Conversation #67
The invisible challenges of feeding sustainable and healthy cities
by Sara Moreno Pires
University of Aveiro, Portugal
It is critical to recognize a (mostly) invisible driver for unhealthy and unsustainable cities: the way we feed cities. The Report of the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health in 2019 (Willett et al., 2019) made an impactful alert to acknowledge that the food system is the single largest reason for humans' transgression of key planetary boundaries, being the main driver of nature degradation and global environmental disruption, especially at city level. From a holistic perspective, we can look at Food as a system that embraces an entire interlinked range of actors and activities from the production, aggregation, processing, distribution, consumption, and disposal (loss or waste) of food products, connecting altogether environmental, social, governance and economic concerns.
Cities play a critical role in this whole chain of actors and sectors and are the main targets of these systems: they host 57% of the world population and consume 80% of all the food produced in the world. Moreover, cities have high food environmental footprints and are dependent on rural and distant lands. For example, recent research (Galli et al., 2023) shows that food consumption in Europe is the single largest reason for transgressing the carrying capacity of Earth ecosystems.
Portugal is one of the countries with a very high European Food Footprint and it is at the city level that major discrepancies emerge. Despite the recognition of this challenge for providing safe, nutritious and healthy food with low environmental impact to urban citizens, major deficiencies in the Portuguese local governance scenario exist (Galli et al., 2020) with weak policy commitment and poor coordination among food stakeholders, as well as a common lack of institutional capacity to implement urban food strategies, since food is still an invisible and not prioritized policy concern. It is not only the case of Portugal. Data from the Eurocities Pulse Mayors Survey 2024, a State of Cities Report through the voices of 100 mayors (Eurocities, 2024), reveals the top areas where mayors would like the next EU budget to support them. Urban food systems receive only 2% for the need to be considered in the development of the next seven-year EU budget.
In short, cities face a massive and urgent threat related to the challenge of feeding them in a secure, sustainable, fair and healthy way, amplified by global health pressures, geopolitical conflicts as well as climate-induced environmental degradation. But cities are not paying enough attention to this. Focusing on urban food systems requires understanding the rural/peri-urban/urban linkages at international, national, regional and local levels and it brings the opportunity for (re)connections, (dis)locations and (in)justices to be reworked at city level via institutional and governance processes (FAO, 2019).
Several local governments have, nevertheless, been at the forefront of concrete political efforts to realize the promises of transforming food systems (Sonnino, 2023). Bristol, Barcelona, Paris, Milan, Berlin and many more, in a network of around 290 cities around the world, have starting to work collaboratively in a global city network targeting sustainable food systems: the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, signed in 2015. This Pact has been activating multi-level governance cooperation to facilitate collaboration across city departments, to strengthen urban stakeholder participation and grassroots initiatives, to develop urban food plans or disaster risk reduction strategies. Likewise, the Global Partnership on Sustainable Urban Agriculture and Food Systems (RUAF) brings together a network of cities to promote projects in different sectors of the food system.
In addition, it is at the city level, that the push for experimentation and innovation in the governance of food systems can transform the whole system. City-region food strategies (territorial-wide approaches to address policy needs and barriers) or innovative urban food strategies (for the planning of different phases and partnership between interested food system stakeholders) are emerging. The Madrid Healthy and Sustainable Food Strategy 2022-2025 or the Strategic Food Plan of Pisa of 2011 are interesting examples.
From a more institutionalized perspective, governance innovation occurs with the creation of Food Policy Councils (FPC’s), through which multiple actors, with different roles within the food system, have the opportunity to debate and interact (e.g., from the very first council to adopt such an approach in Knoxville, US, in 1982 to European ones such as the Bordeaux Metropole Food Policy Council, established in 2017, or the Food Policy Council for the CityRegion of Stuttgart, established in 2022).
From a more bottom-up perspective, the example of the city of Ghent comes from the creation in 2015 of a climate crowdfunding platform to propose and finance ideas for the city. Two projects initiated from this very participative process to encourage urban farming on balconies of social housing (‘Lekker dichtbij!’ project) or to transform stone facades into vertical gardens for local food production (‘the Edible Street´project). Cities can be and are being innovative food hubs for these societal transformations. Scaling-up these innovations is urgent.
Critically, in a very complex challenge such as this kind, cities need to bring along a holistic perspective and a broad participatory process to the design and implementation of food policies. The shift from focusing only on agricultural policies (the “production side”), with the building of city farms, or nutrition policies (the “health side”), with robust educational campaigns to fight obesity at schools for instance, to considering the whole systemic and circular activities around food is difficult, but vital. The whole food system chain needs to be aligned, enforcing food distribution in cities or promoting actions to change urban residents’ consumption habits, dietary choices and food disposal, using citizen science and engagement.
In her book Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World (2021), Carolyn Steel writes that “food is the most potent tool for transforming our lives that we never knew we had.” I would only add to this title that Food and Cities can save the world, together! Let´s make visible this key major challenge for the future of safe, just, healthy and sustainable cities: food security and sustainability.
