A Green(er) Roof over the Head: Reflecting on Strategies Targeting Homelessness with Urban Agriculture for Cape Town, South Africa

The homeless face desperate socio-economic challenges, not in the least, food insecurity. Vulnerabilities are intensified by changing climatic conditions, macroeconomic constraints, limited sanitation and poor nutrition resulting from restricted access in urban food deserts. Social support programmes and shelters mitigate some risks, with several adopting urban agriculture (UA) in developmental strategies to yield longer-term benefits. Examples are especially prominent in the global North, where non-profit organisations (NGOs), research collaborations and cooperatives have engaged in partnerships to target UA-based interventions for the homeless. Such strategies emphasise the provisioning and cultural ecosystem services (ES) delivered by UA as green infrastructure (GI). Framing UA as multi-functional GI and acknowledging additional regulating and habitat ES empowers advocacy in urban planning to advance UA practices in urban centres where space is at a premium and market forces favour more competitive land uses. Although UA is increasingly applied in the global South, approaches remain largely productivist and economic, prioritising food security, poverty alleviation and entrepreneurship. Very few published case studies link UA and homelessness in developing contexts. This is evident in Cape Town, South Africa, regarded as a leader in UA in Africa and home to a substantial homeless population, where information on such strategies remains limited. In response, this paper explores international precedents from the global North and turns to a case study of Cape Town to investigate which organisations integrate UA into interventions for the homeless and how. A qualitative approach is applied following semi-systematic literature reviews. The first examines international cases in the academic literature as part of the literature screening section. The second, under the paper’s empirical component, reviews grey literature on Capetonian examples identified from an official database of registered homeless shelters in the city (n = 29). The literature on international cases revesals the dominace of the USA and emphasises intergovernmental involvement, multidisciplinary collaboration, securing long-term tenure, linking UA sites with supportive uses, using liminal open spaces such as rooftops, remediating brownfields, subsidising infrastructure, embedding volunteerism and co-production, providing training and identifying access points to markets. Findings from Cape Town–based shelters indicate that 17.2% of organisations have implemented UA-related interventions, most primarily focused on production and subsistence, with an auxiliary recognition of therapeutic benefits. Many of the operational characteristics identified in Northern case studies are also pertinent in interventions in Cape Town, underscoring their significance and contextualising their application. By identifying evidence-based principles from global North and Capetonian precedents, the paper highlights critical opportunities to embed UA within strategies addressing homelessness through more developmental approaches, facilitated by urban planning, to encourage cultural and other multi-functional ES beyond (ir)regular sustenance or a temporary roof for the destitute.