The Pandemic Boom of Urban Agriculture: Challenging the Role of Resiliency in Transforming our Future Urban (Food) Systems

ABSTRACT

In Australia, COVID-19 has accelerated the reliance on resiliency as a tool of post-pandemic urban recovery. We draw on critical literature on resilience to examine its use in proposals for urban agriculture in cities after COVID-19. Crucially, we situate the pandemic in a longer history of settler-colonialism, and in the role of agriculture in the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. We argue that the pandemic conditions which urban agriculture is currently operating within risks perpetuating urban colonial governmentality. This paper calls for a rethinking of urban agriculture for future cities by radically disrupting the foundational colonial logics of urban spatiality.

摘要

在澳大利亚，新冠加速了对复原力的依赖，将其作疫情后城市复苏的工具。我们借鉴了关于复原力的批评性文献，来研究它在新冠之后的城市农业建议中的应用。至关重要的是，我们将这一流行病置于定居者-殖民主义的较长历史中，以及农业在剥夺原住民和托雷斯海峡岛民中的作用中。我们认为，城市农业目前在大流行的条件下运作，有可能使城市殖民政府性长期存在。本文呼吁为未来的城市重新思考城市农业，从根本上打破城市空间性的基础性殖民逻辑。

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• urban agriculture
• greening
• decoloniality
• settler colonialism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 By unsettling, we refer to the undoing of settler colonial foundations. We take it as a “settler call to action” for anti-colonial actions in confronting and disrupting Australia’s colonial narrative. Refer to Paulette Regan 2010, Unsettling the Settler Within UBC Press.

2 Traditional name of “Melbourne”, located on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin nation.

3 Sustain is a public charity that promotes health and wellbeing through a food-systems approach which aims to: support local council in the implementation of policies benefiting public health; capacity-building of food-systems stakeholders; facilitate community food-system practice; provide food systems advice; and establish and coordinate an Australian Food Network