Food systems will play a central role in delivering the sustainable development agenda.

With the majority of people already living in urban areas – not only in large metropolitan areas, but also in secondary cities and small towns – a greater focus on urban planning as a way of influencing food systems development will be critically important.

Until recently, urban planners have paid little attention to food systems, emphasising ‘traditional’ urban priorities such as public transportation and decent housing. However, since the beginning of the current millennium, major national associations of urban planners have started to notice this scarce attention...

While urbanisation worldwide sets up unprecedented challenges for feeding cities with accessible, affordable food and healthy diets, urban food security and food systems are receiving growing attention at an international level and in a growing number of cities of all sizes. However, the issue of food and urban planning is insufficiently covered in existing literature. How food is produced, processed, distributed, consumed, recovered and wasted and how local food systems complement rural agricultural production are issues that relate closely to urban planning, which can be either an opportunity to feed cities better or an obstacle to making food systems work...

Section 1 of this chapter explores the links between food and urban planning, which have gradually developed from a situation in which food and urban planning were foreign to each other, to the promising moment of mutual exploration and operational links to which the chapters of this book testify. Section 2 is more conceptual and examines the very notion of urban food system planning, encompassing the various trends and dynamics that are emerging in the cities analysed here and beyond. Section 3 focuses on lessons learned about how food is being integrated into urban planning. Special emphasis is given to...

Bangkok is the capital of an agriculturally productive country. There are both full-time and part-time farmers, both modern and conventional markets and both mainstream and alternative food chains. A survey in 2016 found that the number of full-time farming households working in Bangkok’s peri-urban fringe was 13 774. It can be estimated that the proportion of farming households per total households was 1:195. Although the exact number of farmers was not recorded, it can be estimated that each household would have 2–3 farmers. Thus, the number was in the range 27 000–42 000 (Policy and Planning Division 2016)....

Since 2003, Providence, Rhode Island, a small United States city, has successfully integrated food concerns into urban planning and policy implementation. As a result Providence has already seen a marked increase in local production opportunities, distribution outlets, food waste composting and food security initiatives and is poised to make significant additional advances in the coming years. Figure 3.1 illustrates the bounty of one of Providence’s many productive community gardens.

This chapter studies the confluence of factors that drove the inclusion of food in urban planning and policy implementation. How did food advocates take advantage of the Planning Department’s increased emphasis...

The main aim of this chapter is to analyse how food systems can be integrated into urban and spatial planning in a more efficient way, using the city of Portland in Oregon as a case study.

Portland is often cited as an example of a city with strong land use planning controls. This is largely the result of state-wide land conservation policies adopted in 1973 under Governor Tom McCall which strongly aim to preserve the peri-urban and rural area, as well as food production, around the city.

Over the last few years Portland has been cited for its strong attention...

According to data from the 2007 National Census, 77 per cent of Peru’s population live in cities, and just over half live in coastal regions (55 per cent). Metropolitan Lima, the capital, is the fifth-most-populated city in Latin America, having 43 districts, and is home to nearly a third of the country’s 31 488 000 inhabitants (Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática [INEI] 2007).

Considered to be the second-largest city in the world which is located in a desert, receiving only 25–100 mm of rain per year, and with only 3.7 m² of green area per inhabitant, Metropolitan Lima...

In 2000, in a landmark article, scholars in the United States asked why food, an essential ingredient of life, was a stranger to the field of urban planning (Pothukuchi and Kaufman 2000). Since then much has changed in how urban planning practice addresses the state of communities’ food systems. US cities, like many across the Global South and Global North, are experimenting with public policies to create more just and environmentally sustainable food systems (Rocha and Lessa 2009; Raja et al. 2017a; Morgan and Sonnino 2010; Morgan 2009). National surveys report that members of the American Planning Association (APA), the...

By 2050, when the world population is expected to have increased to 9.6 billion, approximately 66 per cent of us will be living in urban areas. Urbanisation is placing significant pressure on resource management, given that cities are hungry and thirsty and enormous hubs of consumption of all kind of goods to which food, water and energy are central. This in turn makes cities major centres of solid and liquid waste generation. This ‘dirty’ side of the urban food security challenge determines an important share of the urban footprint. If this waste remains in the urban area, valuable resources, like...

