Systemic Design for Food Self-Sufficiency in Urban Areas

Abstract

This article adopts a systemic approach to address the problem of the operationalization of relationships between actors conducive to food self-sufficiency in urban areas. Through the use of Social Network Analysis (SNA), the literature on urban agriculture was analyzed, detecting eight key trends and topic areas. This information was used to design a generic recursive organizational structure with the identification of the key roles and functions for management and governance in the multi-level and multi-stakeholder relationships of a sustainable urban self-sufficient food production system, inspired by the principles of complexity management and organizational cybernetics. Methodologically, this is the first application that combines the exploratory capability of SNA and the recursive structure of the Viable System Model (VSM) to propose applicable organizational structures in any urban area, suggesting a new route for the study and application of systemic thinking in the development of urban agriculture schemes. However, due to the conceptual nature of this work, this study opens a discussion on how we can rethink interactions to seek continuous adaptation in food self-sufficiency, provide tools that foster inclusion, and adapt to every context to support the relevant actors and academics in urban agriculture.

Introduction to the Special Issue “A Systemic Perspective on Urban Food Supply: Assessing Different Types of Urban Agriculture”

“…Looking at this broad picture of potential measurements of UA impacts and implementation, there is further no clear preference for either quantitative or qualitative methods (see Figure 2). While two studies relied on pure qualitative analysis [25,34] and five on quantitative analysis [30,31,35,40,41], the majority of eight studies used mixed-methods approaches and combined qualitative methods (e.g., focus group discussions, stakeholder workshops, on-site visits, or expert interviews) with quantitative methods (e.g., online questionnaires or on-site surveys) [29,32,33,[36][37][38][39]42]. Given the multidimensional impacts of UA and its general multifunctionality [2,43], a mixed-methods approach often seems to be an advisable choice to tackle the different dimensions.…”

“…The cases presented in this Special Issue reflect the diversity of UA types following the typology of Krikser et al [6]. It contains contributions on sociocultural [25,[29][30][31][32], commercial [33][34][35] and self-supply [36,37] UA types, along with studies focusing on either varying or mixed UA types [38][39][40][41]. Comparing the scope of the studies in terms of focusing on technology-or nature-based UA, the majority of the papers deal with nature-based forms of UA [25,[29][30][31]36,39,40,42], while only three papers investigate technology-oriented types of UA [33,35,37] (see Figure 1).…”

“…In total, seven papers in this Special Issue deal with drivers and constraints for implementing various types of UA. Hereby, the focus of three papers is on the social dimension [30,31,34]; two papers take into account a multidimensional [25,36], one a political [42], and a conceptual paper a systemic perspective [38].…”

“…The authors therefore highlight the need for multidimensional and systemic approaches which take into account the various types of populations, their habits, culture, needs, and available resources to formulate effective policies [42]. In fact, by using a Social Network Analysis and a Viable System Model, the conceptual paper by Núñez-Ríos et al [38] identified key factors related to contextual, operational, and management components for understanding sustainable urban food production systems. The authors highlight that their framework can be used for future research on UA and its various contexts.…”

Factors to Foster Organizational Sustainability in Tourism SMEs

“…It is important to mention that in stages 1 and 2, SNA was used because it allows the treatment of multilevel phenomena by combining observations at an individual level (micro-level) with macro-level environments [49]. To incorporate this tool, the group of participants was conformed under the nominalist approach and trigger questions were used to evaluate specific aspects under the phrasing questions criterion as recommended by Prell [50] and Núñez-Ríos et al [51]. The following questions were used-(1) Which aspects do you consider important for a tourist SME to operate sustainably?…”