Digging for Victory 2.0 – Urban Soil Health & Local Food Production

Authored by Organics Policy Analyst Megan Muller-Girard

“Defra and the MHCLG must collaborate to deliver a robust policy and planning framework to capture the true value of urban soils, unlocking untapped benefits to urban health and wellbeing.”

In built-up cities and suburban towns, it’s easy to feel completely separate from the living world of soils beneath our feet. Nearly 85% of the UK’s population lives in urban areas, creating densely populated areas where land use must meet competing demands. Despite such heavy urbanisation in the UK, we tend to focus on the crucial role of agricultural and rural lands and soils, often undervaluing the role of urban soils in societal wellbeing.

Of the UK’s approximately 2 million hectares of urban land (8% of total UK land area), less than 85,000 hectares of land are comprised of publicly accessible functional green spaces (e.g. public parks and fields), and just over 7,000 hectares are comprised of allotments and community growing spaces.

Today, 11.3% of households in the UK are food insecure, with food deserts (areas where access to affordable fruit and vegetables severely is limited) disproportionately located in deprived urban areas. Improved access to locally produced fruit and vegetables is one easy win to make cities healthier – and this starts with healthy soils in allotments and urban agricultural areas.

In Great Britain, over one hundred million kilos of food were grown in allotments in 2020, with research showing that city allotments have the potential to rival the productivity of conventional farms. Soils in urban allotments are typically replenished through composted waste food or plant matter, creating a self-sustaining, robust, and highly productive system. Urban allotments and the soils that support them are a hugely untapped resource, providing improved food security, urban resilience, and community care. Despite these benefits and the four-fold increase in demand for allotments from 2006 to 2020, they are disappearing at triple the rate they were about a decade ago, due to increasing land value coupled with restricted local authority finances.

Local authorities and policymakers generally recognise that a lack of spatial and financial resources is the key driver underpinning limited supply of allotments. Therefore, exploiting the full potential of urban allotments will require collaboration between Defra and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) to create a policy framework that prioritises soils and urban farming in urban spatial planning. As the government endeavours to build 1.5 million houses this parliament, it is crucial to prioritise the healthy soils that sustain us. In pursuit of this commitment, the government is actively working to reform the planning system. To realise the full potential of urban farming, these reforms must also look at easing planning barriers for urban food production and even consider mandating the inclusion of urban agricultural areas in new urban planning and development.

Once planning and policy frameworks are in place, the government must provide adequate resourcing to support local authorities and community groups to implement and maintain the physical and social infrastructure required to make allotments accessible. Additional funding could be supplied through Defra grants similar to those available for conventional farms, to cover the costs of starting a local allotment, followed by sustained Local Authority resourcing to maintain these crucial resources.

Furthermore, healthy urban soils are not only valuable from a local food supply perspective, but are also crucial to support city parks and other urban green spaces, which are closely linked to improved physical fitness and mental health outcomes.

Finally, the practice of sealing soils (i.e. covering them with concrete) in urban areas also carries other concerns for wider health and wellbeing outcomes which are likely to be compounded by the impacts of a changing climate. Sealing soil prevents natural infiltration of rainwater into soils, instead channelling water into fast-moving runoff.

 In a country subject to increasing extremes in rainfall, and regularly contending with both flooding and water shortages, the permeability of soils is crucial and must be factored into future land-use and planning decisions. Similarly, the prevalence of urban heat islands–densely populated city areas that get significantly warmer than the surrounding countryside–are caused by high densities of urban construction which absorb solar radiation more than green spaces do. Urban heat islands can be mitigated through urban greening, again reinforcing the importance of planning decisions and urban soil protection for broader health and wellbeing outcomes.

This World Soils Day, I urge our government leaders to have the foresight and imagination to take the difficult but essential actions to value and support the soils that sustain life in the UK and beyond – actions that will benefit citizens now and for future generations.