References:
Mallach, A., & Brachmann, L. (2013). Regenerating America’s Legacy Cities. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Eurocities (2024). The Eurocities Pulse Mayors Survey 2024 - A state of cities report through the voices of mayors.
FAO (2019). FAO Framework for the Urban Food Agenda. Leveraging Sub-national and Local Government Action to Ensure Sustainable Food Systems and Improved Nutrition. FAO. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Galli, A., Moreno Pires, S., Iha, K., Alves, A., Lin, D., Mancini, S., Teles, F. (2020). Sustainable food transition in Portugal: Assessing the Footprint of dietary choices and gaps in national and local food policies. Science of the Total Environment, 749.
Galli, A., Antonelli, M., Wambersie, L. et al. (2023). EU-27 ecological footprint was primarily driven by food consumption and exceeded regional biocapacity from 2004 to 2014. Nature Food 4, 810–822.
Sonnino, R. (2023). Food system transformation: Urban perspectives. Cities, 134.
Steel, C. (2021). Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World. UK: Vintage.
Willett, W., et al. (2019). Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Lancet.
As Jennifer Cockrall-King stated in her book Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (2012) – we are currently experiencing a Food Revolution, which is particularly visible in cities whose inhabitants are paying more and more attention to what they eat, how they eat and where the food they consume comes from. It seems, therefore, that we are at the most appropriate moment to take bold actions in the field of transforming our food systems into more just, sustainable and resilient ones, and cities are the right ground for implementing the most innovative solutions.
The topic taken up by Sara Moreno Pires, and especially the appeal included at the end of the essay, is particularly important especially in the context of the accelerating climate catastrophe, which may severely affect the most vulnerable social groups living in cities. It is urban areas that are separated from places of food production and hence, are exposed to food shortages that pose a serious threat to food security. In her essay, Sara drew attention to a crucial issue, which is the opportunity provided by the management of food systems at the city-region level. The idea of ‘food beyond the city’ advocating extending the perspective of research and policies in the field of food security and food sustainability to entire metropolitan areas can facilitate the creation of effective and multi-scale food strategies thus contributing to increased urban self-sufficiency.
The need for integrated actions encompassing both cities and their hinterland was referred to by A. Viljoen and K. Bohn in their latest work on Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (2014) – an urban design concept promoting coherent integration of different forms of food production within urbanized areas and creating linear productive landscapes that connect cities and countryside. The concept is worth revisiting today, a decade later, as the problem of food insecurity and cities’ ‘foodprint’ has not yet been tackled.
Making cities and local communities more food resilient and sustainable is, indeed, an urgent challenge that we must debate about. Giving visibility to food on political agendas and making it a priority issue in local governance is one of the first steps to be taken. In fact, several positive and pioneering efforts in this field have shown evidence of it is possible to integrate impulses for experimentation and innovation in food governance, combining three essential sustainability pillars: economy, environment and social justice. Take, for example, the work carried out in the city of Bristol by building a collaborative network that supports, informs and connects individuals, community projects, organizations and businesses who share the vision of transforming Bristol into a sustainable food city.
This network led to the creation of “Bristol Good Food 2030” as a robust approach that has not only allowed the city to unite in favor of good food through the push for healthy and climate-friendly diets, as well as takes on a mission to make governance capable of monitoring and evaluating changes in its food system.
Now, therefore, for efforts like these to proliferate in other contexts, we need cities to assume an increasingly critical and leadership role to establish strong governance networks focused on an effective food transition.
Sara Moreno Pires addresses the sustainability challenges of current global food systems, highlighting that these issues often remain overlooked by many decision-makers, especially at the urban scale. Yet, food system problems present a range of visible drivers and outcomes. In most cities worldwide, food is sourced externally, as urban areas within municipal boundaries typically lack the capacity for food self-sufficiency. However, some studies suggest the potential for metropolitan regions in Europe to achieve food self-sufficiency, particularly if plant-based diets were widely adopted by city inhabitants. The high cost of land in cities often drives agricultural areas, even on urban fringes, to be converted into residential developments. As a result, only highly innovative urban agriculture practices, or legacy land uses such as allotments, manage to compete for space. The traditional urban-rural divide, both spatial and socio-economic, is increasingly outdated, and a food systems approach offers a promising, holistic perspective on the entire food supply chain.
From a landscape perspective, significant land-use changes are contributing to greenhouse gas emissions in the agricultural sector. Furthermore, landscape structure is undergoing simplification, with a decline in smallholder farms globally. Sara highlights positive examples of initiatives and cities that are tackling the complex challenge of creating equitable and sustainable food systems. Such initiatives inspire hope for the future; for instance, cities across Europe, including my own city of Wroclaw—which recently joined the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact (MUFPP)—are adopting and testing progressive food system practices and governance solutions.