Dr Silvio Caputo is leading the UK team in an international 3-year project, funded under the SUGI called Food-Water-Energy Nexus, which started in June 2018. The FEW-meter project aims at measuring the efficiency of urban agriculture in terms of resource consumption, food production and social benefits. Each one of the five countries involved in the project (UK, France, Germany, Poland and USA) will focus on a specific type of urban agriculture and a particular city. The UK will be looking at Community Gardens and City Farms in London, which have recently seen a surge of interest.
Data will be collected over two growing seasons from a sample of community garden projects, which will be used as case studies. They will be subsequently uploaded on the project’s website. This will enable the website’s users to compare a range of case studies across several countries, and analyse their productivity, organisational structure and detailed characteristics.
Finally, data collected will be elaborated, following an urban metabolism method (material flow analysis) and used to develop scenarios for optimal use of urban resources for food production in each city considered. This final outcome of the project will constitute an invaluable tool for local administrations, enabling a measurement of the potential of urban agriculture to utilise untapped resources and generate economic and food-related advantages.