In preparation for our December 18th Urban Food Policy Forum on Growing Good Food Jobs in NYC we asked some of the city’s most prominent good food jobs champions to weigh in on two critical questions: (1) What one thing could elected officials (e.g. mayor, governor, council members, etc.) do in next year to promote good food jobs? and (2) What's the biggest obstacle to increasing the number of good food jobs in NYC and how does your organization/company address this obstacle? Here is what they shared.

Shifting Urban Agriculture Landscapes

The landscape of urban agriculture – the growing of food and non-food products and the raising of livestock in and around cities— is ever-growing throughout cities of the Global North. This, despite the fact that it has often been disregarded as legitimate use of urban space, or as legitimate agriculture (Smit et al. 1996). In the last two decades, longstanding practices of urban gardening (including home-, allotment-, community-gardens, as well as gardens at schools, hospitals, and other institutions) have been joined by not-for-profit initiatives such as community farms, in the U.S. context, or jardins d’insertion that provide opportunities for social and workforce inclusion in the French context. These relatively recent iterations of urban agriculture in Global North cities, including New York and Paris, where we respectively live and work, often are focused on increasing food access and/or providing job training in low income communities (cf., Cohen et al. 2012, Simon-Rojo et al. 2016).