Informal Agricultural Sites in the Urban Fringe

Abstract

Going along the roads and highways in and around Lisbon we can identify a number of urban gardens located on roadside verges, abandoned land, etc. These gardens are a part of the urban food system and raise important questions concerning to food safety, such as heavy metal contamination from traffic, risks from difficult access to sites, etc. But they also represent an important and poorly known, social function as income complement for the urban less favored population. In this paper the authors use remote sensing data and GIS to visually identify, locate and determine their spatial arrangement and size, and the analysis of data provided by the National Statistics Institute to characterize the socioeconomic territorial context in which this kind of urban agriculture takes place, raising questions for future extended research on the subject.