A bottom-up approach to model the environmental impact of the last-mile in an urban food-system

Stelwagen, Rianne Eleonore; Slegers, P.M.; Schutter, Liesbeth de; Leeuwen, Eveline van

doi:10.1016/j.spc.2020.12.039

Cited by 23 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Even in the small city of Feliz (Brazil), which produces more food than it consumes, authors warn that the city cannot be considered self‐sufficient, as it produces a small number of products destined to exports, while most of the food consumed by its inhabitants is imported (Kuhn et al., 2017). This means that very little food consumed in cities is produced within urban administrative boundaries, implying an unequal distribution of environmental benefits and burdens (Huang & Chiu, 2020), particularly as most of food's environmental impacts occur at the stage of agricultural production—thus occurring outside of cities’ administrative boundaries (Dias et al., 2018; Moore et al., 2013; Stelwagen et al., 2021). Embedded mass can represent 96% of meat flows in different cities across the world (Goldstein et al., 2013), which illustrates why territorial‐based and consumption‐based approaches to estimating food flows’ environmental impacts yield such different results.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The current and potential role of urban metabolism studies to analyze the role of food in urban sustainability

Guibrunet

Jiménez

2022

J of Industrial Ecology

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Food supply chains are essential for urban sustainability. To reflect on the state of knowledge on urban food flows in urban metabolism research, and the actual and potential role of urban metabolism studies to tackle food sustainability in cities, we systematically review scientific research on food from an urban metabolism perspective and apply statistical and thematic analyses. The analysis of 89 studies provides insights as to the relation between food supply and (environmental and social dimensions of) urban sustainability. First, food is an important contributor to urban environmental impacts, if a consumption-based approach is adopted. Secondly, the social impacts of urban food supply remain scarcely studied in urban metabolism research, but emerging results on public health, malnutrition, and food waste appear promising. In parallel, we find that the findings of the studies fail to engage with debates present in the broader literature, such as that of food justice. Our analysis shows that most studies focus on large cities in high-income, data-rich countries. This limits our understanding of global urban food supply. Existing studies use innovative mixed-methods to produce robust accounts of urban food flows in data-scarce contexts; expanding these accounts is necessary to get a better understanding of how urban food supply and its diverse impacts in terms of environmental and social sustainability may vary across cities, a necessary step for the urban metabolism literature to contribute to current debates around food sustainability and justice. K E Y W O R D Sfood, industrial ecology, sustainability, systematic review, urban metabolism, urban political ecology INTRODUCTION The role of food supply in urban sustainabilityFood provision is an important sector to take into account for global environmental sustainability: Agriculture is responsible for the majority of the world's water eutrophication and freshwater use (FAO, 2011;Poore & Nemecek, 2018). The food sector (including production, commercialization, and consumption stages) accounts for 26% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (Poore & Nemecek, 2018). At the urban scale, food can be the biggest contributor to a city's environmental footprint (Moore et al., 2013). Given that the majority of the global population lives in cities (UNDES,This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The current and potential role of urban metabolism studies to analyze the role of food in urban sustainability

Guibrunet

Jiménez

2022

J of Industrial Ecology

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“…The range of products offered in food retail and accordingly the size of supermarkets have increased steadily over the past 50 years (European Commission, 2014). The most common mode of transport for consumers to reach these purchasing locationsthe so-called last mile-is by car (Stelwagen et al, 2021). Online grocery retail is still a niche but a trending segment due to an increase in door-to-door delivery services during the Covid-19 pandemic (Worthy, 2021).…”

Section: Current Patterns In Urban Food Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Delivery to the door is particularly resource-intensive (Stelwagen et al, 2021). With a delivery to a place where users often go anyway, this route could be made less resource-intensive.…”

Section: Deliver Into the Daily Walkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Principles and Design Scenarios for Sustainable Urban Food Logistics

Tochtrop

Bickel

Hennes

et al. 2022

Front. Sustain. Cities

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Food and nutrition systems are linked to all Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which makes their transition toward social-ecological behavior patterns crucial for an overarching sustainability transformation. The perspective of (urban) logistics is of special interest. It couples the production and consumption physically and virtually. In this context, we shed light on the design of the turnover point of food in urban areas from the supply chain toward consumers and contribute to an overarching systemic perspective toward establishing a sustainable multilevel food system. We describe current patterns in urban food systems and propose several principles for sustainable design of (urban) food systems based on concepts such as (regional) collaboration and food literacy. Using these principles, we provide four design scenarios that concretely imagine future urban food consumption and production patterns titled “slow stock supply service, ” “deliver into the daily walk, ” “central district food depot, ” “super food action place.” With this work we provide a starting for reflecting whether certain combinations of principles actually lead to patterns of daily life that are feasible, acceptable, or desirable. Moreover, we provide an initial qualitative assessment to stimulate further research that explores scenario pathways and incorporates additional indicators regarding the impact on social-ecological. We open up various research questions with regard to the overarching question of how urban food logistics should be designed to be consistent with the SDGs.

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“…We imagine that similar to parcel stations, so-called Food Hubs (see Figure 14) could spread in urban areas. These have refrigerated, non-heated as well as warm holding lockers and are filled by food from delivery services, which are no longer burdened with resource-intensive last-mile delivery (Stelwagen et al 2021). As they are located not far from people's apartments, they are suitable for daily delivery and collection.…”

Section: From Deep-freeze Community Buildings To Food Hubsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Designing Futures with Pasts

Tochtrop

Jessen

2022

ear

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The impending climate catastrophe gives rise to an increased environmental awareness among many designers, who direct their work towards the paradigm of sustainability. While designing with an ‘ecological lens’ is necessarily oriented towards the future, we highlight the past as an inspiring realm to explore. Rather than recycling materials, we encourage the recycling of ideas as a combination of historiographic and speculative design methods. We will present a framework that extends the idea of design as a ‘projecting’ activity into the idea of design as a constant negotiation process about the relevance and appropriateness of current and past technologies. Design revolves not just about what will be, but to a large extent about what should remain and what should recur, or as Jan Michl put it: “seeing design as redesign” (Michl 2002).We will illustrate the thought of designing futures with pasts by means of a research project that aims at developing a refrigerator for circular economy. The refrigerator – as the currently dominant technology to preserve food – will serve as a starting point to show how artefacts and architecture as well as human skills and knowledge in the preparation and preservation of food are historically interlinked. The history of food preservation unfolds not only along the evolution of the refrigerator, but encompasses household techniques like smoking, curing and fermenting, as well as long-forgotten architectural ‘answers’ such as deep-freeze community buildings. We will revisit three historical examples of food preservation and present the method ‘throwing’ past ideas into the future. Three main arguments are presented in this richly illustrated paper: First, that historiography is a form of designing, second, that designing is constituted and influenced by path dependencies (cf. David 1985) that are deeply rooted in the past and third, that the past is a valuable source of inspiration when designing for sustainable development. Looking at history becomes a way of “mental window shopping” (Simon 1985, 188) for approaches that are to be reactivated and transformed.

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A bottom-up approach to model the environmental impact of the last-mile in an urban food-system

Cited by 23 publications

References 49 publications

The current and potential role of urban metabolism studies to analyze the role of food in urban sustainability

The current and potential role of urban metabolism studies to analyze the role of food in urban sustainability

Principles and Design Scenarios for Sustainable Urban Food Logistics

Designing Futures with Pasts

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