Urban food strategies and plans: considerations on the assessment construction

Abstract

In a context of growing attention to the issue of feeding the city, this article focuses on the role of the assessments guiding the processes of urban food policy and planning to reach Sustainable Food Security. The starting point is a collection of experiences dealing with some cities that in recent years have launched strategies for developing healthier and more sustainable food systems. Their analysis highlights the innovations in the construction of cognitive frameworks supporting food policies and planning, as well as the difficulties to explore the food phenomenon on the qualitative and quantitative level. Within a current research meant to address the food agenda in Venice, the authors take advantage from the case studies comparison to propose key themes and investigation methods a preliminary assessment of the existing food system. Considering the strong impact of the huge tourist flow that invests the city, daily, the foodservice sector is considered as the main challenging and strategical core-area for boosting impactful changes in the urban food system.

Social justice-oriented narratives in European urban food strategies: Bringing forward redistribution, recognition and representation

“…Calori et al 2017;Doernberg et al 2019;Moragues-Faus and Carroll 2018;Sibbing et al 2019), compare a limited number of European case studies with cities outside of Europe (e.g. Baker and de Zeeuw 2015;Coppo et al 2017;Mansfield and Mendes 2013;Prové et al 2019;Sonnino 2016) or conduct European cross-country comparisons of at most two cities (e.g. Moragues-Faus and Morgan 2015).…”

A Sustainable Organic Production Model for “Food Sovereignty” in the United Arab Emirates and Sicily-Italy

“…An urban food security dimension has therefore been defined-using an approach that balances economics, the environment and population dynamics-which has fuelled discussion on the themes of technological revolution, new patterns of productive intensification, local production, sustainable diets from the environmental and human health point of view, waste reduction, mitigation of the impact of agri-food chains on waste produced, etc. SAFA has also been used to analyse urban food policy and food planning processes in order to achieve sustainable food security, with applications in some urban contexts that over the past few years have launched strategies for the development of healthier and more sustainable food systems [19].…”

The Role of Metrics in Food Policy: Lessons from a Decade of Experience in New York City

“…At the city scale, the proliferation of food system plans, strategies, and policy papers over the past decade has been the impetus for municipal governments to develop and collect urban food systems metrics (Coppo, Stempfle, & Reho, 2017;Ilieva, 2017). An analysis of the content of food strategies and plans from five North American cities (New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Toronto) identified 260 distinct food system indicators in these cities alone (Ilieva, 2017).…”

“…Municipal indicators are typically derived from pre-existing government data, data collected by academic institutions and NGOs, and proprietary data from private sector firms. Different data collection and reporting methods and frequencies, geographic boundaries, definitions, and limited or inconsistent data availability result in inconsistencies in the information collected within and across cities (Ilieva, 2017;Coppo et al, 2017). In another example, the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact plans to release a set of indicators to guide the 132 signatories to the Pact in tracking their progress achieving the commonly agreed-upon goals (Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO] of the United Nations, 2017).…”