An Evaluation Approach to Support Urban Agriculture Implementation in Post-covid19 Cities: The Case of Troisi Park in Naples

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a dramatic impact worldwide by producing, especially in urban contexts, severe consequences not only in the healthcare field but also in socioeconomic terms with visible implications for food security. In this difficult context, Urban Agriculture (UA) stands as a valuable means to ensure social, environmental, and economic benefits for urban realities. Indeed, UA implementation’s multi-dimensional opportunities can also be read in terms of ecosystem services. However, despite this wide acknowledgment of UA’s multiple benefits, a gap exists between the number of policies already implemented to promote urban agriculture and the demand for these policies. The reasons for this gap can be found both in prejudice towards agriculture as a low-income activity, discouraging private investments, and in public administration’s reduced financial capacity. In this light, the paper proposes an evaluation approach based on a Sustainability Assessment to support agriculture-led implementation processes in urban spaces by dealing with financial constraints. This methodology is tested on the regeneration of Troisi Parks’ greenhouses in Naples, which have recently been the subject of the Urbanfarm design challenge within the EU H2020 FoodE Project. Thus, after describing the main features of the International Challenge and the project for Troisi Park, the paper delves into the application of the Sustainability Assessment to support Troisi Park’s regeneration. Finally, the opportunities stemming from such an evaluation approach to UA and its possible room for improvement are discussed.