The next two aims, food supply resilience and food security and access, are also connected. Resilience is a precursor to food security as it ensures that the food system can withstand macro-level threats, be they economic, sociopolitical or environmental. The example of Belo Horizonte bears similarities to the market infrastructure development policy in Barcelona, since agricultural development is intended to ensure local production will be able to meet demand in the long term. Food security and access means ensuring that nutritious food is available to the entire community. In Medellín, policy efforts include the provision of emergency food aid under social welfare, and price regulation (Laidlaw 2015). In Belo Horizonte, social welfare efforts are focused on subsidizing canteens and funding school meals (Rocha and Lessa 2009). Physical access can be improved by bringing food supply into underserved areas, such as Medellín's public-private partnerships to ensure that businesses operate in food deserts (Laidlaw 2015). In Toronto, physical access is addressed through integrating urban agriculture into residential areas, and via subsidizing vans to deliver fresh vegetables and fruit in underserved neighbourhoods (Mah and Thang 2013).

The environmental protection aim also promotes long-term resilience as any harmful environmental impacts of food production, distribution and waste disposal can impair future food security. Environmental problems hinge largely on the interface between production and demand within cities. On the one hand, protecting the environment comes down to informing producers about agricultural technologies that are more sustainable and encouraging their adoption. On the other hand, there is a need to create demand for food produced using environmentally-sound practices, as achieved in both Malmö (Anderson and Nillson 2012) and London (London, 2012 2009), where agricultural production practices are specified in procurement and catering contracts.

The public health improvement aim is intended to directly address problems caused by long-term consumption of inappropriate foods, as opposed to the food safety aspects of public health discussed below. Public health is linked to the food security aim, as optimum public health is an outcome of access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food, but enabling public is not just about preventing malnutrition. The ubiquity of cheap, convenient food of poor nutritional quality is a driver of the obesity crisis and diet-related disease (Morgan and Sonnino 2010). Public health measures tend to fall into two categories: education and consumer awareness campaigns to enable informed food choices; and altering the food environment to promote healthier options or limit unhealthy options. The requirement of calorie labelling on restaurant menus in New York is a prime example of the first category, while the second is illustrated by city Health Code amendments prohibiting artificial trans fats in takeaway foods (Libman 2015). Planning restrictions on the opening of new takeaway restaurants near schools and playgrounds in the London Borough of Waltham Forest is a further example of a change in the physical environment (GLA and CIEH 2012). Food safety is a basic facet of public health, although it can also be a specific aim geared towards avoiding the immediate, and often catastrophic, effects of poor hygiene or lack of infrastructure on human health. This is the case with traditional wet markets in Hanoi (Vietnam) that were perceived to
pose a food safety hazard since they do not meet the private standards of modern supermarkets. Consequently, the city's retail modernization policy framework, which favours public-private partnerships, has led to their closure and replacement with supermarkets (Wertheim-Heck et al. 2015).

Social inclusion and food culture—the last two aims—seek to remedy the problem of consumers’ cognitive and cultural detachment from food. Social inclusion concerns the social and participatory nature of eating, preparing or growing food. It strives to deal with inequality, such as in Rosario, where the planning system is used to provide access to public or private land for those who would otherwise be excluded from food growing (Roitman and Bifarello 2010). Finally, the food culture aim seeks to foster conscious food choices. In London, Mayoral support has enabled programmes to educate the public and raise awareness about sustainability and healthy food. Events are organized to encourage food diversity, from both nutritional and cultural standpoints, particularly in light of the ethnic diversity within the city (GLA 2011).

Each of the aims in Table 1 ostensibly seeks to shape the food environment within the city for the benefit of urban residents. However, several of them have effects or require action outside of the city limits too—notably economic development, food supply resilience, food security and access, and environmental protection. This is because the food system is an intrinsic and non-divisible whole made up of all stages of food supply, as well as contextual influences, inputs, outcomes and outputs (Lang et al. 2009; Lang and Heasman 2015). Moreover, as the food system is not geographically bounded, all places of human settlement, their demands and impacts have knock-on effects throughout the system, worldwide (Marsden 2013). Despite this, urban and rural affairs historically have been regarded as discrete disciplines, with the former being a locus of consumption and the latter of production (Dupuis and Goodman 2005). As local administrative boundaries often stop at the city limits, further discussion on the links between cities and periurban and rural areas is warranted.

The City Region Food System (CRFS) concept is an attempt to bridge the long-standing divide between urban and rural concerns (Dupuis and Goodman 2005; Cohen and Garrett 2010). In 2013, CRFSs were defined as encompassing:

> [...] a complex network of actors, processes and relationships to do with food production, processing, marketing and consumption that exist in a given geographical region that includes a more or less concentrated urban centre and its surrounding periurban and rural hinterland; a regional landscape across which flows of people, goods and ecosystem services are managed (www.cityregionfoodsystems.org).<fnref n="2" />

Local and regional provisioning is an operational facet linking urban consumers with rural producers via food value chains, but the intention is wider—to maximize ecological and socioeconomic links and to foster food system co-governance by both urban and regional actors (Jennings et al. 2015). In this way, CRFSs avoid falling into the ‘local trap’ that assumes local is an inherently good scale for action,

<footnote n="2">²Definition by a collaborative partnership of interested organizations.</footnote>
either by considering localisation of supply chains as an aim in itself or by failing to
explore the role of other scales in configuring urban food environments (Libman
2015; Born and Purcell 2006; Winter 2003).

However, while CRFS is a helpful concept that is being applied in empirical set-
tings, its applicability is nonetheless contingent on two factors: the situation of the
city within an agricultural basin; and the existence of regional institutional struc-
tures and their willingness to engage with the city.

Firstly, according to the definition, a ‘city region’ comprises an urban centre and
a periurban and rural hinterland, with provisioning links dependent on the latter
being a productive agricultural basin. The Dutch city of Rotterdam, with arable,
dairy, and greenhouse horticulture production in the surrounding province of South
Holland, is a good example of a CRFS (Van der Schans 2015). On the other hand,
La Paz (Bolivia), where the high elevation and low temperatures limit agricultural
production and most provisions are brought in from elsewhere (Velasco and De
Vrieze 2015), cannot be considered as a CRFS centre. Indeed, Braudel (1979)
points out that, historically, cities were not systematically established at the centre
of a productive region that could serve them, but rather access to trade routes—usu-
ally via a port—was crucial to the most powerful cities, allowing them to draw
provisions from elsewhere.

Secondly, co-governance between urban and regional actors can depend on the
existence of governmental and institutional structures at the regional level, and
political will within them. In the UK, England's regional layer of government was
dismantled by the coalition government that came to power in 2010. The Netherlands,
on the other hand, is divided into 12 regions with clear policy responsibilities, pro-
viding a framework for cities to engage with the wider region on food issues. In
France, meanwhile, the regions have expressed an interest in more territorialized
food systems and have suggested instruments for regional authorities to contribute
to sustainable food regions, such as regional marketing labels and technical or finan-
cial support (ARF 2014; Braine-Supkova and Gaspard 2015). This does not make
regions automatic vehicles for coordinated cross-boundary food policy, however. At
the metropolitan level, meanwhile, there is considerable potential for cooperation
across administrative boundaries. In the *Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole*, 31
municipalities are cooperating to develop a food strategy (see chapter “Reconciling
Sustainability Issues and Urban Policy Levers”). Similarly, in England, the emer-
gence of Greater Manchester as a pilot city region (following the demise of the
English regions) may enable integrated food policy implementation across a larger
area (Halliday 2015).

