Urban farming opportunities: a comparative analysis between Italy and Argentina

This paper presents a preliminary comparison between Urban Agriculture (UA) in Roma and Buenos Aires. UA has been investigated as both social and an economic driving force to understand farming opportunities in both cities. To achieve this goal Business Model Canvas (BMC) was adopted as a research framework. Using the business model helps to move beyond the description of potential benefits and add explanations of how values are captured at the operational level. A classification based on BCM elements was used to outline some diversity in Italian and Argentinean UA. The paper aims to highlight how urban farming has to adjust to urban conditions by stepping into appropriate business models in order to be sustainable and profitable, and how Business Model Canvas is useful to analyze their organization and performances both economically and socially. The analysis demonstrates that UA is differently adjusted to specific social and environmental urban conditions, and that BMC is useful for analyzing urban farming. More specifically it shows that heterogeneous local food farms and the integration of local and organic food production in social farming business models are more frequent within Italian case studies. Local food farms and integration of local and agroecology food production in family farming business models are instead more frequent within Argentinian case studies.