Urban agriculture is an important neighborhood revitalization strategy in the U.S. Rust Belt, where deindustrialization has left blighted and vacant land in the urban core. Immigrants and refugees represent a growing and important stakeholder group in urban agriculture, including in community gardens across the Rust Belt Midwest. Community gardens provide a host of social and economic benefits to urban landscapes, including increased access to culturally appropriate food and medicinal plants for refugee and immigrant growers.

Despite the efforts of developed countries to protect undeveloped land, development continues to expand beyond urban boundaries. High-quality land needed for food production is often consumed. This study aims to verify possible causes of undeveloped land and high-quality land consumption within regions (NUTS3) using a new approach to building growth monitoring. It investigates residential (RBs) and commercial buildings (retail and industrial buildings, RIBs). The development between 2006 and 2016 in the Czech Republic, a country in Central Europe, is used as a case study.

Increasing farmers’ income has always been the core task of China’s land reform. In 2017, a nationwide pilot project on the use of collective construction land for the construction of rental housing was launched. This study employed the synthetic difference-in-differences method to examine whether the reform contributed to the growth of farmers’ property income.