Food and the Cities

Food as a key element for the sustainability and resilience of cities.

The sustainability of food systems is strongly influenced by the world’s urban organization: since 2008, more than half of the human population has lived in cities—ecosystems that depend on other areas both to obtain what they need to exist (energy, water, soil, food) and to dispose of what they have not fully metabolized (waste, byproducts, emissions). At the same time, cities are also where imbalances manifest between wealth production—as measured by GDP—and the multifaceted dimensions of well-being, sustainability, and the resilience of social and environmental systems in the face of external shocks.
In this context, the first part of the book addresses the fundamental dimensions of agri-food cycles, which represent a crucial element of urban metabolism and its social, economic, and environmental components and must therefore be considered “urban infrastructure” on par with other areas such as social services, public transportation, and waste and water management. In other words, it is a constitutive element of the city, intertwined with fundamental rights and needs, individual lifestyles, cultures, the structural aspects of socioeconomic organization, and their relationships with the environmental context.

As “urban infrastructure,” food also requires a strategic approach—a Food Policy —to use the term applied to food-related policies in Anglo-Saxon contexts—whose objective is to articulate a vision, foster the integration of issues and tools, promote multi-stakeholder processes, facilitate the assumption of shared responsibility by these same stakeholders, and, with this in mind, strive to establish mechanisms for assessing the impact of actions in relation to the initial vision.
In the second part of this text, which is based on an analysis of approximately one hundred examples of urban food policies, we aim to provide a series of ideas for implementing such policies, demonstrating their practical feasibility through key insights identified during EStà’s work on formulating the Food Policy for the city of Milan. We therefore reexamine the experiences of cities such as Almere, Amsterdam, Bristol, Ghent, London, Malmö, Melbourne, Milan, New York, Toronto, San Francisco, and Vancouver through ten broad categories (governance, education, food waste, access, well-being, environment, agroecosystem, production, trade, finance, and taxation), with the aim of synthesizing the complexity of the urban food system and thereby facilitating the analysis of its many components.

The focus is primarily on European and North American cases, both because these are the contexts where forms of collaboration between social experiments and institutions are most prevalent, and because these cities are considered “mature” in terms of not only their physical development but also their institutional and socioeconomic development. However, we do not overlook the many experiences in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, where the relationship between food and cities is primarily defined in terms of food security linked to issues of poverty and economic development.

This project was developed in collaboration with Andrea Magarini