Farmer-to-farmer learning is a pillar of the food sovereignty and agroecology movements, enabling territorially-specific learning and alliance-building to support farmers’ livelihoods and broader socio-political transformations. Most accounts of experiences in this field are based on rural contexts and rural farm models. However, the broadening food sovereignty and agroecology movement is also reaching out to urban and peri-urban farmers, some of whom were once rural and found themselves absorbed by expanding urbanisation. Their livelihoods are affected by specific problems of neoliberal urbanisation: speculative land markets and gentrification impacting access to land and housing; erosion, pollution, and destruction of living soils; degradation of riverways; fragmentation of farmland and progressive farmers’ isolation from solidarity networks of proximity; lack of farming infrastructure; ongoing deskilling and producers-consumer's separation. 

This session aimed to contribute to the co-creation of a 'toolbox' of policy advocacy agroecology using remarkable experiences from the project Urbanising in place and will be of interest to farmers and activists engaged in farmer training and in the support and empowerment of peri-urban and urban agroecological farmers.

The event was part of the ''Oxford Real Farming'' Conference in 2021.