Visions of VU’s Green Campus Interrogating the Potential of Urban Gardening, Agriculture, and Farming

Ongoing processes of urbanization in anthropogenic times pose questions about the future of sustainable cities (e.g. SDG 11). Growing cities globally face a host of issues, including increased poverty and inequalities, pollution, heat stress, decreased water retention, declining biodiversity, and questions on how to feed rapidly increasing numbers of urban dwellers.
Greening cities might provide solutions for these problems. Urban gardening (also called community gardening), for example, is recognized to promote (mental) health benefits to urbanites and stimulate social cohesion, while providing educational and economic opportunities, and ecological benefits (e.g. SDGs 3, 4, 15). Meanwhile, urban agriculture, for example in high-rise vacant office buildings, can contribute to urban food systems (e.g. SDGs 2 and 12) as a cost-effective, and energy and space-efficient innovation. At the same time, however, urban farming initiatives are often framed as small-scale alternatives to such agri-industrial food production systems. These latter initiatives have gained traction in light of disturbed food value chains and rising food prices (e.g. due to COVID, and the war in Ukraine), but also as (multi-species) nodes of resistance against capitalist ruination.
We see VU’s campus as a living lab through which we can take stock of all these approaches. We do so by tapping into, and bringing together, existing networks, initiatives and teaching projects on VU’s ‘Green Campus’. This project creates a network of stakeholders on- and off-campus, through which an integrated vision of opportunities and challenges for a green campus at the VU will be developed. By including students, this project promotes an engaged pedagogy of climate positive action, while kickstarting a research agenda on urban green futures.