Urban Food Policy Levers and Constraints on Their Use

Alongside the broadly categorized aims, Table 1 also sets out levers and instruments employed by cities in pursuit of their aims.
The examples of Belo Horizonte, Medellín, Toronto and New York show that the levers and instruments to address an aim are not always limited to one policy area, but several can be employed together. This is because food is not the sole responsibility of a single local government department but different aspects are directly or indirectly handled by different teams (such as public health, economic development, planning, education, etc.). On the one hand, this means there is potential for a more powerful multi-pronged effort, such as in Toronto where food access interventions (e.g. subsidized mobile fruit and vegetable vans) are complemented by public health efforts to boost food literacy, and as a consequence demand for healthy food (Mah and Thang 2013). On the other hand, unless there is recognition of the cross-domain nature of food and a concerted effort towards coordination, there is a danger that each department will look no further than the implications on its own remit (Pothukuchi and Kaufman 1999).

Recognition of the cross-domain nature of food is increasingly seen as the best practice, although it is not yet ubiquitous. Coline Perrin and Christophe Soulard (2014) and Caroline Brand (2015) report that in France to date there is little recognition that food is a local policy area per se, or that food issues require concerted integrated action at the local level. A common intention of food policy councils<fnref n="3" /> that have emerged over the last 20 years in the Global North (particularly in English-speaking countries) is the intention to find and exploit synergies between different public sector areas involved with food (Wiskerke and Vilojoen 2012). One area often serves as a hook or entry point to gain initial local government buy-in in keeping with civic priorities. The initial framing of both the Toronto Food Policy Council in Canada and the London Food Board in the UK was public health but both maintained wider underlying policy objectives on food access, affordability, education and production. This undercurrent of cross-domain activity prevents issues being overlooked and enables them to be brought to the fore if priorities change (Blay-Palmer 2009; Mah and Thang 2013; Reynolds 2009; Morgan and Sonnino 2010).

These examples and best intentions notwithstanding, achieving synergies between policy areas is not always easy. Firstly, each area or department has its own procedures and ways of working (tacitly or explicitly agreed) and language that may not be understood in co-working situations. Departments do not always recognize the relevance and value of food to their core work, nor that food is a cross domain issue over which there is much potential for inter-departmental working (Wegener et al. 2013). Rigid line management structures can also limit the potential for senior staff to take part in strategic policy work with other departments (Yeatman 2003).

Secondly, the precise distribution of powers and responsibilities at the local level varies between national settings. The principle of subsidiarity (which has become a fundamental element in the functioning of the European Union since the early 1990s) holds that policies should be formulated and enacted at the most local level possible and higher levels should step in only if the required action cannot be

<footnote n="3">³Morgan (2014) counted 193 food policy councils in North America in 2012, while in the UK the term ‘food partnership’ is more prominent and some 40 food partnerships have been founded in local government areas in recent years.</footnote>
achieved. This seems to give local governments *carte blanche* to devise food policies as they see fit. However, the EU protocol on applying the principle of subsidiarity relates to EU institutions and Member States (European Union 2010), while there are only recommendations on the division of responsibilities between national and sub-national levels whereby each state can devise its own system (Council of Europe 1995). No ideal level is prescribed for each policy area because local authorities vary in size and resources.

Moreover, the role of local government and its leaders with regard to the national level differs between countries. In some, local government has full legislative power in locally-managed domains; in others it has the power to introduce a policy that is not the specific responsibility of another level or entity; while in others local government largely delivers services or commissions on behalf of the national level. A comparison of the powers of the mayors of New York and London with regard to healthy eating illustrates these differences. The Mayor of New York has regulatory powers that have enabled him to introduce restrictions on trans fats in fast food establishments and calorie labelling in chain restaurants (Libman 2015). His London counterpart has no legislative power and his public health remit is limited largely to advocating conducive policies at the borough level,<fnref n="4" /> and seeking voluntary measures (Halliday 2015; Morgan and Sonnino 2010). In France, cities lack the political weight of their European and American counterparts, with responsibility for food residing at the national or EU level (Perrin and Soulard 2014). Meanwhile, in North African countries, agricultural policies for food security are national rather than local (Soulard et al. 2015).

A third problem in the use of public sector levers is that options within various policy areas are subject to multilevel governance constraints. European public procurement policy is a prime example: while procurement for all locally-managed public services takes place locally, the EU public procurement directive stipulates that calls for tender may not specify preferred place of origin or use the word ‘local’ (Morgan and Sonnino 2008). Planning policy in England is a further example: each local government authority produces its own planning strategy which must be in keeping with the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). Consequently, although the London Borough of Waltham Forest introduced restrictions on new unhealthy fast food outlets near schools and playgrounds, NPPF removed the need for prospective fast food outlets to obtain permission to change the use of business premises, thus making Waltham Forests’ new policy hard to implement. Such barriers highlight the need for local government to engage with multiple levels and advocate conducive framing policies.

In light of the arbitrary application of the principle of subsidiarity, differing roles for local government with regard to the national level, and multilevel framing constraints, it is not possible to definitively identify which policy areas are best handled at which level. Planning and public procurement have been identified as two areas in which the local level has the greatest potential to address food issues (Sonnino 2014; Sonnino and Spayde 2014), but there are other policy areas related to food

<footnote n="4">⁴ London has 32 boroughs, each with its own local government.</footnote>
<table><caption>**Table 2** Food-related policy areas</caption><thead><tr><td>Policy area</td><td>Relevance to food</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Planning, infrastructure and urban development</td><td>Land use, location of food outlets/retail</td></tr><tr><td>Public transport and roads</td><td>Infrastructure for food distribution and retail market access</td></tr><tr><td>Local economic development</td><td>Supporting food businesses, job creation, development of skills</td></tr><tr><td>Local finance administration</td><td>Tax on food businesses, budgetary provision for services and subsidies</td></tr><tr><td>Social welfare services</td><td>Food aid (food vouchers and subsidies), emergency food provision</td></tr><tr><td>Public health</td><td>Diet-related preventive health, education and targeted campaigns</td></tr><tr><td>Education</td><td>Food skills and culture</td></tr><tr><td>Public procurement</td><td>Food served in public canteens and institutions</td></tr><tr><td>Environmental sustainability</td><td>CO<sub>2</sub> emissions from production and distribution, natural resource use, biodiversity preservation</td></tr><tr><td>Environmental health</td><td>Implementation of food safety regulations, environmental conditions</td></tr><tr><td>Waste management</td><td>Redistribution of surplus food, composting and recycling</td></tr></tbody></table>

where the local level may have a role, be it devising policy, interpreting/implementing policy from higher levels, or service provision. These are set out in Table 2.

