What defines a sustainable food system? How can it be more inclusive? How do local and global scales interact and how does power flow within food systems? How to encourage an interdisciplinary approach to realizing sustainable food systems? And how to activate change? These questions are considered by EU and North American academics and practitioners in this book. Using a wide range of case studies, it provides a critical overview, showing how and where theory and practice can converge to produce more sustainable food systems.

This open access book, building on the legacy of food systems scholar and advocate, Jerome Kaufman, examines the potential and pitfalls of planning for urban agriculture (UA) in the United States, especially in how questions of ethics and equity are addressed. The book is organized into six sections. Written by a team of scholars and practitioners, the book covers a comprehensive array of topics ranging from theory to practice of planning for equitable urban agriculture. Section 1 makes the case for re-imagining agriculture as central to urban landscapes, and unpacks why, how, and when planning should support UA, and more broadly food systems. Section 2, written by early career and seasoned scholars, provides a theoretical foundation for the book. Section 3, written by teams of scholars and community partners, examines how civic agriculture is unfolding across urban landscapes, led largely by community organizations. Section 4, written by planning practitioners and scholars, documents local government planning tied to urban agriculture, focusing especially on how they address questions of equity. Section 5 explores UA as a locus of pedagogy of equity. Section 6 places the UA movement in the US within a global context, and concludes with ideas and challenges for the future. The book concludes with a call for planning as public nurturance an approach that can be illustrated through urban agriculture. Planning as public nurturance is a value-explicit process that centers an ethics of care, especially protecting the interests of publics that are marginalized. It builds the capacity of marginalized groups to authentically co-design and participate in planning/policy processes. Such a planning approach requires that progress toward equitable outcomes is consistently evaluated through accountability measures. And, finally, such an approach requires attention to structural and institutional inequities. Addressing these four elements is more likely to create a condition under which urban agriculture may be used as a lever in the planning and development of more just and equitable cities. .

This book is a visual guide to the territorial dynamics operating within a territory. The reading of such dynamics is fundamental in understanding the role of food in cities. This atlas provides a refreshing approach to the study of the city and of its territory, expanded from the perspective of the food system. This book illustrates the impacts of urban planning options on the function of the contemporary Food System of the Lisbon Region, while disclosing its associated urban form solutions. It provides a possible methodology for the reading of the food system based on an analysis of planning instruments and their morphological outcomes, both in the territory but also on the various built forms which have resulted over time. A key focus of the atlas is exploring how planning has regulated the evolution of the Lisbon Region since the 20th century and its implications on the food system. The atlas results from an exhaustive survey and research work conducted in Lisbon Metropolitan Area for a research project, SPLACH – Spatial Planning for Change, for the past 3 years, in terms of the analysis of its Food System and Urban Planning, aiming to inform the delineation of planning strategies towards a sustainable urban environment. It is an important reference for planners, architects, planning and architecture students as well as municipal technicians and the general public, as it provides a refreshing and useful source of information to support further readings about the food system and its relations to urban planning instruments and urban form solutions. Furthermore, it builds a contemporary reading about possible solutions to promote a sustainable transition of the current food systems, while enhancing the strategic role of planning and urban form.

Planners, environmentalists, architects, engineers, policymakers and economists have to work together to ensure that planning and development can meet our present needs without compromising the ability of future generations. This collaboration was the aim of the 12th International Conference on Sustainable Development and Planning, from which the papers in this volume originate. Problems related to development and planning, which affect rural and urban areas, are present in all regions of the world. Accelerated urbanisation has resulted in the deterioration of the environment and loss of quality of life. Urban development can also aggravate problems faced by rural areas such as forests, mountain regions and coastal areas, amongst many others. Taking into consideration the interaction between different regions and developing new methodologies for monitoring, planning and implementation of novel strategies can offer solutions mitigating environmental pollution and non-sustainable use of available resources. Energy-saving and eco-friendly building approaches have become an important part of modern development, which places special emphasis on resource optimisation. Planning has a key role to play in ensuring that these solutions, as well as new materials and processes, are incorporated in the most efficient manner. The included papers feature new academic findings and their applications in planning and development strategies, assessment tools, and decision-making processes.

