Presentation short abstract

Urban Agriculture is an increasingly accessible and beneficial “agri-food world”. Yet the extent to which this growing community truly engages with the wider multispecies world is debated in this research, which utilises a Multispecies Justice lens to investigate its transformational potential.

Presentation long abstract

Against a backdrop of rising urbanisation, food insecurity and nature loss; demand for growing food in cities increases. Specifically in the UK, recent interest in Urban Agriculture (UA) has been driven by the success of campaign groups, with the “Right to Grow” increasingly embedded in local policy. My research centres around the case study of Hull and East Riding, with Hull being the first local authority to embed the right to grow within local policy. In our rapidly urbanising planet, UA is an increasingly accessible “agri-food world” with multifunctional benefits including health, food security and nature recovery. Yet the extent to which this growing community truly engages with the wider multispecies world is debated in this research, which utilises a Multispecies Justice (MSJ) lens to investigate the transformational potential of UA to nature recovery policy.

MSJ is inspired by multiple approaches: including environmental justice movements, animal rights activism, political ecology and posthumanism. MSJ’s appeal is its capacity to analyse complex human-nonhuman relationships and centre the rights of non-humans within the wider justice concepts of fair resource distribution, representation and agency. Specifically, here, I analyse how UA connects with stories of multispecies justice beyond the socially-politically and ecologically constructed boundaries of urban food growing sites.

I will present part of my multidisciplinary research design in an embodied and interactive style. The presentation will engage creatively with ecological mapping and examine whether UA can actively build multispecies bridges of care, connection and justice across boundaries, and explore implications to nature recovery policy.