Actors in each city are advised to reflect upon the applicable national model for local government and policy areas that can be leveraged, while acknowledging the constraints and barriers faced. By being realistic, they may find ways to remove the barriers (e.g. through negotiation, relationship building and subtle influence) or, where barriers are immutable, to identify creative workarounds to achieve the same results. These workarounds can include drawing on the resources, levers and instruments of civil society and private sector actors who support the objectives, but who are not subject to the same institutional constraints. The prospect of non-public sector levers and instruments calls for an analysis of the governance of city food policy initiatives.

## Involvement of Different Sectors and Respective Governance Models

While so far this chapter has focused on public policy to address food-related problems, this section discusses the involvement of civil society and the private sector. Three governance models, each with variations, are outlined. Over the last 30 years, the shift to governance (particularly in developed countries) has brought the private sector and civil society into the policy-making process. This should not be interpreted as meaning that the State is handing over power (Pierre and Peters 2003), but
rather than the State no longer ‘rows’ (i.e. delivers services or makes decisions uni-
laterally) but instead ‘steers’ using tools such as monitoring, cultural persuasion,
financing, and a reserved right to intervene (Stoker 2000). This shift has taken place
in every policy domain and means that the food system overall is not governed
solely by top-down regulations. It is subject to contested governance in which the
public and private sectors and civil society cooperate, but also compete for influ-
ence. However, the three sectors are not always perfectly represented when it comes
to food policy development and implementation at the local level.

There is general agreement that political buy-in to food policy at the local level is critical to achieve change (Orlando 2011; Schiff 2008). Many commentators have nevertheless highlighted the benefits of civil society working alongside local governments. In non-Anglo Saxon contexts, Perrin and Soulard (2014) underline the need to conduct studies on forms of civil society involvement in food policy and to assess their contribution. If a food policy council only involves the public sector with no civil society ballast, there is a danger it will be unable to propose policy changes to the system within which it operates. As noted above, civil society and private sector actors bring their own arsenals of resources and instruments to complement those of the public sector. Using these, they can exercise agency, i.e. “act consciously and, in so doing to attempt to realise his or her intentions” (Hay 2002, p. 94), so as to overcome barriers posed by public sector institutional frameworks, e.g. inhospitable policy framing in multilevel governance or immutable procedures and received language (Halliday 2015). Civil society involvement is a key principle of food policy councils, which are groups of actors from multiple sectors. The latter meet regularly and their activities include formulating and advocating policy approaches, raising awareness, knowledge brokerage, and monitoring progress. Civil society brings insight and energy (Derkzen and Morgan 2012), offers resilience in the face of electoral change (Wiskerke 2009; Morgan and Sonnino 2008), and can provide specialist food knowledge and experience (Wekerle 2004).

As for the private sector, almost all food passes through the hands of at least one private enterprise on its route from producer to consumer, yet Harper et al. (2009) point out that food businesses are often un- or under-represented in food policy groups, and suggest that if they are not engaged from the start it is difficult to bring them in later if decisions have already been made that are not seen to be in their interest. This poor representation of food businesses could be explained by the perception that local food policy is entirely opposed to the global food system operations, with aims and objectives that are incongruent with those of business. However, a change in business practices has repercussions throughout the supply chain. Hence, local food policy groups should ideally include diverse businesses of different sizes, values, and activities to be able to initiate effective system change (Halliday 2015).

Food policy councils are the first governance model for local food policy. As a minimum they include actors from the public and civil society sectors, but there is much internal diversity in how they are initiated and run. Some, such as Manchester Food Futures in the UK, were initiated via top-down processes, while others, like the London Food Programme, were formed through a combination of top-down and
bottom-up energy (Reynolds 2009). Where initiation is top-down, questions remain about when civil society and the private sector are to be brought in, who decides which organizations are eligible and on what criteria. If they join too late, they may struggle to achieve ownership of a preset agenda. The institutional positioning of food policy councils also varies. Some are hosted within local government structures, e.g. the Toronto Food Policy Council is embedded within the public health team (Blay-Palmer 2009). Others occupy an independent space outside local government, like the Bristol Food Policy Council which, nonetheless, still involves public sector actors (Carey 2013). Finally, the nature and degree of civic leaders’ commitment ranges from explicit mayoral support (as in London), to adoption of a food strategy or motion (as in Manchester), to providing budget or in-kind support such as meeting rooms or officers’ participation during working hours.

Despite the popularity of the food policy council model, it is by no means the only type of urban food policy intervention. A second type is found in some cities, where the intervention is formally rooted in a public mandate to take responsibility for the food system, albeit with input or practical contributions from civil society, the private sector, or universities and research institutes. In San Francisco in 2009, the then-Mayor Gavin Newsome issued an executive directive making the food system the explicit responsibility of the city government. In La Paz (Bolivia), the 2014 ‘Autonomous Municipal Act N°105 on Food Security’, the goal of which is to secure the right to food for all citizens, was prompted by campaigning by civil society groups. The benefit of high level mayoral commitment is that it enables (and often obliges) departments and agencies to review their food-related policies. Elsewhere, a local government entity has been set up to coordinate integration between food-related policy domains, as is the case with the Municipal Secretariat for Food Policy and Supply in Belo Horizonte, which engages the private sector and civil society over implementation (Rocha and Lessa 2009). As for universities, the development of a city-region agriculture and food production policy in Montpellier (France) has involved a team of researchers working alongside the public sector (Soulard et al. 2015; chapter “Reconciling Sustainability Issues and Urban Policy Levers”), while researchers from the University of Pisa (Italy), with the agreement of the provincial administration, initiated multisector discussions over developing a food plan for the city (Di Iacovo et al. 2013).

While a coordinating entity is helpful, it is not a prerequisite of interventions that have positive impacts across policy areas. For instance, the city council in Ourense (Spain) initiated an agricultural land-use policy of establishing urban orchards. This initiative was intended primarily to boost citizens’ education and employment skills using financial instruments to facilitate access to private land, but it has also brought documented environmental, social and economic benefits (Oursense City Council 2013). The London borough of Waltham Forest’s planning restrictions on unhealthy fast food outlets, as mentioned above, brings both public health and environmental benefits.

A third type of urban food policy initiative that is worthy of mention consists of civil society interventions with varying degrees of organization. In some cases, food activities are part of a wider social movement, such as Transition Towns through
<table><caption>**Table 3** Overall types and variations of urban food policy interventions</caption><thead><tr><td>Types</td><td>Variations</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Food policy council</td><td>Top-down or bottom-up initiatives (or both)<br>Hosted within local government or outside<br>Nature and extent of local government support</td></tr><tr><td>Formal public-sector mandate</td><td>Executive directive or law<br>Local government entity to coordinate integration of different areas<br>Individual policies with cross-policy domain implications</td></tr><tr><td>Civil society intervention</td><td>Part of a wider social movement<br>Set up by an established organization with funding<br>Guerrilla movement</td></tr></tbody></table>

which grassroots communities seek to build resilience in response to peak oil, climate change, and economic instability (Morgan 2009). In other cases, food projects are instigated by established organizations, usually upon receipt of funding. While such projects initially lack local government support, they might clinch it once they are established and yielding positive results. For instance, in Porto Alegre (Brazil), the bottom-up guerrilla gardening initiative of planting fruit trees has been accepted and maintained by municipal workers (Abelman 2015). This case is reminiscent of Incredible Edible Todmorden in the UK, which started off as community movement and has earned the support of public bodies while serving as a template for integrating agriculture into city environments around the world (Warhurst 2012).

