A key ingredient is the trend in ever more imaginative forms towards urban agriculture, a multi-faceted recipe already being pored over by some 800 million people globally, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. Paris has meanwhile come up with its own urban agriculture model, dubbed "Pariculteur," a series of town hall-mandated projects designed to cover as much of the capital as possible with greenery via a rise in urban farming. Urban ecologist Swen Deral, who oversaw a pan-European urban agriculture project last year, says if the concept is to be financially viable in cities it has to go "beyond production". "Either they recycle, or else they create services linked to urban agriculture, educational activities, restaurants and the like," he explains. Francois Mancebo, researcher at France's Reims University, summed up the challenge in an article published by peer-review open access publisher MDPI and entitled "city gardening: managing durability and adapting to climate change thanks to urban agriculture."

Source: The Local February 24, 2019 08:48 UTC