Urban agriculture and the built environment: Possibilities and barriers in future scenarios

Urban agricultural (UA) production has been characterized as a potential solution to crises from food insecurity to global warming. The movement of agricultural production into cities faces numerous challenges and opportunities in integrating with existing urban food systems, and the built environment (BE) features strongly as a backdrop in most UA scenarios. The extent to which UA is able to reflexively address ongoing crises in the built environment, such as changing work patterns and vacant office spaces, remains understudied. Through thematic analysis of workshop data with participants in the BE and food sectors in the Helsinki metropolitan area, Finland, this paper explores the role of the built environment in future urban agriculture scenarios, revealing barriers and possibilities for UA’s integration into urban food systems. While numerous barriers and possibilities are thematically interrelated—and offer potential ‘synergies’ between the BE and UA—the presence of meta-barriers hinders futures thinking around UA integration.