Urban agriculture as an interface for policy–practice integration

Abstract

Urban agriculture is increasingly recognized as a multifunctional lever for urban sustainability, yet the mechanisms through which planning policies enable or constrain its integration into city systems remain poorly understood. This gap limits the development of evidence-based frameworks that can bridge policy intent and implementation practice. This study develops a transparent, multilingual content-analysis pipeline and a landscape-informed coupling framework to evaluate urban agriculture policy–practice alignment across three contrasting governance contexts: Havana (Cuba), New York City (USA), and Chongming Island (China). Using a PRISMA-ScR literature synthesis (n = 3145), we construct a five-domain, 40-keyword evaluation matrix and apply it to official policy corpora and flagship project documentation. Results show that human-centered approaches effectively translate social equity and food-provisioning aims but exhibit limited spatial integration; nature-based approaches advance ecological and morphological targets but underperform on participation; and the landscape-informed model achieves more balanced alignment across all five domains, though gaps persist in inter-layer connectivity. Situating these findings within the broader discourse on urban sustainability governance, we propose a multi-layered landscape framework spanning ecological, institutional, social, and spatial dimensions. This framework offers planners a structured diagnostic and prescriptive tool for embedding urban agriculture into integrated urban transitions.