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While urban farming is advocated as a contributor to urban sustainability and resilience, the “informal” household-practiced urban agriculture activities are taking place within urban spaces in most Emirati neighbourhoods but unfortunately without investigating their potential as participatory processes that could efficiently help attain urban sustainability and resilience on the neighbourhood level. So, this research is a humble attempt to bridge the gap of the lack of official recognition of informal residents-led processes and their products in a way that help understand them and their impacts and to explore the possibility of developing them further into wider community shared urban agriculture activities.

The research adopted the case study method and selected a representative neighbourhood to investigate informal residents-led urban agriculture practices. The utilized qualitative–quantitative investigation tools included map analysis, field observation and in-depth interviews with the residents of the selected neighbourhood.

The results of the research have revealed that the residents managed to successfully pursue informal urban farming processes that have led to significant environmental, social and economic sustainability and resilience outcomes. While these informal urban farming activities are performed individually by each household, the interviewed residents have shown enthusiasm to take part in larger-scale collective community urban farming activities, especially in the deserted public and semi-public spaces in their neighbourhood.

The research outcomes significantly contribute to the growing worldwide discourse about urban agriculture/farming, especially in a country like the UAE where such activities are almost overlooked. Based on its findings, the research concludes by proposing a set of recommended actions to legitimatize these informal urban agriculture processes in the urban development regulations and to build on them to encourage the local communities towards more collective urban farming activities.

This paper aims to draw attention to the information processing of speed regarding the specific approaches by which suppliers respond to downstream and upstream communications. It examines supply chain management and three-way communication between raw material providers, manufacturing suppliers and buying retailers.

Previous studies have investigated upstream and downstream communication as key drivers for framing the consequences of supply chain communication speed. This study applied a three-stage communication speed mechanism survey and acquired 210 validly matched paired questionnaires between selling suppliers and buying customers in a retailing industry supply chain to better understand and systematically model the empirical communication speed.

Downstream and upstream communication positively increases supply chain speed, which is weakened by the dysfunctional competition scenario. To highlight performance, the faster the speed, the greater performance the superior firm will achieve.

Suppliers are looking to enhance speed for better resilience in dysfunctional competition disruptions. This study offers guidelines and specified carbon footprint scenarios to provide managerial insight into their sustainability performance with a greater information processing mechanism. Slower speed may be exactly what many firms and supply chains need to integrate sustainability initiatives.

This study contributes to the supply chain management literature by shedding light on communication and information processing, of which the speed mechanism eventually enhances firm performance.