With the fast urbanization, urban rooftop farming (URF) has appeared at the intersection between urban agriculture and green roof concepts. As the number of spontaneous rooftop farms in the city has grown over the last decade, the understanding of the motivation of participants has progressed from food production, to environmental greening and more recently to generating social value. However, few practical research into this topic from social value perspectives has been undertaken in highly dense urban areas like Hong Kong where there is an ambiguous situation of URF because of the gap of top-down strategic policies and day-to-day level regulatory support.

This research considers the phenomenon across Hong Kong, and takes Kwun Tong district as a focused case study site. It aims to demonstrate the potential social value of urban rooftop farming and suggest mechanisms enhance the practice, by investigating and verifying what the social values of urban rooftop farms are and how its intangible social values can be quantified in multiple scales including monetary value, spatial influence and, perceived benefit.