Resumen de Understanding the dynamics of urban horticulture by socially-oriented practices and populace perception: Seeking future outlook through a comprehensive review
Salman Qureshi, Mahsa Tarashkar, Mansour Matloobi, Zhifang Wang, Akbar Rahimi
Urban horticulture (UH), like other urban land-uses, influences urban dwellers’ social lives, wellbeing and explicitly influences their perceptual understanding of nature in urban settings. This paper, based on a comprehensive literature review, highlights the research gap in UH and its relationship to food production and social wellbeing by understanding the use of perception-based studies. The systematic literature reviewed 136 papers concerning social responses towards UH (n = 57) and other urban landscape types (n = 79). The papers included were then categorized into three sub-groups by methods namely papers using textual questionnaires to explore public perceptions of UH, papers exploring public perceptual responses towards visual stimuli presenting future scenarios of UH in cities, and those exploring public perceptions of environmental contexts through mining textual or pictorial contents on social media. The results of this study show that UH studies have yielded scientific achievements and revealed the public preference for food production, food security, and esthetic values. However, they are still dependent on traditional methodologies and lack a wide geographical coverage when it comes to representing a broad spectrum of study sites across the world. Studies using photo-questionnaires and social media research show better geographical distributions and growing trends. The photo questionnaire provides an opportunity to explore the perceptions towards innovative ideas but only reveals perceptions within the scope of the predesigned questions. Social media research provides an opportunity to access data in an automated manner with specific locations and enlarged scalability. These approaches might offer a new dimension to the knowledge domain of UH and could potentially facilitate the scientific understanding of UH’s concept and its relationship to social acceptability and food security in the longer run, particularly in the developing world.
