Urban Food Forests and Community Agroforestry Systems

This chapter focuses on urban and community agroforestry strategies that connect and expand urban food forestry systems. It offers insights into how these systems are designed and scaled to provide food, timber, fiber, and other materials in addition to eco-social benefits. Urban food forests are the cornerstone of agroforestry applications in population centers. Agroforestry is largely seen in terms of rural land use practices that integrate and thereby diversify farm and forest products such as crops, livestock, timber, and non-timber forest products. Residents and governmental and nongovernmental agroforestry allies alike are enacting agroforestry through local food movement initiatives, such as community-supported agriculture, farmers' markets, and community gardens. The features of productive placemaking are best defined by residents who are embedded in their local eco-social system and consequently able to design meaningful systems. Urban food forests are created by planting a variety of annual and perennial plants together to form diverse food-producing agroforestry ecosystems.