Browsing by Author "Ribeiro, Alexandra"
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- Citizens’ deliberation on solutions to fight urban household food waste and nexus with growing urban gardens: the case of Porto metropolitan area in PortugalPublication . Ribeiro, Alexandra; Madureira, Lívia; Carvalho, RaquelFood waste is currently acknowledged as a major societal challenge, including the food waste at the household level estimated to be responsible for the wastage of one third of the food produced for human consumption. Hence, tackling household food waste (HFW) is gaining a momentum in societal and policy agendas accompanied by an increasing effort of the scientific community to deliver evidence to address the research gaps on the causes and on the solutions to address this multidimensional societal problem. The proposed solutions by published literature to mitigate HFW can be unfolded into four major types, actions to raise people awareness, participatory actions, economic incentives, and collective actions. However, there is little evidence on the household's assessment of the different types of actions and its combination. This paper contributes to this research gap by adopting an innovative participatory approach, using deliberative focus groups (DFG), and analyzing the collected data through content analysis resorting to the software Maxqda. We had conducted six DGF in the Porto metropolitan area before and during the pandemic COVID-19 crisis. Our results highlight the citizen's option for more holistic actions in comparison to separate actions as a way to effectively fight food waste at household level. Another finding of our study is that citizen's growing urban gardens found it the more effective way to reduce household food waste. These results suggest that urban policies and underlying legal frameworks should favor holistic solutions to incentivise fighting HFW and account for the urban gardens as a relevant part of the solution. In addition, the study has shown that qualitative deliberative citizen-led approaches show insightful to understand how common people perceive as alternative or complementary the different types of actions to fight HFW proposed by the literature review.
- Establishing urban gardens on vacant land while considering international good practices: a legal case study from PortugalPublication . Ribeiro, Alexandra; Carvalho, Raquel; Madureira, LíviaThere is a gap in most countries’ legal frameworks regarding their ability to connect vacant land and urban gardens. Hence, research is needed to understand how regulation on vacant land might be designed to promote a more sustainable purpose to it. Urban gardens are a type of urban agriculture that could be potentiated by such regulation. The aim of this paper is to show how that can be done through the Municipal Master Plans (MMP) legal and regulatory framework for the Portuguese case, by reviewing worldwide good practices on vacant land restorations for urban sustainable development. The paper comprises a literature review on good practices adopted in different countries regarding vacant lot restoration. The evaluation of good practices is built on the achievement of the three pillars of sustainability. Five Portuguese MMP were used, as empirical data, to support the design of a new legal and regulatory framework. The goal is to enhance the sustainable destination of vacant land by converting it into urban gardens. The analysis of these MMPs demonstrated that they disregard urban gardens as a tool to promote urban sustainability in spite of global trends to make urban territorial planning and management instruments greener. An additional outcome of this paper is to categorise different types of vacant land in the five municipalities under analysis according to their suitability for urban garden conversion. The design of the legal framework enhancing the conversion of vacant land into urban garden will contribute to the 2030 international agenda goals’ achievement. The proposal would create an innovative legal framework in the case of Portugal that could be replicated by other countries.
- Evidence on how urban gardens help citizens and cities to enhance sustainable development. Review and bibliometric analysisPublication . Ribeiro, Alexandra; Madureira, Lívia; Carvalho, RaquelThis paper offers a comprehensive review on a bibliometric analysis of the published research on the most recent generation of urban gardens. Urban gardens have been part of the cities ever since; however, the present paper focus on the latest wave of this type of garden, that has been triggered by individual bottom-up initiatives driven by sustainability-related motivations, which have an impact on cities’ sustainable development. Its aim is to deliver an overview of the published scientific literature and to comprehensively review the evidence it provides on the role of urban gardens in Sustainable Development. A bibliometric analysis has been carried out using the Vosviewer software and searching the Web of Science database for ‘urban gardens’, ‘community gardens’ and ‘allotments’ as keywords. A narrow selection of the most co-cited publications on urban gardens pointed to four major strands of research grouped into four clusters. The first cluster (‘Citizens’) groups evidence on urban gardens and ‘People, lifestyle and sense of community’. Citizens are found to be major triggers of urban gardens initiatives, driven by ‘motivations, purposes and benefits’ that are explored by a second strand of literature captured by the second cluster, the ‘Drivers’ cluster. A third group of publications addresses urban gardens in the context of the sustainable development of cities. The ‘Cities’ cluster shows how urban gardens contribute to urban sustainability as well as some aspects that can hinder it, namely not being acknowledged by local public policies and urban planners, while being neglected by urban planning policies framework. Finally, the fourth cluster (‘Soil’) refers to sustainability shortcomings of urban gardens resulting from their being situated in vacant land that is only available due to soil contamination, which is related with its lack of institutional recognition. We were able to conclude the studies conducted are directly related to sustainable development and there are direct and necessary relationships between the three pillars and the literature on urban gardens that has been published in recent years. Besides, little importance has been given to this whole urban garden issue, not only because most of the studies reviewed in this work are case studies, but also because there is still much economic pressure affecting the sustainability pyramid.