Urban Agriculture Interventions in Refugee and Immigrant Communities: A Scoping Review

Urban agriculture, known as urban farming, urban gardening, or community gardening, has become an important avenue for community development, food security, and economic stability in response to increased urbanization. However, a less studied aspect of urban agriculture is its application for historically marginalized communities and refugee and immigrant communities specifically. Using a two-fold research question: What are the domains of application of urban agriculture interventions on refugee and/or migrant populations? What are the scales and geographic patterns of urban agriculture interventions? Following scoping review guidelines, 42 articles published from 1990 to 2024 were included after screening out 375 articles that were initially retrieved from the database search. Articles were examined based on the following criterion: population of interest, intervention type, intervention scale, and geography of author. Findings suggest five domains of application: well-being, physical health, ecological, economic, and sociological, the latter as the most common domain. Health, particularly mental health, was less evident in scholarship. In terms of scale and geography, findings suggest that studies about large-size interventions were mostly in the Global South (Middle East and African regions specifically), and studies on small and medium-sized interventions were in the Global North (United States, Canada and Australia specifically). For theory, findings point to two broad theoretical domains: relationality and materialist, and less attention to food and environmental justice. These findings raise questions pertaining to access to resources insofar as resources determine the scale/size of interventions and thus their application. Issues pertaining to health and food and environmental justice were applications that largely did not emerge in the data, raising questions for further research.