Urban Agriculture Consortium

The power of urban agriculture –

Since 2020 the Urban Agriculture Consortium (UAC) has been bringing people together to co-create the conditions for urban and peri-urban agroecology to thrive, as part of an integrated, resilient, & just food system for the UK.

With two part-time coordinators running the project, UAC has, with partners across the consortium, been and co-designing, testing and delivering a portfolio of complementary support ‘modules’ to help amplify and accelerate the place-based initiatives and ideas that we see and feel are (and will be) the most impactful, systemically, and in terms of human transformation and ecological healing. 

These modules are evolving – this diagram gives a snapshot of our current work (coordinators and our guides, associates and place-based partners at the centre, and the projects we directly fund in yellow circles around. This diagram is evolving all the time.

Communities at the grass-roots are seeking change and a new movement of community-and-nature-led food projects and businesses is emerging and taking root. Often in unfavourable and volatile conditions.

UAC is now seeking next-level funding to continue to co-design, develop, grow, and deliver these modules collaboratively, to make them more widely available, to have the means to support their upscaling where/when there is an opportunity, and to invest in holistic evaluation of our impact (across all members and projects of the consortium).

Our goal is re-normalising local food growing and local food consumption in and around our towns and cities and to continue to push the boundaries through supporting transformative ideas and the relationships to make them happen. 

Backdrop…

Urban and urban fringe (or peri-urban) settings present a unique set of constraints, opportunities, challenges, problems and solutions when it comes to transitioning our food system. We want to move away from the present destructive industrial model, towards a just, inclusive, regenerative and localised one. The continuing process of urbanisation has disconnected people from the source and value of good food, giving rise to many personal and planetary problems.

So when we reimagine urban centres and their peri-urban hinterlands as landscapes interwoven with small scale, regenerative and diverse food growing everywhere, as generators of abundance, food equality, innovation, livelihoods, local economic resilience and beauty we can start to see that it is possible to heal this dislocation and its effects; healing our own bodies, our communities, the habitats of our companion species’, and the planet.

This decade is widely considered to be our last window of opportunity to slow the collapse of the ecosystem integrity on which all life depends through a global movement for ecosystem restoration. Mainstreaming agroecology – an agriculture based on healing and optimising natural systems, provides perhaps our biggest hope for success. This transition will be driven by demand for good food in urban settlements, and enabled by supportive policy and financial commitments at a local, regional and national level.

So, much of our hope for a better world, personally and globally, lies in transforming our food systems. Everyone is needed, everyone is invited. The more skilled we become at working together, the sooner we will reach a positive tipping point.