Urban agriculture for sustainable cities: using wastes and idle land and water bodies as resources describes how cities can be transformed from being only consumers of food and other agricultural products into important resource-conserving, health-improving, sustainable generators of these proucts.

Kraak, S. B. M., Buisman, F. C., Dickey-Collas, M., Poos, J. J., Pastoors, M. A., Smit, J. G. P., van Oostenbrugge, J. A. E., and Daan, N. 2008. The effect of management choices on the sustainability and economic performance of a mixed fishery: a simulation study. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 65: 697–712. Alternative management scenarios were evaluated in a simulation framework that mimicked the recent exploitation of sole and plaice in the North Sea. A large proportion of plaice is taken as bycatch of the beam trawl fleet targeting sole, yet current management of the two stocks assumes no interaction in their exploitation. The evaluation criteria included biological and economic sustainability, and stability in the management measures. The fishery was assumed to respond to management restrictions by dropping the least profitable trips. We investigated two contrasting management strategies, single-species total allowable catches, and effort regulation. Under the assumptions made, the latter strategy performed better. The results suggest that, given assessment error and bias, a strategy that accounts for the mixed nature of a fishery and that occasionally results in perceived underexploitation may work best. Stability in fishing mortality reinforces itself, through lower assessment bias, and management corrections become less frequent. The common assumption in many stock assessments in EC waters that fishing mortality in the most recent year should resemble the value obtained in previous years (“shrinkage”) had a negative effect on the stability of control measures.

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The Delphi Method has been applied to a wide variety of predictive and consensus building problems in the West. It has achieved mixed success in its ‘native’ environment. This paper reports on the successful use of the Delphi by an interdisciplinary, international team of English‐speaking consultants in an Arabic‐speaking country, politically dominated by a centralist regime. In the sixth year of the Iran‐Iraq war, a group of international consultants proceeded with the development of a master plan for the development of the City of Baghdad, the Greater Baghdad Area and Central Iraq. Work on the plan had begun in 1982 but had been slowed by the war and its effect on the Iraqi economy, a lack of consensus on the part of the Iraqi government and a substantial degree of uncertainty in the government's confidence in the consulting team's perceptions. An accelerated form of the Delphi was structured and applied over a period of three weeks, employing high ranking members of the Iraqi technocracy. The results indicated a good degree of consensus on a number of material issues. The consultants obtained a clearer picture of the client's desires, and the client was left with greater confidence in the consultant's perceptions of the planning problems and solutions. There was a notable reduction in the level of uncertainty and disagreement among both Iraqi and expatriate members of the planning team. Finally, there was an increased acceptance of the resulting master plan due to the demonstrable participation of senior government officials in its formulation and the credibility they attached to the process of the Delphi. At the time of writing, the plan has been accepted by the government of Iraq.

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