The three types of urban food policy described above and their variations are summarized in Table 3.

The governance model for an urban food policy initiative often does not come down to a choice by the initiator, and it would be inappropriate to recommend a one size fits all model to be universally applied to all places and circumstances. Rather, different models are suitable and possible in different settings, depending on variables such as local government structure, political will, and social capital levels. The high social capital levels in Bristol (UK) have enabled the Bristol Food Policy Council to secure some influence over policy making despite residing outside of local government. Meanwhile, in Manchester—a city with a relatively conservative culture—the Food Futures programme could not have operated effectively had it not been embedded within the Manchester City Council (Halliday 2015).

## Ways to Assess the Success of Urban Food Policies

The success of an intervention will ultimately need to be assessed irrespective of the governance model, aims, levers and instruments employed. This means coming up with a definition of the success of a food policy. However, it is hard to judge the impact of a policy initiative unless indicators and evaluation criteria are defined at the start (Sonnino 2013; Burgan and Winne 2012), especially because food-related
issues are complex and there can be non-food contributing causes or mitigating fac-
tors. For example, if the aim is to improve public health or reduce negative environ-
mental impacts using public procurement as a lever, a measureable indicator could
be the number of school canteens or other public bodies subscribed to a certification
scheme. If the aim is to improve the food economy using more local food sourcing
as a lever, indicators could be the land area devoted to food production, profits of
local food enterprises, or their ability to remain in business. A problem with indica-
tors is that they are retrospective and require a period of time before success can be
measured, at which point it could be too late to deal with any barriers. One way of
overcoming this problem is to assess the process of establishing a governance body,
while determining its role and mission and implementation as it is taking place
(Burgan and Winne 2012).

Kenneth Dahlberg (1995) also offered a different interpretation of success by
asking, “has everything been done that was possible in that context?”. This high-
lights that the impact of policy efforts is dependent upon circumstances and subject
to constraints within the local policy environment and in multilevel framing of pol-
icy domains. It is prescient of the strategic urban governance capacity (SUGC)
approach employed by Wendy Mendes (2008) and Brent Mansfield (Mansfield and
Mendes 2013) to explore factors that can affect the capacity of local government to
develop and implement a food strategy (see this chapter, Box 1).

Another way of judging the success of an initiative is to assess its wider impact
on the food system, with scaling up leading to reconfiguration of food provisioning
arrangements and impacts outside the boundaries of the city or its immediate sur-
roundings. Given the current enthusiasm for urban food policy and CRFS, there is a
danger of giving the impression that food system problems can be solved by cities
alone. Roberta Sonnino (2014) has underlined the ambitious claims by several cities
of ‘world leadership’ with regard to urban food strategies in the Global North,
which imply not only that they are among the first to have a comprehensive food
strategy but also that they have the means to bring about larger-scale food system
change. Actually, inhospitable multilevel governance can present barriers to larger-
scale change (Barling et al. 2002) and can hamper the ability of an initiative to flour-
ish in the long term (Morgan et al. 2006). By and large, multilevel food policy
remains predominantly neoliberal, albeit with highly contested governance. To date
there is little evidence of larger scale change prompted by any city’s food-related
policy, with two notable exceptions: Belo Horizonte’s *Fome Zero* (zero hunger)
strategy, which was instrumental in the institutionalization of the right to food at the
national level (Rocha and Lessa 2009); and New York’s trans fats directive, which
prompted the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to propose new rules that would
eliminate trans fats in the US food supply (Libman et al. 2015).

Possible pathways to higher level influence include the involvement in local level
food policy of actors who have political influence at other levels (e.g. public figures
or big business representatives), and greater cooperation between cities. There is
already evidence of cities learning from each other and sharing experiences, whilst
remaining alert to the governance differences that limit direct policy transfer, as
seen in the exchanges between London (UK) and Toronto (Canada) (Blay-Palmer
Box 1: Strategic Urban Governance Capacity Concept and Urban Food Policy Implementation Factors

Wendy Mendes

The strategic urban governance capacity (SUGC) concept, as theorized by urban planning scholar Patsy Healey (2002), can be traced to the shift from government to governance, resulting in a blurring of distinctions between the State, market and civil society (Harvey 1989). Beyond this commonality, SUGC can be distinguished by its focus on “the creation of meanings for the city which make a contribution to creating and sustaining an imaginative, shared collective resource, which is richer and more inclusive” (Healey 2002: 1778). In this sense, SUGC is a lens through which fundamental questions can be asked about who and what cities are for, and who has the power to shape their trajectory (ibid.: 1779). The SUGC concept is productive for a number of reasons with regard to urban food policies and other complex sustainability challenges.

Firstly, it shows the extent to which impulses for change must be imagined before transformations can be achieved. This means that city governance analyses must foster attentiveness not only to governmental arrangements, but equally to wider urban concepts that new social and environmental mandates such as food policy imply. Although resilient food systems are among the most ancient of urban concerns, the relatively recent re-emergence of food on urban agendas puts a spotlight on assumptions about what counts as a ‘legitimate’ urban system, who participates in defining food system challenges, and the ways in which solutions are co-created. This is at least partly due to the unusually high number of stakeholders associated with food movements. These include coalitions concerned with ecological protection, public health, nutrition, anti-poverty, social inclusion, community capacity-building, participatory decision making and economic development. Although not without internal tensions, such a broad landscape of perspectives can enhance dialogue—and imaginings—on contemporary city-building and civic engagement.

Secondly, the SUGC notion humanizes governmental institutions as sites of urban transformation and reveals that governance and policy making are deeply social processes (While et al. 2010; Mendes 2007, 2008; Mansfield and Mendes 2013). As Healey argues, no one agency has the power to produce the city, be it materially or symbolically (2002: 1785). An examination of governmental institutions through the lens of SUGC makes it possible to envision the potential to incubate new, sometimes radical, ideas and practices involving traditional and nontraditional stakeholders. These practices can cast light on city governance as “a border zone of trial and error” in which those involved assume new and expected roles (Appadurai 2001: 33–34).

