Konou, A.A.; Kemajou Mbianda, A.F.; Munyaka, B.J.-C.; Chenal, J. Two Decades of Architects’ and Urban Planners’ Contribution to Urban Agriculture and Health Research in Africa. Urban Sci.2023, 7, 117.
Konou, A.A.; Kemajou Mbianda, A.F.; Munyaka, B.J.-C.; Chenal, J. Two Decades of Architects’ and Urban Planners’ Contribution to Urban Agriculture and Health Research in Africa. Urban Sci. 2023, 7, 117.
Konou, A.A.; Kemajou Mbianda, A.F.; Munyaka, B.J.-C.; Chenal, J. Two Decades of Architects’ and Urban Planners’ Contribution to Urban Agriculture and Health Research in Africa. Urban Sci.2023, 7, 117.
Konou, A.A.; Kemajou Mbianda, A.F.; Munyaka, B.J.-C.; Chenal, J. Two Decades of Architects’ and Urban Planners’ Contribution to Urban Agriculture and Health Research in Africa. Urban Sci. 2023, 7, 117.
Abstract
Urban agriculture is an early practice, especially for cities in the Global South that are expanding at an unprecedented rate, and in African cities, it can be a way to attend to essential social and health needs. However, it is unclear whether architects and urban planners have expressed interest or already incorporated urban farming within their designs of African cities. This literature review was conducted to understand to what extent architects and urban planners have researched urban agriculture and health. Comprehensive searches based on urban agriculture, health, and Africa were conducted in Scopus, PubMed, and Web of Science from 2000 to December 2020. Zotero, Mozilla Firefox search engine, and Google Chrome were used to collect paper metadata. The duplicate articles were excluded, and all the n = 240 publications remaining were included in the analysis. Food security and the immediate health impact of urban agriculture on health were the most addressed topics. These studies reported the harmful effects of urban agriculture on malaria and the wastewater irrigation of plants. The evidence on urban agriculture is increasing from public health researchers, but not in the field of urban planning or architecture. Future research on urban agriculture's impacts on urban health should be increasingly done by architects and planners to help shape urban planning practices and regulations that could help create urban agriculture that benefits urban health.
Keywords
Africa; architecture; health; literature review; urban agriculture (UA); urban palnning
Subject
Public Health and Healthcare, Public, Environmental and Occupational Health
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
