Smart Urban Agriculture : exploring its development in Sweden

Abstract

Smart urban agriculture initiatives where food is produced in closed, controlled and digitally augmented environments, such as vertical farms, plant factories and aquaponics systems can be found in cities across the globe. Such initiatives produce fresh food all year around using less chemicals and require fewer food miles. However, critiques of smart urban agriculture suggest it is a marginal activity that often produces food with low nutritional value and requires energy intensive artificial lighting. Technological advances in digitalisation and food production as well as social and economic developments may create opportunities for smart urban food systems to address these issues and become a more realistic food supply in cities. Using qualitative research methods, this report explores the development of smart urban agriculture in Sweden. Specifically, it identifies experimental and entrepreneurial initiatives and analyses these initiatives in relation to high level policy agendas such as food policy, smart city and digitalisation. Our findings show that smart urban agriculture broadly consists of technology-oriented entrepreneurial start-ups and experimental initiatives that includes, but are not limited to production, community and technology oriented initiatives. Production oriented initiatives are mainly organised to produce herbs and leafy greens; community oriented initiatives are mainly prioritising social benefits; and technology oriented initiatives develop and supply digital solutions and services for smart farming. These initiatives are interesting because of their claims about superior sustainability performance compared with conventional food production. Specifically these sustainability claims include resource efficient production in contained farming environments that are chemical free and can be located close to the market. Given the sustainability debate inherent with food production and consumption, smart (urban) agriculture has gained commercial traction and momentum, e.g. financial investments. The product output is, however, limited to a small variety of financial high margin crops that are sold at premium prices on the market. When examining smart urban agriculture in relation to high level strategic agendas, our findings show that urban agriculture is recognised for its environmental and social benefits (e.g. to mitigate flooding as well as offer space for recreation), but not as a realistic food supply. Here, food policies have a conventional view in that food is produced in rural areas and consumed in urban areas. The developments of smart urban agriculture challenge this conventional view. However, food production-consumption systems are excluded from high level policy agendas on smart cities and digitalisation. These insights suggest that there are established institutional arrangements (e.g. in food policy and urban planning) that may constrain development and uptake of smart urban agriculture and its possibility to bring significant sustainability benefits.

Published in

SLU Future Food Reports
2022, number: 18ISBN: 978-91-8046-795-7, eISBN: 978-91-8046-796-4Publisher: SLU Future food, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

SLU Authors

• Langendahl, Per-Anders

  • Department of Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

Associated SLU-program

SLU Future Food


UKÄ Subject classification

Food Science


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54612/a.7hllg1t7av

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/119980