(continued)
**Box 1:** (continued)

Another way to describe such an approach is what Dana O'Donovan and Noah Rimland Flower (2013) call “adaptive strategy”, referring to the shift away from long held assumptions about strategy and planning as predictable, hierarchical and linear. In recognition of the complexity of our current economic, political and social systems, O'Donovan and Rimland Flower argue that the adaptive strategy allows for iterative problem solving characterized by collective decision making, rapid prototyping and experimentation (ibid.). Where urban food systems are concerned, the rise of large-scale urban farming, food business incubators, community food hubs, comprehensive municipal food strategies and other food-centred innovations requires precisely this type of expanded capacity for experimentation and ability to test new solutions. Food system innovations often take place under conditions of ambiguous regulation, typically have few precedents, and involve the participation of non-traditional stakeholders. These innovations contribute to and are propelled by new understandings of governance, planning and policy making embodied in notions such as SUGC and adaptive strategy.

Thirdly, building on expanded of strategic planning notions, a SUGC approach to urban food policy disrupts institutional and sectoral silos that can impede systemic responses to complex sustainability challenges. As Healey writes, strategic planning efforts based on SUGC principles, “move from a position *above and apart*...to institutional locations *within the flow*...of urban life (Healey 2002: 1786). Results can include a challenge to centralized decision making, an increase in cross-agency collaboration, and a shake up of institutional silos (ibid.: 1787). For instance, in his analysis of the London food strategy, Reynolds (2009) examines the intention by the City of London to take “a holistic view of the food that the city produces, stores, delivers, sells, consumes and wastes” (ibid.: 417). Reynolds argues that the diversity of food issues addressed in London’s strategy, combined with the wide range of agencies and sectors involved, is largely responsible for its continued relevance and success (ibid.: 417–418). He writes:

> [...] rather than being split into a myriad of different silos, we believe a holistic approach is necessary: where decisions are made that not only consider the healthiness of a particular food offering but also its environmental impact, where social and cultural concerns are considered as much as economic concerns (ibid.: 424).

This aspect of SUGC raises a host of questions related to the implementation of responses to cross-cutting issues such as food policy. There is no one size fits all answer to this challenge, however a growing body of research examining the implementation of municipal food policy mandates and comprehensive

(continued)
**Box 1:** (continued)

municipal food strategies is building a rich knowledge base of insights (Mendes 2008; Rocha and Lessa 2010; Mansfield and Mendes 2013; Hatfield 2013; MacRae and Donahue 2013). Factors commonly explored in these studies include the role of the institutional location of food policy processes, staff and budget support, the degree of integration into normative mechanisms, champions supporting a new policy area, overall management, and the extent of meaningful partnerships with non-governmental actors.

Overall, SUGC clearly offers a useful lens that encourages new approaches to emergent issues such as food policy. Taken in conjunction with other tools and conceptual frameworks, SUGC can enhance the understanding of the strengths and challenges of taking a holistic systems approach to urban food policy and planning that is coordinated and collaborative.

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2009). New networks, such as the Sustainable Food Cities Network in the UK, and the 2015 Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, signed by over 100 cities around the world, can give cities a louder collective voice with regard to food policy. The local level could thus have more influence over higher levels of food system governance.

## Conclusion: Mobilizing Methodological Tools and Drawing Up a New Research Agenda

This chapter has drawn attention to several important considerations for cities that seek to take responsibility for food. Firstly, it is helpful to identify pressing issues in the local context, as they can inform the overarching aims of food-related policy that resonate with top local government priorities. Secondly, the local context, including powers and capabilities that exist at the local level but are framed by multilevel governance, determines what can be done with respect to food and which levers can be utilized to achieve the aims. Thirdly, it is important to explore complementary levers and instruments across policy domains, as well as civil society and private sector contributions. There is a need for methodological and process tools that go beyond a check-box approach in order to assist cities in devising food policies that are appropriate and realistic within the local political economy. Failure to take the political economy into account is likely to impair the policy development and implementation process.

In addition to these lessons, this chapter has also identified two important issues concerning cities’ food-related strategies. Firstly, questions have been raised about the appropriateness of cities seeking to (re)localise food provisioning, either as a specific aim or as a lever towards achieving other aims, if the city is not located within an agricultural basin and has historically forged longer-distance trade links. Secondly, there are questions over how far the local level can really contribute to systemic change, beyond just impacting food experiences within the urban setting and the immediate vicinity.

These issues each signal a possible new direction for the role and influence of cities within the food system. Regarding (re)localisation, there may be potential for cities to relocalize governance and control over supply chains instead of (or in addition to) territorial relocalization of food provisioning. This could be done through mutually beneficial partnerships or twinning with nearby or remote agricultural areas, investing in their production capacity, setting standards and offering a guaranteed market. There is a need for research into the conditions that would facilitate such innovation and any practical and ideological barriers that could arise. Test grounds are also required. These could include an initial focus on direct relationships to procure food for public canteens, or the extension and adaptation of current models to govern direct trading principles, such as Fairtrade and buyers’ cooperatives.
As for cities' influence at higher policy levels, on-going research is needed on the potential of the combined efforts of many cities to strengthen their collective voice. In particular, this includes monitoring the impact of initiatives such as the 2015 Milan Urban Food Policy Pact on the international food policy dialogue. Another possible way to exert a more systemic influence could be to seek and obtain buy-in of actors or organizations that are influential in multilevel governance but un- or under-represented in local food policy. These actors and organizations include major food businesses, lobby groups and political figures. To this end, research is needed to gain insight into the barriers to engaging these actors, such as accepted framings and definitions of sustainability and food security, accepted norms and ways of working, and the governance structures to which they are bound.

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<figure><img src="image_10.png" /></figure>

Julie Debru and Caroline Brand with Vanessa Armendáriz, Stefano Armenia, Alberto Stanislao Atzori, Nevin Cohen, and Paul James (Contributions)

The emergence of food strategies and policies in many cities worldwide (chapter “Urbanization Issues Affecting Food System Sustainability; Nicolas Bricas”) has prompted researchers to investigate associated building, support and assessment processes. In the light of the limits of industrialized food systems, these strategies and policies are driven by the need for a transition towards more sustainable food systems. This chapter looks at the conceptual frameworks used by researchers to assess urban food system sustainability.

## Diversity and Complexity

The main problem currently facing researchers and public, private and community actors is the need to account for the complexity of the issue, including the extent of stakeholder involvement, policy areas and the scope of governance and action (Brand 2015). Until recently, the food issue has been handled on a sectoral basis at international, European and national levels. The dimensions of this issue have been slotted into separate ‘silos’, so it has only been dealt with regard to its agricultural, commercial, normative health security and, more recently, public health aspects (Brand 2015). In 2007, Guillaume Dhérissard and Dominique Viel underlined the risk of vulnerability and perverse effects linked to segmentation of the food issue (productivity, health security, ecology, marketing, etc.), which could lead to disruptive situations. They pointed out the need to consider food as a complex social phenomenon with a complete change of approach in favour of sustainable urban food systems and governance.

