Urban Agriculture as Critical Infrastructure: Sustainable Urban Infrastructure and Climate-Resilient Systems

Urban Agriculture is increasingly understood as a multifunctional component of sustainable urban infrastructure, encompassing community gardens, rooftop farms, green roofs, peri-urban production sites, and other productive landscapes. As climate change intensifies flooding, extreme heat, drought, grid failures, and other disruptions, infrastructure designed around historical climate conditions is becoming less reliable, particularly for vulnerable communities.Recent research demonstrates that urban agricultural spaces can support food security while delivering ecosystem services, including stormwater infiltration, temperature regulation through evapotranspiration and shading, biodiversity enhancement, and the provision of accessible open space. However, existing studies tend to examine food production, ecosystem services, or climate adaptation separately. Important questions remain concerning how these functions can be quantified, spatially planned, governed, and activated during emergencies. Greater investigation is needed to establish how urban agriculture can operate as hybrid infrastructure that supports everyday well-being and strengthens urban disaster preparedness and response.This Research Topic aims to advance conceptual, methodological, and applied understanding of urban agriculture as a critical component of climate-resilient urban systems. It will examine how productive landscapes can be integrated into spatial planning, infrastructure investment, food-system governance, and emergency-management strategies. Particular attention will be given to the assessment of co-benefits and trade-offs, the distribution of resilience benefits across communities, and the conditions under which urban agricultural spaces can function as reliable assets during extreme events. Contributions may also investigate how design, policy, institutional coordination, and community stewardship influence the capacity of urban agriculture to support climate adaptation, food security, public health, and disaster response.To gather further insights into the planning, design, governance, and emergency functions of urban agriculture, this Research Topic will focus on urban and peri-urban productive landscapes while recognising their contextual, institutional, and climatic limitations. Comparative, empirical, modelling, design-based, and policy-oriented contributions are welcomed, including research addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:- Urban Agriculture as critical or hybrid infrastructure- Heat-island mitigation, shading, and evapotranspiration in Urban Agriculture- Stormwater infiltration, flood mitigation, and water-sensitive design involving Urban Agriculture- Urban food security and food-system resilience during emergencies- Community gardens, rooftop farms, green roofs, and peri-urban production- Urban agriculture as community resilience hubs and emergency-response spaces- Multifunctional landscape design balancing food production and climate adaptation- Spatial planning and infrastructure frameworks for integrating urban agriculture- Governance, land tenure, climate-sensitive stewardship, and cross-sectoral institutional coordination of Urban Agriculture - Equity, accessibility, environmental justice, and the distribution of climate resilience benefits in Urban Agriculture - Methods for quantifying ecosystem services and infrastructure performance in Urban Agriculture - Comparative case studies of urban agricultural systems in different climatic contexts- Policy instruments for incorporating urban agriculture into climate adaptation and disaster planning- Management, maintenance, and post-disaster recovery of productive urban landscapes integrating Urban Agriculture Topic editors: Ashutosh Rai, Kishor T Zingre, E.V. S. Kiran Kumar Donthu Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/85401/urban-agriculture-as-critical-infrastructure-sustainable-urban-infrastructure-and-climate-resilient-systems