Learning Resources Division: Urban Agriculture: Books

Browse the Stacks

If you want to browse the stacks for urban agriculture books, you can find titles related to this topic in the call number sections below. If you need assistance finding a topic or a specific title, just ask a reference librarian for help.

HD 1401-2210 - Industries, Land Use, Labor - Agriculture
QK - Botany
S - Agriculture (General) (S494.5 - Urban Agriculture)
SB - Plant Culture

Recommended Books

Black Food Geographies by Ashanté M. Reese
Call Number: E-book
Publication Date: 2019-03-08
In this book, the author makes clear the structural forces that determine food access in urban areas, highlighting Black residents' navigation of and resistance to unequal food distribution systems. Linking these local food issues to the national problem of systemic racism, Reese examines the history of the majority-Black Deanwood neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Reese not only documents racism and residential segregation in the nation's capital but also tracks the ways transnational food corporations have shaped food availability. Reese's geographies of self-reliance offer an alternative to models that depict Black residents as lacking agency, demonstrating how an ethnographically grounded study can locate and amplify nuances in how Black life unfolds within the context of unequal food access.
Breaking Through Concrete by David Hanson; Edwin Marty
Call Number: E-book
Publication Date: 2012-01-30
This text documents twelve successful urban farm programs, from an alternative school for girls in Detroit, to a backyard food swap in New Orleans, to a restaurant supply garden on a rooftop in Brooklyn. Each beautifully illustrated essay offers practical advice for budding farmers, such as composting and keeping livestock in the city, decontaminating toxic soil, even changing zoning laws.
Cities of Farmers by Julie Dawson; Alfonso Morales
Call Number: E-book
Publication Date: 2016-11-01
The authors describe how food is produced and distributed in cities via institutions as diverse as commercial farms, community gardens, farmers’ markets, and regional food hubs. Growing food in vacant lots and on rooftops affects labor, capital investment, and human capital formation, and as a result urban agriculture intersects with land values and efforts to build affordable housing. It also can contribute to cultural renewal and improved health. This book enables readers to understand and contribute to their local food system, whether they are raising vegetables in a community garden, setting up a farmers’ market, or formulating regulations for farming and composting within city limits.
Designing Urban Agriculture by April Philips
Call Number: E-book
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
This full-color guide offers a complete overview of edible landscapes from the planning, designing, and funding to the management and maintenance of these communal spaces and ecodestinations. Featuring case studies of innovative projects, it offers complete coverage of a dozen typologies including community gardens, CSA farms, edible estates, edible roof gardens, guerilla gardens, vertical wall gardens, and farm-to-table gardens, among others.
Ecology of Urban Environments by Kirsten M. Parris
Call Number: E-book
Publication Date: 2016-03-02
This book provides an accessible introduction to urban ecology, using established ecological theory to identify generalities in the complexity of urban environments.
Freedom Farmers by Monica M. White; LaDonna Redmond (Foreword by)
Call Number: E-book
Publication Date: 2018-11-06
This title expands the historical narrative of the Black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of Black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.
Good Food, Strong Communities: Promoting Social Justice Through Local and Regional Food Systems by Steve Ventura (ed.); Martin Bailkey (ed.)
Call Number: E-book
Publication Date: 2017
This text shares ideas and stories about efforts to improve food security in large urban areas of the United States by strengthening community food systems. Activists and scholars talk about what's working and what still needs to be done to ensure that everyone has access to readily available, affordable, appropriate, and acceptable food. This book helps readers understand how a food system functions and how individual and community initiatives can lessen the problems associated with an industrialized food system.
Integrated Urban Agriculture: Precedents, Practices, Prospects by Robert France (Editor)
Call Number: E-book
Publication Date: 2016-07-22
Intended as a "one stop shop" of a veritable who's who of leading urban agriculture authors and scholars, this book brings together seventeen contributions on the design, development, science, and society of the rapidly expanding, multi-disciplinary field.
Integrating Food into Urban Planning by Yves Cabannes (Editor); Cecilia Marocchino (Editor)
Call Number: E-book
Publication Date: 2019-03-15
Urban planners, alongside the local and regional authorities that have traditionally been less engaged in food-related issues, are now asked to take a central and active part in understanding the way food is produced, processed, packaged, transported, marketed, consumed, disposed of, and recycled in our cities. Despite a growing body of literature on food and cities, the issue of planning cities in such a way that they will increase food security and nutrition not only for the affluent segments of society but also the poor, is much less discussed and much informed by practice. This volume fills this gap by putting more than twenty cities' experiences in perspective.
Pollination: The Enduring Relationship Between Plant and Pollinator by Timothy Walker
Call Number: E-book
Publication Date: 2020-10-06
The author offers an engaging introduction to pollination biology and explores the many different tactics of plant reproduction. He shows how wind and water can be effective yet wildly unpredictable means of pollination, and describes the intimate interactions of pollinating plants with bees and butterflies, beetles and birds, and lizards and bats. Walker explores how plants entice pollinators using scents, colors, and shapes, and how plants rely on rewards as well as trickery to attract animals. He sheds light on the important role of pollination in ecology, evolution, and agriculture, and discusses why habitat management, species recovery programs, and other conservation efforts are more critical now than ever.
Soilless Culture: Theory & Practice by Michael Raviv (Editor); J. Heiner Lieth (Editor); Asher Bar-Tal (Editor)
Call Number: E-book
Publication Date: 2019-04-02
The first authoritative reference book on both the theoretical and practical aspects of growing plants without the use of soil. The book builds on the thorough presentation of both physical and chemical properties of various soilless growing media, also addressing how these properties affect plant performance in basic horticultural operations, such as irrigation and fertilization. In addition, the book describes the latest technical advancements and methodologies, including run-to-waste, re-circulation and closed systems.
Urban Farming by Tamara Thompson (Editor)
Call Number: E-book
Publication Date: 2016-04-18
This text includes a variety of articles on urban agriculture. Articles discuss urban agriculture as a viable solution to food insecurities; the economic sustainability of urban agriculture; the impact of urban agriculture on specific groups, such as women in developing countries; and the future of urban farming.

