Urban gardening (UG) as a component of urban agriculture (UA) has reached popularity during the last decades. This growing interest depends on several factors including the different functions that have been attributed to UG over the years, operating from the economic to the social, health and cultural levels. While multifunctionality of UG is well documented, only a few studies investigated individual gardeners’ motivations, which can be subjective and heavily affected by the local context in which it takes place. The paper aims to detect some peculiar features of Milan city gardeners, in order to highlight the motivations of their activity through an innovative and replicable approach based on multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and hierarchical clustering analysis (HCA). The analysis has been applied to the Milan case study, in the North of Italy; the results suggest a great importance of the social component of UG, and trace some different gardeners’ profiles.

A search of the term biostimulants on the most renowned scientific online databases such as Web of Science results in more than one thousand documents. Although some reviews have been previously published, there is no unified and comprehensive bibliometric review of the scientific literature related to biostimulants. This study examines the scientific literature on biostimulants from 2000 to February 2022 by conducting a bibliometric analysis of the literature published on the Web of Science database to deepen its evolution, trends, and macroareas to represent a quick reference guide for interdisciplinary researchers. We identify the most productive countries and journals, detect the major research streams and perspectives, and trace overall research development over the years. Furthermore, the results highlight aspects that have had little consideration in the current scientific literature, such as economic assessments of the use of biostimulants and more comprehensive explanations of the molecular mechanisms responsible for their positive effects.

Packaging is an important economic component of the wine industry. However, while glass bottles are the leading wine container globally, their production and handling entail severe problems in increased carbon footprint impact and waste and logistic management. As a result, the wine packaging industry has developed and commercialised several alternatives to glass bottles, including aluminium cans. However, despite producers’ efforts in proposing alternative wine packaging, there are several barriers to their diffusion, especially in countries with a long tradition of wine consumption such as Italy, and it is still uncertain if and to what degree consumers would appreciate a wine in an aluminium can. This research investigates Italian wine consumers’ preferences and willingness to pay for canned wine through a survey and the contingent valuation method. We collected data from 551 consumers regarding attitudes and preferences about their wine consumption, alternative packaging acceptance, and motivations for accepting and refusing to buy it. Only a minority of the respondents declared they would buy canned wine, while the majority would refuse for reasons related to low-quality perception and poor consideration of alternative wine packaging. The lack of knowledge is one of the main obstacles to the diffusion of canned wine. However, canned wines could address different groups of wine drinkers and consumption occasions, increasing the opportunities for winemakers, especially among non-regular consumers.

In the wider debate on urban resilience and metabolism, food-related aspects have gained increasing importance. At the same time, urban agro-food systems in city regions are facing major challenges with regard to often limited domestic supplies, resource-intensive producer–consumer relationships, and the competition for low-price products via global food chains. In this sense, novel methods for coupling local and global processes are required to better understand the underlying mechanisms between the above factors. Exploring the relationship between food supply and demand, this study presents a set of suitable fact-finding tools that are introduced and applied in a comparative study of five European city regions. The methodological framework, by introducing and combining economic-based indexes, aims at overcoming limits and gaps identified by means of a literature review. The model will explicitly address the main features of the regional agro-food systems by managing information on the capacities and opportunities of local agriculture to adequately respond to food demand, as well as by providing insights on the interconnections among localism, global competitiveness of agricultural sectors, and land use change.

The presence of and proximity to water influences human settlement decisions, because water has been able to characterize the environment and affect human health since prehistoric times. Many scholars have studied the effects of environmental amenities on the real estate market; however, only a few of them have explored the effects of water. This study stresses the role of water with a focus on the dichotomy between artificial and natural waterways (canals vs. streams), which involves managerial and qualitative differences. A hedonic approach, based on a large web scraped and geo-referenced dataset of 10,530 observations, is used to analyze the effect of water proximity and quality on residential housing prices in the province of Milan (Italy). Our main results show a significant but conflicting impact of water proximity on real estate value: reducing the canal distance, we observe an increase in the residential housing sale price, in urban more than peri-urban environments; in contrast, reducing the stream distance, our results show decreases in property value. Moreover, a significant moderating effect of water quality on distance from streams is identifiable.

Over the last years, the trust of consumers in the quality and sustainability of the food system has weakened due to the disconnection between producers and consumers. Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) and Short Food Supply Chains (SFSCs), born out of the perceived loss of trust in the globalized food system, are trying to shorten the gap between farmers and consumers. Nowadays, many scholars agree that local and global food systems coexist, and consumers usually buy both in local and in global food chains. Our study aims to understand the factors that affect the development of AFNs with a specific focus on the interactions with small- and large-scale food retailing in the Lombardy region in the north of Italy. We employ an Ordinary Least Square (OLS) model, on a municipal scale, in which the dependent variable measures the number of participatory activities carried out by farmers and consumers in AFNs. The main results highlight that conventional large retailers and alternative food networks are linked, and that the coexistence of the two market channels may lead to the development for both of them. Contrarily, where small stores exist, they may compete with an alternative food channel, as they offer similar products and services.