Pathways to circular and regenerative urban agriculture through stakeholder-informed approaches.

Conventional agriculture typically relies on linear production systems that degrade soil and undermine sustainable resource management and climate change mitigation. Urban and peri-urban agriculture has the potential to shift from conventional approaches towards circular strategies that enhance soil health. However, this transformation requires changes beyond agricultural practices to include institutional, cultural, and governance dynamics. This study identifies systemic barriers, stakeholder actions, and transformation pathways to healthy soil and sustainable urban agriculture through carbon and nutrient circularity. By combining the Three Horizons framework with grounded theory analysis, this study derives cross-sectoral themes and tangible actions for systemic transformation. Stakeholder mapping demonstrates the need for distributed leadership and intersectoral collaboration to enable circular practices such as implementing decentralized and proximity-based waste management, community led agricultural food networks, as well as supporting environmental stewardship through procurement and land policy. Moreover, three interlinking pathways for the implementation of circularity on a wider scale are identified to address system complexity: 1) localized material and knowledge flows; 2) socio-economic reconfiguration through communities and markets; and 3) policy and planning integration for resilience. These findings highlight that advancing circularity requires not only technical innovation but also participatory governance, market realignment, and regulatory adaptation. By integrating stakeholder perspectives into transformation design, the results demonstrate how a transformation to healthy soils for sustainable urban agriculture can be positioned as foundational infrastructure for regenerative urban and regional futures.