Urban Agriculture and the Battle for History in Melbourne and São Paulo

Abstract

Urban agriculture is booming around the world, and has become a marketed commodity in cities as disparate as Melbourne and São Paulo. Real estate developers, for instance, increasingly offer luxury apartments with veggie plots that promise to reconnect customers with the earth and traditional lifestyles. This narrative of revived interdependence between people and nature reveals selective amnesia: only those practices that advance commercial and political interests are recalled. Meanwhile, the allocation and protection of productive land, the training and employment of horticultural workers by city councils, and the less polluted ecosystems of the pre-industrial era are forgotten. Case studies from Melbourne and São Paulo demonstrate that these conditions remain important enablers of genuine urban agriculture, and that they can be locally achieved. We argue that to do so, though, requires action to redress structural shortcomings rather than the real estate industry’s glossy promises to revive the past.

We thank the Australian Research Council, the Council on Australia-Latin America Relations, and the São Paulo Research Foundation for supporting this work.