A review of urban farming research: taxonomy, challenges and future research direction

Abstract

The activities of urban farming in Southeast Asia are still very limited and dispersed. In order to give valuable insights in relation to urban farming activities in Southeast Asia and to support researchers, there is a need to know in details the available options and gaps in this research direction. Thus, this study is conducted using a structured literature review to provide a coherent taxonomy and future research direction. This research focuses on the following subject matters: urban farming activities, technology application for urban farming and their use in the urban farms and smallholder farming activities in Southeast Asia. The process of reviewing literatures started with selecting the three major digital databases, namely, ScienceDirect, Web of Science, and Scopus. The study selection process consists of research into literature sources, followed by three iterations of screening and filtering, excluded duplicate articles, screening the titles and abstracts and reading of the full-text articles. The final included result is 88 articles, which will be adopted on in this study. Further, a review in details of the layout of the research landscape of literature is conducted into a cohesive classification with its descriptive analysis. We also identify the basic characteristics of this emerging field in the following aspects: benefits of using urban farming activities in Southeast Asia, challenges hindering utilisation, and recommendations to improve the acceptance and use of urban farming applications in literature.