The Meta-synthesis of Dimensions and Challenges of Urban Agriculture

The urban population is increasing daily, and meeting the nutritional needs of this population is one of the serious problems for municipal planners and managers for now and then. In this regard, many people consider the urban agriculture as a reliable and sustainable way of responding to the growing needs of cities. Therefore, various studies have been carried out to explore different aspects of urban agriculture. Each of these studies has looked at this category from a specific and restricted angle and ignored many important issues. Thus, in order to clarify the different dimensions and challenges of urban agriculture in this research, after analyzing them, 34 articles have been selected from amongst various articles, extracted based on the Meta-synthesis method, and formed a comprehensive model for challenges and dimensions of urban agriculture. After that, with a review of the statistics in the encoded tables, it was revealed that the dimensions of "supportive and facilitating policies" in the category of attitudes and policies, as well as the "food security" in the social category, had the highest number of references in these articles. Plans and studies in this area are still novice and the qualitative issues and deep concepts such as the role of urban agriculture in social interactions and spatial attractiveness have been overlooked. Separating this area from the urban green space could be one of the main reasons of this problem. A serious method should be designed in order to solve this problem and perform as an integrated plan with regards to urban green spaces.