Today Japan is the world’s leading consumer of seafood and it boasts the largest fishing industry. After China, India, Peru and Indonesia it is also the world’s fifth-largest producer in the aquaculture and fishing sectors (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations Statistics Division [FAOSTAT] 2015). Two factors underlie the Japanese fishery’s huge demand: population density and the importance that fish has in Japan’s cultural and urban identity.

The Greater Tokyo Area is the world’s largest urban agglomeration with 39.4 million people. To make a comparision with Italy, for instance, the Tokyo area (16 218 km²) is slightly smaller...

There is a growing realisation that the issue of food security, for a long time a primarily rural concern, needs to become a focus of urban policy and planning. It is usually assumed that solutions to urban food insecurity lie in support for food production (urban agriculture), but research has shown that most African urbanites, including low-income households, source their food from retail outlets. It is therefore essential to consider the urban food marketing and distribution structure and how this impacts on food security and urban poverty.

This chapter will first review the evidence from recent research in African cities...

Belo Horizonte is a planned Brazilian city, built in the late nineteenth century, whose city plan differentiated urban and peri-urban zones as well as a productive rural belt. The city has expanded swiftly from 25 000 inhabitants in 1897 to close to 2.5 million today (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística [IBGE] 2016), eating up arable land and bringing a dramatic impact on food production and informal distribution channels. To address this situation and regulate food market prices, the municipality created in the 1990s a municipal secretary for food supply, security and nutrition (secretaria municipal adjunta de segurança alimentar e...

As informal street vending has proliferated in many Indonesian cities, some local governments have sought to relocate food vendors from the streets to public purpose-built markets. A number of such relocations have received widespread recognition for being managed without conflict, through engagement and participation and with limited confrontation. However, further examination reveals that the success of such policies is limited, many relocated vendors returning to the streets within a few years.

This chapter examines four different vendor relocation processes in two different Indonesian cities, conducted between May 2015 and January 2016. It illuminates why informal food vendors return to the...

Fresh food markets are markets where grocers gather to sell vegetables, fruit and meat, among other things. The formalisation of fresh food markets is the process of replacing informal street food markets with markets accommodated in a fixed and organised space where only licensed food dealers are allowed to sell food. Today, formal food markets are typically designed with up-to-date equipment for food transportation, storage and processing, and operated by modern business management.

In China, the formalisation of fresh food markets started in the late 1980s when the Chinese economy had transitioned from a planned economy to a market economy....

The City of Toronto is the largest city in Canada with a population of 2.8 million people. The city is one of the most multicultural cities in the world, with over 140 languages spoken. Immigrants account for 46 per cent of Toronto’s population, and a third of newcomers to Canada settle in the city (Statistics Canada 2016). Needless to say, diets are extremely diverse. This represents an opportunity for the food and agriculture sector in Ontario, one that many organisations are seizing.

The region surrounding the City of Toronto, known as the Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH), is made up of...

Milan is internationally recognised as a tertiary city-hub, celebrated as the uncontested Italian capital of design and fashion and renowned for its financial and cultural services. Yet, this European metropolis is also a major agricultural centre, in both the Italian and the European context, as defined by agricultural land coverage and the number of farms. This mixed-use nature of the metropolitan region is not a new phenomenon. Since the Middle Ages, Milan has been characterised by a tradition of agricultural practices.

However, since the mid-1900s its urban/agricultural character has been affected by several dynamics. The most significant phenomena have been...

Food systems are integral to a city’s functioning, and the importance of stakeholder participation in urban planning at various scales is increasingly recognised. This chapter therefore analyses the role of participatory processes in urban food system planning. We draw upon data from an ongoing multi-stakeholder planning process in Tamale, Northern Ghana, as well as interviews with planners in the city. We describe the food system in Tamale, focusing on the food production and spatial and infrastructural planning issues that stakeholders prioritised in the workshops. However, urban food production is regarded here as but one element of city region food systems...

Among the tools that planners wield, none is more powerful or more commonly used than the ability to rezone land at the parcel, neighbourhood or city scale. Advocates of sustainable, healthy food systems typically focus on theintentionalapplications of zoning to improve neighbourhood food environments: allowing urban agriculture in residential and commercial areas; offering developers density bonuses to include supermarkets in their buildings; or restricting fast food establishments in neighbourhoods with high rates of obesity and diet-related diseases (Wooten et al. 2013; Sturm and Cohen 2009; Cohen 2014b, 57–85). However, these examples of intentional food zoning have produced...