Qualitative Analysis of Rooftop Farming in Delhi

Urban agriculture is shifting from trend to strategy in Delhi. This post shows how to run a qualitative analysis of rooftop farming (using the August 20, 2025 Resilience feature on Living Greens) as a replicable research workflow. You’ll learn which themes matter (dignity for displaced farmers, food sovereignty, household micro-climates), how to turn interviews and site visits into quantified themes, and which Evidano capabilities (document ingestion, thematic and cross-segment analysis, multilingual translation, and visualizations) speed the work. Read the original reporting at www.resilience.org/stories/2025-08-20/roots-on-the-roof-how-rooftop-farming-is-reinventing-farming-in-delhi/ and see how to operationalize these findings with www.evidano.com.

Fast take: why this matters for qualitative teams

Living Greens (profiled 20 August 2025) has installed rooftop systems in over 4, 000 locations across 25 cities and cultivates roughly 250, 000 sq ft of rooftop space, showing urban gardens can supply up to 30% of seasonal vegetable demand in local contexts. For researchers and UX teams, that means a compact corpus of repeatable practices and stakeholder narratives worth coding and scaling.

Source: full article, www.resilience.org/stories/2025-08-20/roots-on-the-roof-how-rooftop-farming-is-reinventing-farming-in-delhi/
Payoff: map patterns across households, mentors (displaced farmers), and neighborhoods to inform policy, product, or program design

Findings snapshot (quick numbers)

Metric	Value	Source	Implication
Installations	4, 000+ locations	Resilience (Aug 20, 2025)	Large sample frame for household-level qualitative sampling
Geographic reach	25 cities (Living Greens footprint)	Living Greens (profile)	Cross-city comparisons possible
Area cultivated	≈ 250, 000 sq ft	Resilience (Aug 20, 2025)	Measure outputs per sq ft for impact estimates
Local supply potential	Up to 30% seasonal veg demand	Aggregated studies (see www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/17/3/1303)	Supports scenarios for food-security interventions
Published	20 August 2025	Resilience	Use as time-marker for before/after analyses

What happened: concise methods & mechanics

Living Greens converts rooftops and balconies into kitchen gardens using home visits, soil consultations, customized planters, compost units, and drip irrigation. Displaced smallholders are trained as mentors and compost technicians and perform weekly stewardship. The model blends technical installation with sustained in-person coaching to restore agricultural dignity and generate income.

Core inputs researchers can collect: participant interviews (trainers, households), installation logs, photo timelines, compost and yield records, and community market interactions.
Key outputs to code for: livelihoods (income streams), dignity/stigma narratives, micro-climate effects (reported 2–3°C cooling in shaded roofs during the 2023 heatwave), and waste-to-compost practices.

Implications for researchers, UX teams, and policy analysts

For qualitative researchers

Primary keyword: qualitative analysis of rooftop farming becomes practical when you standardize interview guides (mentors, households, community orgs) and adopt a hybrid coding approach: rule-based codes for operational steps + inductive codes for values and dignity.

Look for repeatable motifs (e.g., ‘income from training’, ‘child food education’, ‘micro-climate relief’) and quantify occurrence by segment (neighborhood, apartment type, mentor background).

For UX & product teams

Translate themes into features: onboarding flows that surface mentor visits, dashboard metrics showing yield and compost health, and localized content (language-specific care tips).

Use segment analysis to prioritize features for dense apartment blocks vs. single-family rooftops.

For policy & climate analysts

Aggregate qualitative signals (reported cooling, waste diversion, local markets) to build scenario briefs: e.g., if 10% of city rooftops convert, estimate reductions in heat island effect and food supply vulnerability.

Qualitative evidence of dignity and livelihoods strengthens social-justice oriented policy proposals.

Do more, faster with Evidano

Problem: Fragmented texts and field notes → Solution

Ingest reports, interview transcripts, field photos, and spreadsheets into one corpus. Evidano automatically extracts themes, frequencies, and co-occurrence networks so you can see how 'mentor income' and 'household food security' cluster across sites.

Problem: Multilingual interviews (Hindi/English) → Solution

Use Evidano's translation with a custom dictionary to preserve terms (local crop names, compost terms) and keep coding consistent across languages.

Problem: Hard to compare segments → Solution

Run cross-segment analyses (neighborhood, housing type, mentor age) to produce quantified theme tables and visualizations (word clouds, co-occurrence graphs, hierarchical codes→subcodes) for stakeholder reports.

Problem: Slow synthesis → Solution

Evidano's AI chat over your documents speeds hypothesis testing (e.g., 'show quotes where mentors mention income stability') and produces an export-ready codebook. Data is encrypted and never used to train third-party models.

Checklist: 6-step workflow to reproduce this analysis

Step 1: Collect, assemble interviews (mentors, households), installation logs, photos, and market notes.

Step 2: Ingest, upload documents and spreadsheets to Evidano; optionally scrape Living Greens pages for program descriptions.
Step 3: Auto-code, run thematic extraction to surface top 20 themes and candidate codebook.
Step 4: Validate, manually review and merge codes; bootstrap intercoder checks on a 10–20% sample.
Step 5: Cross-segment analysis, compare theme frequency by city, housing type, and mentor status.
Step 6: Visualize & report, generate co-occurrence networks, hierarchical code maps, and export executive summaries for stakeholders.

Wrapping up & next steps

Rooftop farming in Delhi (Living Greens, Aug 20, 2025) provides a compact, actionable corpus for qualitative work: rich narratives, repeatable practices, and measurable community impacts. If your team wants to move from reporting to reproducible insight (standardized codebooks, cross-segment themes, and stakeholder-ready visuals) start by ingesting your field corpus into Evidano.

Try a pilot: upload 20 interviews + installation logs and run a thematic + cross-segment report at www.evidano.com.
Read the source: www.resilience.org/stories/2025-08-20/roots-on-the-roof-how-rooftop-farming-is-reinventing-farming-in-delhi/ for the original reporting.

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