J. Debru · C. Brand (✉)

UNESCO Chair in World Food System, Montpellier SupAgro, Montpellier, France
e-mail: carolinebrand@hotmail.fr
Moreover, the first report of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) called for a more holistic view of food systems (IPES-Food 2015). They proposed to look at food systems as a network of complex interactions between actors and system processes, and as a network of policies and regulatory frameworks. The complexity paradigm suggested by Edgar Morin highlights that a *whole* is not simply the sum of its parts—the complexity binds the parts to the *whole* and the parts to each other. This paradigm provides a structure for our thoughts on sustainable urban food systems. It is thus understood, for instance, that urban agriculture considerations cannot be limited to a nurturing approach, but should also include issues pertaining to education, social ties, aesthetics, biodiversity conservation, etc. (Duchemin et al. 2010; Duchemin 2013).

That said, the hardest part is to determine how to identify levers that could improve the sustainability of food systems based on a holistic view, and how to take the complexity, diversity and totality of sustainable urban food systems into account. This chapter successively outlines ways of dealing with this complexity.

Scientists are addressing this complexity by developing conceptual frameworks and representation models to encompass various aspects of sustainable urban food systems within a common vision. These analytical and insight-generating approaches are associated with forms of representation and single- or multi-disciplinary conceptual references (geography, political science, agronomy, economy, sociology, etc.). They offer different ways of identifying problems, finding solutions and enhancing the sustainability of urban food systems, while mobilizing practical tools for their assessment (phosphorus and nitrogen flows, food kilometres, food desert mapping, food footprint, carbon footprint, etc.).

There are several possible integrated ways of dealing with the issue of sustainable urban food systems, by focusing on: the food system, food sectors, social practices, policy areas or instruments, sustainability issues, spatial representations, etc.

These conceptual frameworks are not always explicitly geared towards promoting sustainable urban food policymaking. They are also used to gain insight into and describe urban food systems, in addition to building simulation models and developing approaches to assess the impacts of specific policies, projects or initiatives.

Through this diversity of approaches, a range of different solutions may be proposed for building more sustainable food systems. Combinations of approaches and tools may be able to effectively account for the complexity of the sustainable urban food issue—it is not necessary to build a widely applicable blanket framework integrating all approaches for this task. This notion of arrangements and combinations is common in many research fields that address the sustainability issue, including nutrition through studies on individual dietary diversity and its impacts, and economics via combined policy assessments (Esnouf et al. 2011). As diversity is now recognized as being a resilience factor, a range of combined approaches should be considered as a way to achieve more sustainable urban food systems.

In this chapter we thus present three types of approach that we feel are effective for drawing up sustainable urban food policies: systemic approaches that strive to incorporate sustainability issues in the food system analysis; approaches developed
for analysing and building sustainable cities while addressing food issues; and
finally a sustainable development approach to urban issues and food.

# Food System Approaches

## Systemic and Modelling Approaches

Systemic approaches have been used to understand and describe how food systems function (Rastoin and Ghersi 2010). When implemented by agrifood economists, these approaches are based on a functional view of food, describing a chain of operations and sectors (production, processing, distribution, consumption disposal/recycling, regulation). The food system has thus been defined as:

> [...] an interdependent network of actors (businesses, financial institutions, public and private bodies) located in a given geographical area (region, State and plurinational area), while directly or indirectly participating in the creation of flows of goods and services geared towards fulfilling the food needs of several consumer groups locally or outside of the considered area (Rastoin and Ghersi 2010: 19).

The focus here is essentially on how the supply is organized.

Rationales have changed in favour of cyclical views, with the development of the circular economy concept, along with growing awareness that the waste produced by our food system is a resource. Analysis and assessment tools have thus been developed to gain greater insight into how territorial food system cycles work. For instance, on the basis of industrial ecology research, territorial ecology has given rise to the territorial metabolism concept, which makes it possible to get a snapshot of territorial food supplies: "[...] the analysis of material (raw), energy and substance flows, as well as the measurement of environmental footprints are concepts and methods that all contribute to this [territorial metabolism] characterization" (Barles 2014: 2).

Territories are seen as living organisms based on a 'lifecycle' rationale focused on inflows, 'digestion' and outflows (chapter "Urbanization Issues Affecting Food System Sustainability; Nicolas Bricas", Box 1.1). As Barles points out in her study on the urban metabolism of Paris, the global approach to flows is also interesting because it highlights the upstream and downstream dimensions (fertilization and waste management) of the food issue, which have yet to be sufficiently accounted for in thinking and initiatives:

> It reveals the need for new public policies, especially concerning waste management—to reduce construction material imports—and urban planning—to reduce their consumption. In addition, more research and the development of action plans to link urban and agricultural policies to improve the use of urban fertilizers and to favour local food supply are required (Barles 2009: 911).

Systemic approaches focus on the relationships between system components, their interactions and interconnections. For example, the model developed by
Vanessa Armendáriz and colleagues reveals the interdependence between the differ-
ent components of food supply and distribution systems. This model has a system
perspective and applies the system dynamics method to gain insight into food sup-
ply systems. Although developed to assess situations in developing countries, the
model is otherwise especially interesting because it offers a representation that
sheds light on the overall functioning of a given food system in interaction with oth-
ers (habitat, movement, economy, technology, etc.). It shows the linkages and recip-
rocal influences between these systems, as well as cause-effect and carryover
relationships between the different components. This facilitates identification of
indirect causes or effects that may not be foreseen at the outset. It also serves as a
research tool to simulate the impacts of policies targeting certain levers on the entire
food system.

*A Systems Approach to Urban Food Supply and Distribution Systems<fnref n="1" />*

Vanessa Armendáriz, Stefano Armenia, Alberto Stanislao Atzori

This section presents a framework to gain a greater understanding of food supply and distribution systems (FSDS). The latter are described using system thinking (ST) and system dynamics (SD) approaches to highlight how the identification of FSDS feedback structures can guide policymaking to meet urban food needs

A system perspective implies the presence of interconnected elements to fulfil a
function or an objective over a given time period (Meadows 2008). Those elements
can be physical or informative. When observing food systems, interrelationships
may be detected between different elements involved in food production, supply,
processing, distribution and consumption activities. A systemic and dynamic analy-
sis can help gain insight into food system feedback loops and accumulation pro-
cesses in urban environments. Accumulation processes determine changes in critical
resources and drivers of food production and distribution, and are essential for
assessing their sustainability.

What Are System Dynamics (SD)?

SD techniques may be used to assess a system structure, characterized by feedbacks
among its parts. The system behaviour over time is the result of the system feedback
structure, which can be qualitatively conceptualized through causal loop diagrams
(CLD). Causal maps (or CLD) may be drafted to map feedback within and across

<footnote n="1">¹The authors would like to thank the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO/AGS – Rome, Italy) for providing valuable information and prior knowledge on the FAO FSDS Framework of Analysis, and for precious help in building the revised SD framework.</footnote>
interacting subsystems. Two kinds of loops are studied on the basis of their
characteristics:

1. Reinforcing: self-reinforcing loops. This implies that the system grows exponen-
tially if these loops are dominant or the sole ones in the system.

