Abstract
With more than half of the world’s population urbanized, cities find themselves in the forefront of the food sustainability challenge (involving both food security and environmental sustainability). Under the ‘New Food Equation’ – shaped by food price hikes, dwindling natural resources, social unrest and looming climate change (Morgan and Sonnino, 2010), it is becoming increasingly clear that food insecurity is not simply a problem of insufficient production. Rather, it relates to a complex interaction of structural factors that encompass the entire ecology of the food system (Lang, 2010) and that raise important questions about spatial, economic and cultural access to food (Sonnino, 2009a). Addressing these questions has become an especially urgent priority in cities, where consumers are largely separate from the productive landscape and depend on the market for food (Yngve et al., 2009). In Europe and North America, pioneering urban governments are devising a new policy and planning approach that aims to address the new food security challenges in a more structural and systemic fashion. As exemplified by the emergence of urban food policy councils and the recent proliferation of urban food strategies, central to this approach is an attention to the complex and interrelated dimensions of the food system that effectively build (or fail to build) opportunities for food security (Ashe and Sonnino, 2013). The worlds of theory, policy and practice have begun to recognize that there is significant scope for change associated with these urban innovations. As Morgan and Sonnino (2010, p. 210) acknowledge, cities are acquiring a new role – ‘namely, to drive the ecological survival of the human species by showing that large concentrations of people can find more sustainable ways of co-evolving with nature and that urban governance is key to creating sustainability changes’. By forging new alliances between food consumers and producers, it has been argued, systemic urban food strategies are creating new forms of connectivity across urban and rural landscapes (Marsden and Sonnino, 2012) that challenge conventional development theories and planning models. Indeed, a recent publication by the FAO on food, agriculture and cities has acknowledged:
[A] new paradigm is emerging for eco-system based, territorial food system planning [that] seeks … not to replace the global food supply chains that contribute to food security for many countries, but to improve the local management of food systems that are both local and global.