Mapping Urban Agriculture From the Sky

Our best estimates of the scale of urban agriculture typically come from self-reported lists and non-profit groups trying to keep tabs on shared community gardens. These lists are, like the gardens themselves, informal. One frequent estimate floating around Chicago for several years figured there were maybe 700 food-producing plots in the city.

But when researchers from the University of Illinois tried to visit some of them, they more often found planter boxes or ornamental gardens, nothing that could truly be considered part of the city’s food supply. It then occurred to John Taylor, a doctoral candidate in crop sciences at the university, that Google Earth images might reveal what ground-level surveys of the city had not: the true extent of its urban agriculture.