2. Balancing (B): self-correcting loops that counteract change. Balancing loops seek equilibrium.

The system dynamics (SD) arise from the interacting complex network of these
two kinds of loops (Sterman 2012). The SD can be analyzed through simulation
after building a stock and flow diagram (SFD), also referred to as an SD quantitative
model. The model formalization consists of describing, through an SFD, involving
the presence of differential equations, how the system variables are interconnected
and how the accumulation processes are determined by flow changes that alter the
state of the system levels (or stocks).

System Dynamics (SD) Applied to Study Urban Food Systems

SD modeling is an iterative process to get a better understanding of the system (Ghaffarzadegan et al. 2011). As shown in Fig. 4.1, the modeling process requires the identification and definition of the problem. The overall system conceptualization results in a qualitative or quantitative model formalization, which often

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 4.1** Overview of the SD modeling process. (Zock 2004, adapted from Richardson and Pugh 1981)</figcaption></figure>
improves our initial understanding of the system. The simulation model enables assessment of the model validity with empirical data, testing policy alternatives and gaining insight to increase the likelihood of performing a good policy analysis.

An example of the application of the SD method to study urban food systems is the FSDS framework setting model (Fig. 4.2) created on the basis of a detailed study leading to the publication of the Methodological and Operational Guide to Understand FSDSs (Aragrande and Argenti 2001) and complementary FAO documents (Argenti 1999a; b; Balbo et al. 2000; FAO 2000). The aim of this work was to get an overall understanding of urban food systems. This model was designed on the basis of the dynamics that generally prevail in developing and transitional countries. In the modelling phase, we decided to not include the characteristics of developed cities. This approach, in fact, required some simplification of the first detailed FSDS model (Armendáriz et al. 2015a) in order to capture—at an aggregated level, while maintaining its validity—the main system interactions, including non-food system issues.

In Fig. 4.2, blue arrows indicate a positive causal effect of an independent variable change on the dependent variable, i.e. when an independent variable increases or decreases, the dependent variable changes in the same direction. The red arrows indicate a negative causal effect among independent and dependent variables, i.e. when an independent variable increases the dependent variable decreases. The bold blue arrow represents the main question addressed in the FAO guide, i.e. “how can the urban food needs of a growing population be met?” The main feedback struc-

<figure><img src="image_12.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 4.2** FSDS framework setting model</figcaption></figure>
tures are identified and named according to their function in the system: B1 Territory carrying capacity, B2 Food system organization, B3 Ecological footprint, B4 Food gap, B5 FSDS pressures on urban space, B6 Population growth impact on food demand and urban space, B7 Urbanization impact on economy and food demand, B8 Effects of technology on FSDS efficiency, B9 Urban planning and market administration, B10 Waste management reduction, B11 Food system efficiency, R1 Urban growth, R2 Economic growth impact on urban populations, R3 Employment and food demand, R4 Technology development, and R5 Food demand effect on employment policy.

The Urban growth (R1) system loop represents the feedback between the urban population and the urban space, which is a self-reinforcing relationship. Urban population growth increases the need for new infrastructure and urban space, meanwhile urban growth functions as a population attractor (World Bank 1999). The Economic growth impact on urban populations (R2) loop explains an additional self-reinforcing dynamic observed in developing and transition countries, i.e. economic growth in cities increases the rural population migration rate, in turn increasing the labour force for economic activities (UNDP 1999; Waibel and Schmidt 2000). Conversely, developed countries have different urban growth dynamics due to their different economic development patterns (Kastner et al. 2012).

The impact of urban growth may be noted in land-use changes, increased pollution and changes in non-renewable resource availability (Forrester 1970). This could be explained by the Territory carrying capacity (B1) of the system, which represents the maximum limit for continuing to produce or supply raw materials given the extent of resource depletion (Brenner 2014).

The relationship between urban space for markets and food logistics forms a balancing loop called the Food system organization (B2). Land devoted to urban activities (housing, services) reduces the space available for food markets and roads. Meanwhile, in the long-term, an increase in road coverage leads to an increase in urban agglomerations, thereafter increasing merchandise transport times and thus distribution costs (Aragrande and Argenti 2001). The FSDS Ecological footprint (B3) is explained by the environmental impacts of food production, processing, distribution and consumption activities involving renewable and non-renewable resource use, waste and pollution (Cordell et al. 2009; Ericksen 2008). The FSDS Pressures on urban space (B5) loop indicates that food system activities are only possible after urban space use and resource consumption issues have been addressed. The resource competition relationship between activities could lead to resource overconsumption, representing a risk for both the food system and the urban system.

Food system business revenues ensure economic growth, while the resulting employment opportunities provide income for the community, therefore increasing food demand at the market level. These relationships are represented by the Employment and food demand (R3) loop. The relationship between the food demand at the market level and food production and distribution activities is described by the Food gap (B4). Food production and distribution management deficiencies or even a resource crisis in the system could decrease the urban food supply and increase the food gap (Hanjra and Qureshi 2010; Pimentel and Pimentel 2007).
The Population growth impact on food demand and urban space (B6) represents the food demand linked with population growth, which boosts food production and distribution processes. However, population growth also requires an increase in urban space and infrastructure, which in turn leads to urban growth that attracts populations (Ehrlich and Holdren 1971; Waibel and Schmidt 2000). Another external balancing loop, i.e. the Urbanization impact on economic growth and food demand (B7), was discovered after assessing the population impact on economic growth. Employment increases income, thus increasing the food demand, while economic growth increases urban growth, which will boost the food production and distribution process, leading to competition with other industrial activities and housing for space and infrastructure (Allen and Sanglier 1978; Batty 2008; Pumain et al. 2015).

Indirect effects of the food market on economic growth and technological improvement are accounted for by the Technology development (R4) loop (Boserup et al. 1983). Enhancement of the food supply chain efficiency depends on the organization and technology levels applied to food production and processing, as explained by the Effects of technology on FSDS efficiency (B8) loop.

## System Dynamics (SD) to Enhance Urban Food Policy

The results of a detailed analysis of FAO recommendations to policymakers in developing countries highlighted the target of improving food availability at the market level (Armendáriz et al. 2015a). Policy proposals were directly stimulated by variations in food demand. However, the FSDS framework (Fig. 4.2)—by identifying important interrelationships among urban elements and providing an aggregated view of the urban food system structure—revealed the following insight regarding the effectiveness of urban policies geared towards meeting actual food needs.

The urban food demand differs from the actual amount of food required in a city. The socioeconomic conditions determine the extent to which people are able to use their income to fulfil their food needs. Therefore a sound urban food policy should aim at reducing urban poverty levels. Economic growth and employment are needed to ensure access to food (Zezza and Tasciotti 2010; Von Braun 1995). The Food demand effect on employment policy (R5) loop explains how income is directly related to food consumption in terms of amount and quality. The socioeconomic status of the urban population is also closely related to health problems such as malnutrition and obesity. The impact of economic development on diet and health changes should be taken into account when planning interventions (McLaren 2007; Popkin 2001).