E-books

E-books are books, too! They just happen to be available to you online. Just like any of the library's databases, these can be used from anywhere with an Internet connection. When prompted, all you have to do is log-in using your UDC credentials.

Many e-books may be downloaded (chapter-by-chapter or the entire book) and some can even be printed. If you check out an e-book, it will "disappear" from your library account on its due date.

E-books are available in many of the library's databases. You can try a few of them in the list below:

Books In Print This link opens in a new window
Books In Print is the world's largest, unbiased, web-based bibliographic resource, a comprehensive database of almost 20 million book, e-book, audio book, and video titles available from 43 different markets worldwide. It features over 462,000 tables of contents, 3.4 million annotations, and 3.5 million reviews of titles by more than 426,000 publishers, as well as extensive cover images and author biographies. Also included is Fiction Connection, a reader's advisory tool.
eBooks@Adelaide This link opens in a new window
The University of Adelaide provides full-text electronic books of classic works of literature, philosophy, and history from a variety of countries, most available free online to anyone because the copyright has expired. Users can browse by subject, title, author, or search by keywords.
EBSCO eBooks This link opens in a new window
Focused e-book collections include: Agriculture, Community College, Environment and Sustainability, Green Technology, Nursing, Political Science, Ready Reference, Social Work.
Gale eBooks This link opens in a new window
Reference e-books, including Business Plans collection
HathiTrust This link opens in a new window
A collaboration between the members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and institutions in the University of California system, Hathi Trust is a repository for the archiving and sharing of digitized collections, which can range from nineteenth-century periodicals to historical bicycling to war to hard-to-find government documents and congressional materials.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Digitized back issues of scholarly journals with a rolling date of five years ago. Covers a wide variety of disciplines. Includes JSTOR Arts and Sciences I, II, III, IV, V, VII, X. Also includes e-books.
Project Gutenberg Online Catalog This link opens in a new window
Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books. Over 30,000 titles are available.
ProQuest Ebook Central This link opens in a new window
Over 100,000 e-books on a wide range of topics, including: business and economics; computers and information technology; education; engineering and technology; history and political science; humanities; interdisciplinary and area studies; language, literature and linguistics; law, international relations and public policy; life sciences; medical; nursing and allied health; physical sciences; psychology and social work; religion, philosophy and classics; sociology and anthropology.
Universal Library This link opens in a new window
Over 100,000 electronic books available from the Internet Archive.

Urban Agriculture

Browse the Stacks

Recommended Books

E-books

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