MD Tanvir Hasan

I am a landscape architect and researcher with a successful background in architecture and more than 8 years of teaching experience as a university lecturer involved in managing different urban, residential, and landscape projects. As an architect and landscape architect, I always promote sustainable community spaces, strong cultures, inclusive housing spaces and ongoing adherence to different urban regulations.

The world’s continuous population expansion and migration to metropolitan areas are consuming limited global resources. As a result, ecological imbalance, limited accessible green space, and increased food insecurity are growing threats to the sustainability of urban communities. To be sustainable, public green spaces could play a vital role. Unfortunately, the quality of green spaces is being adversely affected by shrinking management capacity and budgets, which means the ongoing loss of qualified staff with skills and knowledge. Within a neo-liberal political context, urban green spaces are being explored as a viable option to raise public funds, which has included selling public land for development and commercial uses. Many local authorities are trying to find out income generation models for the long-lasting financial management of green spaces without hampering their core purposes. With this in mind, urbanism and sustainable food systems are being integrated to contribute to a sustainable city in the twenty-first century, with some cities currently attempting to do so via their green space strategies. However, this is a little explored area of research beyond community gardens and allotments, which tend not to be in larger, public green spaces such as parks. My research will therefore address this gap in knowledge and explore different stakeholders’ point of view regarding the acceptability, feasibility, and application of different food growing activities in diverse public urban green spaces in UK. This research aims to contribute to the academic debate on how different food growing approaches might be viable in the UK context and could provide a model for similar public spaces around the world.