What is the nature of evidence regarding relationships between urban agriculture and gentrification? A systematic map protocol

TL;DR

This paper outlines a systematic review protocol to explore how urban agriculture relates to gentrification, aiming to identify patterns and gaps in academic research.

Contribution

It introduces a structured protocol for mapping literature on urban agriculture and gentrification, focusing on cross-cutting social-ecological relationships.

Findings

The protocol will assess scholarly work on urban agriculture and gentrification using a comprehensive search strategy.

It aims to uncover evidence of their relationships and highlight research gaps in dominant academic discourses.

Abstract

As people work towards environmental sustainability for urban environments and everyday lives, tensions have been seen in different efforts on food, housing, environmental management, urban planning, and many cross-cutting issues touching on multiple aspects of social-ecological systems. Urban agriculture (UA) as one multifaceted, cross-cutting arena, has had one particular tension regarding relationships with housing and the built environment: its gentrification potential. However, different accounts have provided evidence and theorization of gentrification as a possible outcome of UA activities, as a risk for UA initiatives, and showing still other relationships between UA and gentrification. These different accounts may be partially explained by different theoretical engagements with gentrification, as well as multiple activities constituting a broad notion of urban agriculture. An overview of the scholarly work regarding these two topics can provide a starting point for understanding how they have been approached and theoretically engaged together, and demonstrate gaps in dominant academic discourses.

This research for a systematic mapping of literature seeks to assess the academic work around relationships between urban agriculture and gentrification. The protocol outlines a comprehensive and reliable search and review strategy based on the core components of urban, agriculture, and gentrification in search strings and inclusion criteria. Texts in English, French, and German will be scanned as historically and currently dominant academic languages, while searching nine bibliographic databases or platforms. The protocol details a data coding strategy for metadata, empirical content, and analytic content. The results are expected to uncover sources of evidence for links between urban agriculture and gentrification, producing interoperable datasets of the evidence base, insights of the overall research landscape, and possibilities to find research gaps.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13750-025-00375-4.

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