may be biophysical and driven by climatic changes, many are social, economic and political. This project was designed to extend our knowledge of the current diversity of urban agricultural practices in Australian cities, to identify the social, economic and political barriers to urban agriculture and to explore the potential for extending its practice in the future, especially one increasingly affected by climate change. It draws on a systematic review (presented as Appendix One) of current practice in Australia and beyond and supplements this with two case studies of major Australian cities, Melbourne and Gold Coast, involving interviews with key local stakeholders with knowledge of current urban agricultural practices, barriers and limits. The systematic literature review was undertaken prior to the case study research and the themes used to structure the review were used also to structure the fieldwork interviews. This Appendix presents a summary analysis of the case study fieldwork undertaken in Melbourne and the Gold Coast. 1.1 Background to Melbourne and Gold Coast case study areas Melbourne is a thriving city of 4 million residents. It is currently experiencing a sustained wave of inward migration at the rate of 70,000 new arrivals per year and its population is projected to reach 7 million by the middle of this century. Like all Australian cities and virtually all cities established in the 19th century or earlier, Melbourne had substantial areas of land within or very close to the city boundaries devoted to market gardening, livestock rearing and fruit orchards. This strong agricultural link was essential to the development of Melbourne, the day to day survival of its population and the operation of its urban economy (Budge, 2009). Market gardens and urban orchards were located in areas that are now high-density inner urban suburbs, such as Brunswick, Coburg, Preston, Northcote, St Kilda, Bentleigh, Moorabbin and Templestowe. These commercial-scale food production activities were complemented by the widespread practice of householders utilising their back gardens to grow vegetables, keep chickens, and larger animals such as goats and cows for milk (Gaynor 2006: 21, cited in Burke 2009). Indeed Gaynor reports that in 1881, ‘40% of households [in Brunswick] owned large livestock and 63% owned poultry (Gaynor 2006: 19, cited in Burke 2009). This pattern or relatively self-sufficiency in urban and suburban food self-sufficiency pattern continued through to the middle decades of the twentieth century, and ‘helped much of the working class feed themselves through the depressions of the 1890s and the 1920s, as well as the hardships of two World Wars’ (Burke 2009: 4). While peri-urban farming, market-gardening, and backyard self-sufficiency, were undoubted elements within the broader historical narrative of Melbournian, and Australian, urbanisation, the socio-economic and spatial dynamics of urban food systems were transformed by profound technological, economic, planning and cultural change in the decades after World War II. Also during that time, what Budge terms ‘the market forces associated with the suburbanisation of metropolitan areas’ meant that low-density suburban sprawl and ‘big-box’ shopping centres – with major supermarkets at their core – became the dominant and preferred model of land use and residential development in major Australian cities like Melbourne (Budge, 2009: 5-6).
Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change 102