Food And Urbanism

Exploring Food and Urbanism looks at the ways food and cities interconnect in a diversity of places across the globe. The book’s focus moves from transformations in feeding the city and its hinterland in Istanbul, Turkey, through neighbourhoods struggling with food access in Blantyre, Malawi, to the challenges in making convivial public food spaces in Cairo. It explores everyday buying practices in Islamabad food markets that reflect wider changes in food cultures in Pakistan. The possibilities for growing food in suburban Cape Town in South Africa are tested, while possibilities for sharing meals using online methods to bring cooks and eaters together are considered across the Netherlands. This edited volume makes clear that globally food is critical to sustainable urbanism everywhere across cities from kitchens to gardens, food markets, food shops, streets, squares, neighbourhoods, cities, suburbs, and hinterlands. It shows how food cultures, practices, and economics are closely intertwined with how places are planned and designed even if this is not always fully recognised. The editors of the book conclude that food can and should contribute to responding to the challenges presented by the worsening climate emergency through a focus on sustainable urbanism. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Urbanism.

Cities are home to over fifty percent of the world's population, a figure which is expected to increase enormously by 2050. Despite the growing demand on urban resources and infrastructure, food is still often overlooked as a key factor in planning and designing cities. Without incorporating food into the design process – how it is grown, transported, and bought, cooked, eaten and disposed of – it is impossible to create truly resilient and convivial urbanism. Moving from the table and home garden to the town, city, and suburbs, Food and Urbanism explores the connections between food and place in past and present design practices. The book also looks to future methods for extending the 'gastronomic' possibilities of urban space. Supported by examples from places across the world, including the UK, Norway, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Romania, Australia and the USA, the book offers insights into how the interplay of physical design and socio-spatial practices centred around food can help to maintain socially rich, productive and sustainable urban space. Susan Parham brings together the latest research from a number of disciplines – urban planning, food studies, sociology, geography, and design – with her own fieldwork on a range of foodscapes to highlight the fundamental role food has to play in shaping the urban future.

The integration of food into urban planning is a crucial and emerging topic. Urban planners, alongside the local and regional authorities that have traditionally been less engaged in food-related issues, are now asked to take a central and active part in understanding how food is produced, processed, packaged, transported, marketed, consumed, disposed of and recycled in our cities. While there is a growing body of literature on the topic, the issue of planning cities in such a way they will increase food security and nutrition, not only for the affluent sections of society but primarily for the poor, is much less discussed, and much less informed by practices. This volume, a collaboration between the Bartlett Development Planning Unit at UCL and the Food Agricultural Organisation, aims to fill this gap by putting more than 20 city-based experiences in perspective, including studies from Toronto, New York City, Portland and Providence in North America; Milan in Europe and Cape Town in Africa; Belo Horizonte and Lima in South America; and, in Asia, Bangkok and Tokyo. By studying and comparing cities of different sizes, from both the Global North and South, in developed and developing regions, the contributors collectively argue for the importance and circulation of global knowledge rooted in local food planning practices, programmes and policies.

With an increasing interest in quality of nutrition and health, urban food production has begun to occur inside the growing cities worldwide and risks to compete with other urban needs. The book introduces typologies, tools, evaluation methods and strategies, and shows the practical applications of the methods. Multiple projects illustrate solutions that augment quality via the insertion of food production entities into the urban realm.

Authored by the most innovative and leading thinkers and practitioners in the Southwest of Canada, this book offers a new and exciting concept of agricultural urbanism that unifies urban and rural in a previously unconceived way. --Book Jacket.

As urban populations rise rapidly and concerns about food security increase, interest in urban agriculture has been renewed in both developed and developing countries. This book focuses on the sustainable development of urban agriculture and its relationship to food planning in cities. It brings together the best revised and updated papers from the Sixth Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) conference on Sustainable Food Planning. The main emphasis is on the latest research and thinking on spatial planning and design, showing how urban agriculture provides opportunities to develop and enhance the spatial quality of urban environments. Chapters address various topics such as a new theoretical model for understanding urban agriculture, how urban agriculture contributes to restoring our connections to nature, and the limitations of the garden city concept to food security. Case studies are included from several European countries, including Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Turkey and the UK, as well as Australia, Canada, Cameroon, Ethiopia and the United States (New York and Los Angeles).

With over half the world's population now deemed to be urbanised, cities are assuming a larger role in political debates about the security and sustainability of the global food system. Hence, planning for sustainable food production and consumption is becoming an increasingly important issue for planners, policymakers, designers, farmers, suppliers, activists, business and scientists alike. The rapid growth of the food planning movement owes much to the fact that food, because of its unique, multi-functional character, helps to bring people together from all walks of life. In the wider contexts of global climate change, resource depletion, a burgeoning world population, competing food production systems and diet-related public health concerns, new paradigms for urban and regional planning capable of supporting sustainable and equitable food systems are urgently needed. This book addresses this urgent need. By working at a range of scales and with a variety of practical and theoretical models, this book reviews and elaborates definitions of sustainable food systems, and begins to define ways of achieving them. To this end 4 different themes have been defined as entry-points into the discussion of 'sustainable food planning'. These are (1) urban agriculture, (2) integrating health, environment and society, (3) food in urban design and planning and (4) urban food governance.

Foregrounding an innovative and radical perspective on food planning, this book makes the case for an agroecological urbanism in which food is a key component in the reinvention of new and just social arrangements and ecological practices. Building on state-of-the-art and participatory research on farming, urbanism, food policy and advocacy in the field of food system transformation, this book changes the way food planning has been conceptualised to date and invites the reader to fully embrace the transformative potential of an agroecological perspective. Bringing in dialogue from both the rural and urban, the producer and consumer, this book challenges conventional approaches that see them as separate spheres, whose problems can only be solved by a reconnection. Instead, it argues for moving away from a ‘food-in-the-city’ approach towards an ‘urbanism’ perspective, in which the economic and spatial processes that currently drive urbanisation will be unpacked and dissected, and new strategies for changing those processes into more equal and just ones are put forward. Drawing on the nascent field of urban political agroecology, this text brings together: i) theoretical re-conceptualisations of urbanism in relation to food planning and the emergence of new agrarian questions, ii) critical analysis of experimental methodologies and performing arts for public dialogue, reflexivity and food sovereignty research, iii) experiences of resourceful land management, including urban land use and land tenure change, and iv) theoretical and practical exploration of post-capitalist economics that bring consumers and producers together to make the case for an agroecological urbanism. Aimed at advanced students and academics in agroecology, sustainable food planning, urban geography, urban planning and critical food studies, this book will also be of interest to professionals and activists working with food systems in both the Global North and the Global South.