The intention of this case study is to learn from the institutional and programmatic processes that have sustained the transformation of Ireland’s food system so that other countries might be inspired by ideas and practices that could be potentially adapted to their own journey towards a sustainable food system. The country’s trajectory from small-scale farming focused on commodity exports with little value addition, to gradual integration into high-value international supply chains, alongside its current ambition to contribute to solving world hunger, reflect the profound shifts that have taken place within and around the boundaries of Ireland’s food system. Ireland’s transformation demonstrates the complexity of multiple drivers (policies, investments, market trends and disruptions) simultaneously at play as food systems evolve. At present, the top challenges in agri-food concern the environment, human health and nutrition.

In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in local food systems-among policy makers, planners, and public health professionals, as well as environmentalists, community developers, academics, farmers, and ordinary citizens. While most local food systems share common characteristics, the chapters in this book explore the unique challenges and opportunities of local food systems located within mature and/or declining industrial regions. Local food systems have the potential to provide residents with a supply of safe and nutritious food; such systems also have the potential to create much-needed employment opportunities. However, challenges are numerous and include developing local markets of a sufficient scale, adequately matching supply and demand, and meeting the environmental challenges of finding safe growing locations. Interrogating the scale, scope, and economic context of local food systems in aging industrialized cities, this book provides a foundation for the development of new sub-fields in economic, urban, and agricultural geographies that focus on local food systems. The book represents a first attempt to provide a systematic picture of the opportunities and challenges facing the development of local food systems in old industrial regions.

Sustainable Food System Assessment provides both practical and theoretical insights about the growing interest in and response to measuring food system sustainability. Bringing together research from the Global North and South, this book shares lessons learned, explores intended and actual project outcomes, and highlights points of conceptual and methodological convergence. Interest in assessing food system sustainability is growing, as evidenced by the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact and the importance food systems initiatives have taken in serving as a lever for attaining the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This book opens by looking at the conceptual considerations of food systems indicators, including the place-based dimensions of food systems indicators and how measurements are implicated in sense-making and visioning processes. Chapters in the second part cover operationalizing metrics, including the development of food systems indicator frameworks, degrees of indicator complexities, and practical constraints to assessment. The final part focuses on the outcomes of assessment projects, including impacts on food policy and communities involved, highlighting the importance of building connections between sustainable food systems initiatives. The global coverage and multi-scalar perspectives, including both conceptual and practical aspects, make this a key resource for academics and practitioners across planning, geography, urban studies, food studies, and research methods. It will also be of interest to government officials and those working within NGOs. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.routledge.com/Sustainable-Food-System-Assessment-Lessons-from-Global-Practice/Blay-Palmer-Conare-Meter-Battista-Johnston/p/book/9781032083933, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book considers the ability and capacity of the food supply system in Australia to provide food security for the ever-increasing domestic and international population in the face of growing challenges in production, resource supply and failures within the food system itself. Although Australia is a net food exporting country, domestic food insecurity exists and will increase as food prices rise in the coming decades. An overview of the food supply system highlights the main challenges that are determining the future. Many of these challenges can be resolved by the Australian government, but others are in the hands of global governance to which Australia can only adapt. This book sheds light on the challenges and discusses the prospects for developing more sustainable and resilient future food systems in Australia. In addition, it covers food security and sovereignty issues under the heading of “food equity and access,” “food production, policy and trade,” and “impacts of land use planning on agriculture.” The unique features of the book include the following: • Most literature on food security pertains to developing countries. By way of contrast, this book explores food security in a developed nation (Australia) that seemingly should not have food security issues. The topics covered in the book are relevant to other developed nations with growing populations and resource management challenges. • The book chapters are written by specialists to paint a comprehensive picture of the political, social, economic and environmental issues that give rise to food insecurity, and the challenges these issues present to the security of the food system in coming decades. The overall organization of the book uses a theoretically informed and multi-disciplinary approach. This enables a critical and in-depth analysis of food security by outlining the key challenges as well as prospects for the development of more sustainable and resilient agri-food systems. • The three principal topics in the book are dealt with by a multi-disciplinary team of authors in a way that teases out diverse points of view illustrating the complexity of food security. Author disciplines include health and nutrition, agriculture, ethics, social science, law, and practitioners managing food aid programs. • The book shows how food security relates to many technical, social and moral issues in society and how it is possible to develop successful programs to improve food security.