by Min and Marion

According to the UN, 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas and it is expected to increase up to 68% by 2050. Then a question comes directly to our minds about how we can feed all of these people living in urban areas. Because we are living in a new era where we face climate change that threatens human life especially in the agriculture sector due to drought and flood.

To adapt to the climate changes, many cities are already doing urban farming as one solution. To take good examples we will introduce New York city and Cairo in a way that both cities are vulnerable to climate change in terms of the size of population and the environment.

Firstly New York is not just a world famous city with big skyscrapers and business district images, but also it has the largest urban farming in the USA. Isn’t it amazing? And Cairo is the second largest city in the African continent which recently promoted urban rooftop gardening proactively by the government to adapt to climate change and to have food sovereignty.

 Scrutinizing all the impacts, we can say all the impacts by urban gardening in both cities are very much positive. So we collected qualitative data in terms of some categories: Governance, community benefits, Awareness and commitment, Adaptation measures, Mitigation measures, R&D, Health and Food security. Then we found common areas and differences between the two cities as the diagram shows.

New York started urban farming in 1978 and has developed more in the R & D area as well as more funding thanks to the GDP size. And heaps of workshops help citizens have public awareness. On the other hand, Cairo had some resistance from the inhabitants due to unfamiliar concepts and funding with skilled expertise were not enough. There are more poverty and development issues.

However, the two cities are tackling urban gardening in different ways and trying to make common reasons of adapting to climate change and to create a healthy lifestyle

To sum up, although Cairo and New York have contrasting GDP and the urban gardening culture started in different years (1978 – New York and 2000 – Cairo), the two cities match their ideologies in at least 40% of the categories.The most common factors that influence the development of urban gardens are funding and education.The level of economic development in Cairo affects the use of urban gardens for different purposes like employment and poverty alleviation.