. Our ethnographic work in urban gardens in Medellín and Bissau shows continued shared horticultural practices adapted to dense urban settings and ecological pressures. Recognising women’s urban horticulture as heritage based innovation shifts food security agendas beyond technocentric and Western models towards more context responsive, gender equitable visions of agrarian futures for African and Latin American cities.