Urban Agriculture And Eco-land Saving Strategy

Half of the World’s Population is living in the urban area. As the acceleration ofurbanization process, more and more arable land is occupied. The World Food andAgriculture Organization (FAO) defined urban agriculture as a kind of localagricultural cultivation, located in urban and peri-urban areas. It provides high quality,safe agricultural products and job opportunities, gives new concept to urbanlandscape, and offers a new way to protect the environment. The development ofurban agriculture has gone through three stages. The first stage is the activities inGermany, Russia, and Japan from1919to1959. The second phase is the globaldevelopment boom from1959to1996, which includes: the continuation of thetraditional urban agriculture; use urban area as the additional land; solve foodshortages problems in urban poor with urban agriculture. The third stage is the highlevel development of urban agriculture, which is from1996to2010, including thesustainability research of agriculture; use urban agriculture as a way to buildecological city; a new king of urban agriculture building called vertical farming. Urbanagriculture can be divided into three types economically: family agriculture;economical agriculture; and ecological agriculture. It could be also be divided in tothree types by the size: urban farmland, small-scale urban farming, and verticalfarming.Drawing on foreign experience of urban agriculture and in the light of Chineserealities, this paper proposes the tactics of urban eco-land saving, such as breakingthrough absolute limit between town and city; establishing new greening concept andenlarging growing areas. It explores the feasibility of the program of “occupying zerometer” by constructing urban agriculture eco-circulatory system. This paper broughtup the idea of using urban agriculture to build a new kind of ecological city.