From Theory to Transdisciplinary Practice: Community-Based Resilience Visioning in Urban Agriculture

Using a case study of urban agriculture (UA) in the Rust Belt Midwest, we present lessons learned from a participatory resilience visioning activity rooted in social-ecological resilience principles. Our goal was to further operationalize resilience practice while providing a structure for academic-practitioner partnerships. To align development intentions with outcomes, our approach first looks backward with the community to co-create a timeline of shocks and their differentiated responses and then looks forward to imagine a resilient and desirable UA system with a World Cafe dialogue. We demonstrate how resulting data can be analyzed through the lens of seven resilience principles, grounding the activities in accessible theory to describe existing resilience in a system and identify levers toward more equitable regimes in the future. The described method is accessible to a wide range of stakeholders in and beyond urban agriculture to evaluate and improve resilience in their own communities.