Regreening urban spaces: a case study of the Genoa Serre Antiche regeneration project and the multifaceted impact of urban agriculture initiatives on local communities

Urban agriculture (UA) has been increasingly seen as a useful practice to provide food and ecosystem services to cities. Indeed, the success of this practice lies in its capacity to have positive effects across all aspects of green and sustainable development, while providing fresh food for local communities. This makes UA initiatives an effective strategy to improve, both qualitatively and quantitatively, green areas in cities. Accordingly, UA projects have often been seen as valid solutions to regenerate and requalify vacant and abandoned areas. Within this framework, this paper will delve into the realization of a regeneration project in the heart of Genoa (IT), where an abandoned plant nursery, formerly known as Serre Antiche (the Old Greenhouses), has recently been renovated to host a new local food production. The project is structured along three core objectives, corresponding to specific actions for the re-functioning of the green area: i) reactivate the old greenhouses by integrating contemporary hydroponic cultivations to provide enough fresh food for the local community; ii) increase and protect the natural capital and biodiversity of one of the few green areas left in the city and make the Serre Antiche a centre of a new urban ecological network; iii) foster public awareness of the benefits of investing in natural capital and the active involvement of citizenship, particularly of young people, spreading the knowledge on new ways for cultivating fruits and vegetables inside the city borders. Therefore, building on the Genoa experience, this paper aims to illustrate how UA initiatives can be an important added value to the regeneration of marginalized and abandoned green areas in the city, assessing the impacts that the Genoa project has had (and is having) on the local community.