Toronto Municipal Staff and Policy-makers' Views on Urban Agriculture and Health: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

Municipal governments across the Global North are increasingly becoming key actors in shaping urban food and agriculture policy. In the City of Toronto, recent aspirational policies, such as the provincial Local Food Act and the municipal Toronto Agricultural Program, created new opportunities to shape a healthier food system. We sought municipal perspectives on the question of "How might urban agriculture policy and programs be better supported to promote equity and health?" Analysis of findings from semistructured key

Local urban government policies to facilitate healthy and environmentally sustainable diet-related practices: a scoping review

“…Of the included studies (n 27) (29,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56) most applied qualitative research methods (n 21) and used either content, document or policy analysis (n 16), interviews (n 11) or case studies (n 10) to address study aims (see online Supplemental Materials S4: Summary characteristics of included studies and S5: Data extraction from included studies). Most studies targeted local government stakeholders such as leaders and city planners (n 21), while approximately one-third included stakeholders from other levels of government (n 9) and several engaged primary producers of food (n 3).…”

Grand Challenges in Urban Agriculture: Ecological and Social Approaches to Transformative Sustainability

“…Though previously minor, food is being transformed into a centerpiece of urban policy issues where research challenges extend well-beyond safety and narrow regulatory concerns (Pothukuchi and Kaufman, 1999;Morgan, 2009). Urban food planning and analysis are shedding new light on specific regulations of production, distribution, consumption, and social initiatives (Dawson and Morales, 2016), cultural practices (Hammelman and Hayes-Conroy, 2015), and case studies of specific cities (e.g., New York and Toronto; Cohen and Reynolds, 2014;Mulligan et al, 2018). Significant UA research challenges are centered on the need to create policies that can respond to the spatial, temporal, and human-environment complexities of UA social and ecological functions (see preceding section).…”

Creating a supportive public policy framework for urban agriculture

“…In recent years a significant number of papers and books have been written about urban and city-region food and agricultural policies. The majority of these publications focus on specific cases, such as Dar es Salaam (Schmidt, 2012), New York (Cohen and Reynolds, 2014), Mexico City (Dieleman, 2017), Toronto (Mulligan et al, 2018) and Rosario (Dubbeling and Bracalenti, 2018). Others are comparative analyses of several cases (e.g.…”

“…The aim is a food system that fosters equitable food access, nutrition, community development and environmental health. Towards this end, the TFPC focusses on the following themes (Baker and De Zeeuw, 2015;Blay-Palmer, 2009;Mulligan et al, 2018, TFPC, 2019):…”

“…Characteristic for the TFPC is the integrated approach to food (Mulligan et al, 2018). Sustainable and healthy food is a lens through which all urban policies are assessed, that is, all new policies have to contribute to (or should at least not negatively impact) a food system that encourages equitable food access, nutrition, community development and environmental health.…”