And then there is the quality aspect. Mass-produced food in the US does not taste good. The varieties you can buy in the store are optimized for 3 things: high yield, long shelf life / tolerance to travel & warehousing and appearance. When you grow your own food, you can optimize for taste. You can have a tomato that is actually sweet, not something that tastes like a cucumber. You can grow varieties that won't do well in transit (ie. fragile or easily bruised) because you're handling the vegetable from the garden to the kitchen.
Most of the time, it is impossible to even buy produce with high quality characteristics. When it is, it is often very expensive. This increases the value proposition of a personal/urban garden.
There's no case to be made that there is any economic benefit to farming in the city. By all measures, it's much more expensive.
The same can be said of other places I'd have thought?
I think that is a bit myopic.
A small farm can look nice too. And even with electric transport, there's the fact that cities have to bulldoze over miles and miles of nature in order to accommodate the kind of transport you're talking about, mainly cars. Which is why some cities are moving away from cars and into more dense kinds of environments. Once that's done, transporting your crop of the day from the farm into the city becomes a bit of a hassle
Overall I think you are right, but it seems like a non issue in a (relatively) stagnant depopulated city.
Potatoes do fine on the truck ride in from the countryside, but baby arugula, not so much. Potatoes are also a lot easier to plant and harvest by machine.
Lawns don't make any economic sense; convert them to leafy greens and fancy perennials that are not economic to grow at a scale. Deliver greens to your neighborhood via bike. They are light. Sell them to fancy restaurants for $15 a pound and not have to pay for trucking them in from 50 miles away.
Then, convert equal amount of farmland being used for green, back into wildish stuff, so birds, bees, etc have room to live and improve (pollinate) the staple crops.
Yes, they do; the fact (if this is the case) that you don't personally gain utility from them doesn't mean they don't make economic sense, neither does.the fact that they generally aren't part of the production chain for a product for sale.
(corn, wheat, soy, others)
There are many things we do in our worldwide agriculture system precisely because they make economic sense. That doesn't mean they are a good idea. We are going to pay the price for that lack of judgement. I am excited to see anything that bucks that trend.
But if it makes people happy, it might be worth it.