Selecting Allotment Gardens in Urban and Peri-Urban Areas

The downside of the current rapid urbanization is well known; cities grow faster than their minimum service levels can cope with. This is particularly manifested in urban food insecurity, predominantly in the lower wealth segments of the Global South countries, which demands far reaching policy interventions to empower the urban poor and to allow them to tackle these problems heads-on. The impoverished urbanized population, the world over, faces now even greater challenges under the COVID-19 mobility restrictions that disrupt food supply chains while those who lose their jobs in the informally organized sector do not qualify for income compensation. Urban agriculture seems a viable answer; it can be practiced at safe and infectious preventive distances, produces healthy and nutritious food, earns some extra income from surplus production, and can be located away from infection prone mass concentrations. Political support to implement allotment gardens is largely absent and continues to be sustained by information gaps on the allocation and suitability of potential sites. We address this knowledge gap by presenting the fundamental building blocks for a site allocation tool that optimizes the spatial planning of allotment gardens in urban and peri-urban areas while accounting for biophysical (soil, water) and socioeconomic (distance to markets and safe entrance for women) conditions as well as COVID-19 safety measures and will provide better life conditions. The tool underlying the model uses a wide array of fully georeferenced database of explanatory variables while a selected of subset expert judgments assess site suitability in qualitative ordered classes. Model outcomes are tested for consistency, reproducibility, and stability (robustness), while a correlation protocol with quantitative data makes qualitative judgments interpretable. The model is converted into a tool for an impact interventionist analysis and aims to foster sufficient production and consumption of food locally in urban settings.