Synergising outdoor, indoor, and greenhouse urban agriculture to strengthen urban resilience in an era of polycrisis

• Urban agriculture’s multifunctionality enhances diverse resilience capacities • Combining urban agriculture types improves synergies and resilience outcomes • Strong risk of trade-offs when urban agriculture systems are not aligned • Overlooked experiences in the Global North limit research equitability Urban Agriculture (UA) is increasingly recognized as a multifunctional strategy that can strengthen a city’s resilience capacities. Such multifunctional approaches to resilience building are becoming increasingly critical as city’s more frequently face entangled, compounding, and cascading polycrisis. However, UA’s diverse typologies, which include outdoor, indoor, and greenhouse practices, impact Urban Resilience Capacities (URCs) differently, raising the question of how their implementation can be optimized to generate synergies while mitigating trade-offs and negative externalities. Accordingly, this paper maps how differentiated configurations of outdoor, indoor and greenhouse UA impact city’s resilience capacities. The study identifies both the complementary and unique URC impacts of each typology and visualizes their conceptual synergies. The findings illustrate that a strategic, place-based, combinatorial approach to integrating UA typologies into cities can produce mutually reinforcing outcomes that, through their interlinkages, can strengthen a variety of URCs simultaneously. These synergies have the potential to enhance city’s specific resilience capacities to high probabilistic events, and the general resilience capacities required to guide transformative change and overcome novel and unforeseen perturbations. However, a critical research gap remains, as empirical case studies are concentrated in Europe and North America, thereby, overlooking much of the experiences, knowledge, values, and innovations of cities in the Global South. Subsequently, this paper calls for more geographically inclusive research to avoid inequitable urban resilience narratives, and to better understand how UA can be leveraged globally, as a context-responsive, socially and environmentally just, urban resilience strategy.