Modeling the relationship between urban agriculture and sustainable development: a case study in Tehran city

The present study aimed to investigate the role of urban agriculture in sustainable urban development in Tehran, Iran. The statistical population comprised all residents who had carried out urban agricultural activity of some sort in Tehran. The method was primarily based on a questionnaire to which urban farmers responded. The results showed that different dimensions of urban agriculture had different factor loads. These were the social dimension, the economic dimension, the spatial dimension, the environmental dimension, and the mental dimension which had great impacts on the conduct of urban agriculture. The greatest impact of urban agriculture on sustainable development was ‘concern for citizen health’. The results of the goodness-of-fit indexes showed that the model provided an excellent fit for the data. Finally, the relationship between urban agriculture and sustainable urban development was statistically confirmed. The scale of values for each subset corresponded with each other and thus confirmed a possible relationship between the importance of the five dimensions in relation to each other and in relation to sustainable development. This research offers a new insight into the specifications of the Tehrani population and how they shape an interplay of mechanisms in discussion that ultimately result in data and results. In conclusion, the urban agriculture has a certain degree of positive impact on sustainable urban development as well as the quality of ecological environment.