believe, having regard to the diversity of innovative practices that urban agriculture is now recognised as including, that it makes little policy or practical sense to introduce it in the Australian context. This does not of course prevent councils and policy-makers being cognisant of the different functions and roles of non-commercial community gardening, and commercial-scale urban food production in a city or peri-urban market garden.
4.2.4 How might urban agriculture contribute to greater food security? When asked to explain what they understood by resilience in the urban context, many participants in both case study areas used terms such as ‘adaptability’, ‘flexibility’, ‘preparedness’, ‘confidence’, and ‘increased skills’. Those working in community groups spoke of ‘social resilience’ and ‘connectedness’, expressed through ‘sharing and doing’, ‘networking’, ‘re-skilling’ and ‘enhancing capabilities’. Based on their own experience and practice, these participants were passionate believers in the creative and adaptive power of people working together in pursuit of a shared goal and vision: When you create space for people to come together, amazing things can happen … Council could encourage neighbours to steward a street … This has serious potential! [Community food advocate] Another community food activist, who had participated in a number of permablitzes commented: There’s an average of forty people at each blitz, many with only entry-level knowledge about food growing, and most of whom don’t know each other. It’s shocking how well people work together. In each blitz there is some problemsolving involved, and inevitably the design alters through discussion [Community food activist and social entrepreneur]. While another proposed a broader, community- and systems-based understanding of resilience: Resilience for me is the ability to decentralise systems. I see resilience as an evolution in action, creating opportunities for people to be actively engaging in a practice, growing food or whatnot, in a very localised sense, that allows them to evolve the most appropriate systems for their particular needs, and their particular time. And I think it’s something that needs to be inspired, because people will naturally do it. That will create a diversity of solutions … I see that as resiliency around food: people growing their own food locally, in their own neighbourhood, are like little life-rafts, little support networks, that are forming around growing and producing food; but more importantly, getting out of their houses, and co-living, sharing the burdens of life in a city, and life in general, in a neighbourhood. Which is something that I know existed before. It hasn’t existed in my lifetime, or at least in my experience, but it’s something that I see as that true resilience. When times become difficult, people rather than go internally, come out [City of Yarra Urban agriculture officer]. The researchers with whom we spoke tended to understand resilience from the perspective of social-ecological systems thinking, as seen for example in the writings of Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change 42