Urban Horticulture and Urban Gardening as Activities to Increase Local Food Production and Provide Other Ecosystem Services

The two main challenges of the future, as is now well known, are to achieve global food safety and environmental sustainability. To reach the goal, agricultural systems need to be transformed and made more efficient to face the challenges of food production and environmental protection. Urban horticulture and urban gardening can be interesting strategies in this context: they represent a growing segment of horticulture, related to the study of the relationship between plants and urban environment (city or suburb). They can help to reduce the cities’ ecological footprint, as well as the waste of space and resources. They can be useful activities for protecting biodiversity, with positive implications for the environment but also for consumers, who can benefit from it through a more varied diet (for example, when considering edible wild species). The latter aspect can also be interesting for the creation of alternative agri-food networks and to improve the presence of short food supply chains within cities. In order to make good use of unused spaces and buildings within cities, it is also necessary to experiment with new cultivation methods (soilless cultures, vertical farming systems), to be combined with traditional agricultural systems. In addition, greener cities can improve the psycho-physical well-being of citizens and provide an important educational function for the future generations.

In this Research Topic, Original Research, Perspectives, Reviews, Mini-Reviews, Brief Research Report, Papers that targeted activities related to urban horticulture and urban gardening, to increase local food production and provide ecosystem services, are welcome.
Specifically, we welcome works that focus on (but are not limited to) the following topics:
• urban horticulture, made through traditional and innovative growing systems;
• urban gardening;
• quality of vegetables produced in the context of such cropping systems;
• positive effects of urban agriculture, in terms of food security, social and education, self-sufficiency of cities etc.

Keywords: urban horticulture, urban gardening, ecosystem services, vertical farm, green spaces, ornamentals, environmental sustainability, food security

Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.