CoFarm4Cities: Creating a sustainable model for urban fringe farming in Central Europe as an effective tool to prevent urban sprawl and to transition to a more sustainable food system and society

Central European cities are witnessing increasing market pressure for land use due to urbanisation, especially in peri-urban agricultural areas, resulting in biodiversity loss and endangering land fertility and food systems. Parallelly, there is growing demand from citizens for more cultivable urban lands, reflected in the popularity of community gardens, which gained further ground during the lockdowns of the pandemic.



This trend, coupled with climate change impacts cities are facing (heat island effect, changing rainfall patterns) calls for a new approach of land use based on climate-friendly, nature based solutions to increase cities’ resilience, counteract urban sprawl, regenerate degraded peri-urban areas, preserve biodiversity and strengthen local food systems.



Recognising the socio-economic and environmental benefits of urban farming seen mainly in other regions (as such practises are scarce in CE or focus only on certain factors), CoFarm4Cities partners have decided to jointly find an environment-friendly solution for urban sprawl by identifying a sustainable utilisation of peri-urban agricultural, mixed-use or abandoned areas and developing a replicable model with stakeholder engagement tools (UFSLU) for transforming them into managed land for urban farming in CE cities.



Good practices analysed will be used to develop different possible urban farming scenarios, including management, business, environmental and social aspects, to be tested in 5 cities. Also, to induce attitude change on urban agriculture, partners will address and engage stakeholder groups of the production and demand sides, decision-makers on all levels, as well as follower cities.



Besides the model, the project will result in Action Plans based on it, setting steps and actions for urban fringe farming in partner cities, aiming to curb urban sprawl and provide local healthy food, thus contributing to the transition to sustainable food systems (in line with the Farm-to-Fork strategy).Co-develop sustainable land use model based on urban farming through analysing local land use practices & global urban farming cases from management & business perspective and through lessons learnt from pilot actions for urban agricultural land uses

WP2 aims at testing and evaluating elements of co-developed urban farming scenarios in pilot actions to study their feasibility and contribution to the sustainable operation of urban farms.

WP3 aims at ensuring long-term sustainability of urban farming-based sustainable land use via the engagement of different stakeholder groups and the facilitation of the replication of the UFSLU model to other cities in Central Europe.