The Food system efficiency (B11) can be boosted by increasing the technology level used in food production and processing activities. Natural resource consumption is closely related to the efficiency of supply chains, consumer lifestyles and waste disposal processes. Environmental sustainability and urban metabolism indicators should be taken into account when designing food policies for rural and urban areas. Excessive use of natural resources due to the growth of human activities (i.e. in terms of both supply chains and consumption) could deplete system inputs and put the viability of the system at risk (Giampietro et al. 2013).
Waste reduction and management (B10) policies can improve the supply chain efficiency and reduce pollution. B10 and B11 structures represent balancing feed-backs that aim at increasing food supply by tackling urban inefficiencies and negative environmental impacts, while also reducing the urban food gap (Godfray et al. 2010; Parfitt et al. 2010).

Food policy and regulations (administrative protocols, regulations and laws) impact the quality of food to which communities have access. Different policy recommendations should be listed for the processing, distribution or consumption of different foods based on their core properties (high and low quality standards, prices, brands, food product lifecycles and availability of substitute products). For example, perishable and nonperishable foods have very different characteristics related to their lifecycle. Processing, distribution and consumption processes regarding these foods have constraints related to the available infrastructure, urban spatial organization, business logistics, consumer preferences, health risks, etc. (Beske et al. 2014). Apart from delays and side effects in some special food chains, there is a risk of causing urban food policy failures. For example, dairy products need a well developed refrigeration system, while an improvement in the storage capacity for dairy products would not be worthwhile if the distribution processes are limited by an absence of roads or by normal urban congestion and traffic, which would cause distribution delays.

Urban planning should be considered to optimize FSDS organization by setting up an effective food distribution infrastructure able to support both growing populations and the food gap (Pothukuchi and Kaufman 1999; Pothukuchi 2004; Born and Purcell 2006). The Urban planning and market administration (B9) loop considers key areas for policy intervention. These areas are related to urban spatial management and innovations, urban density and congestion, adequate roads and planned city allocation of formal and informal markets according to the urban population distribution and their socioeconomic characteristics. Loops B1, B2, R1, B5 highlight the indirect effects of such urban planning policies.

Preliminary outcomes from the studies on the application of the SD methodology to the understanding of FSDS (Armendáriz et al. 2015a, b, c) underlined that improving food system operations was not enough to cope with expected urban population growth, especially in developing countries. However, it turned out that urban population growth was not the main problem. The increase in urbanization processes is what actually causes the greatest pressure on food system support structures due to their impacts on land use patterns and their attraction for migrant populations and conurbations.

## The Systems Approach for Food Policies in a Nutshell

A systemic view helps identify relevant issues beyond those related to food and which are often overlooked in urban food system analyses. The system dynamics (SD) method enables us to gain greater insight into interconnections between elements from which the structure of food systems can be analysed. Understanding
how food systems work can support decision makers in identifying the actual prob-
lems and in formulating better policies to solve them, rather than just tackling the
symptoms. Simulation exercises can even enable testing of different policies in a
virtual environment. The example illustrated in this work has shown that it is essen-
tial to assess the environment in which FSDS are embedded. Understanding how
the city is related to various physical or material issues (resources, technology,
economy) is essential to gain insight into the origins of system pressures, while
identifying possible intervention points for sustainability policies. The limitations
of the FSDS model presented in Fig. 4.2 include: the focus on the FSDS structure
and urban dynamics in developing and transition countries, especially megacity
trends; the fact that the model was built on the basis of the FAO guide, with the aim
of understanding FSDS in developing countries, and; the model’s high level of
abstraction, with the FSDS framework still being a qualitative approach to urban
food systems. More comprehensive and robust policies are possible by integrating
different methodologies in urban food system analyses, including agent-based mod-
elling (ABM), structural network analysis (SNA), and geographical information
systems (GIS).

Adaptive System

Systemic and modeling approaches provide an overview of the state of food sys-
tems, especially regarding the food supply organization and functioning mecha-
nisms. However, as highlighted in the previous conclusions, these approaches must
be combined with other tools to be able to gain insight into the full complexity of
sustainable urban food systems.

For instance, it is hard to incorporate shifting uncertainties and dynamics related
to stakeholders’ practices into modelling approaches, but territorial ecology stud-
ies—at the crossroads between systemic and modelling analyses and more socially-
oriented analyses on stakeholders (Barles 2010)—may help overcome this problem.
Moreover, Debuisson (2014) combined a quantitative material and energy flow
approach with a more qualitative approach that included role playing and modes of
stakeholder interaction in the organization of these flows in order to analyse food
and energy systems and understand how sustainable territorial dynamics become
anchored. Approaches that stem from the complexity paradigm focus on ‘adaptive
systems’, as opposed to ‘deterministic systems’ (end states) whose behaviour can be
predicted (Cloutier 2013). In an adaptive system, the same stimulus can produce
two different behaviours since they are dependent on the relationships between
elements and not on the individual rationales of these elements. Hence, this approach
can account for the fact that the same stimulus could trigger different reactions
depending on multiple factors such as time, desire, humour, personal history, hun-
ger, etc. This complex adaptive systems approach also helps us gain a more dynamic
understanding of how urban food systems work.
This illustrates the advantage of combining the systemic approaches presented here with approaches that help gain insight into the practices and action capacities of system actors (who are linked with the sociopolitical, human, historical and cultural setting) as a way to grasp the complexity and sustainability of urban food systems.

## Territorial Food Systems

A territorial view of food systems has more recently developed, particularly via the globally renowned city region food systems (CRFS) concept<fnref n="2" /> and the territorial food system (TFS) concept<fnref n="3" /> developed in France, both of which encompass the territory and agrifood sector concepts (Rastoin 2015). They are in keeping with literature that has emerged since the outset of the new millennium regarding the development of so-called ‘alternative’, ‘regional’ and ‘local’ food systems to better address sustainability challenges (Kneafsey 2010; Feenstra 1997, 2002; Reagan 2007; Hendrickson and Heffernan 2002).

These new concepts place the food system in a political, cultural, historical, agricultural and landscape setting. They contend that urban regions (a city associated with a more or less extensive supralocal area) have a key role to play in governance and in enhancing food system sustainability. These concepts reflect the hypothesis that a territorial approach could help solve some of the problems outlined in chapter “Urbanization Issues Affecting Food System Sustainability; Nicolas Bricas”. They provide solutions for the issue of detachment (geographical, cognitive, economic) between urban and rural citizens, consumers and producers.

CRFS offer better integration of urban and rural issues regarding food supply through strengthened relationships between these two spaces (Jennings et al. 2015). Without simply advocating food autonomy or ‘localism’ as a blanket solution, territorialization of the food system concept has been put forward as a way to regain control of a system that eludes us in its global scope. The aim is to build a comple-

<footnote n="2">²A city region food system is defined as: “the complex network of actors, processes and relationships to do with food production, processing, marketing and consumption that exist in a given geographical region that includes a more or less concentrated urban centre and its surrounding periurban and rural hinterland; a regional landscape across which flows of people, goods and eco-system services are managed.” (Jennings et al. 2015)</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³A territorial food system is defined as: “a consistent set of agrifood chains located in a geographical area of regional dimension. This concept focuses on maximizing the local integration of sectors as opposed to long globalized agrifood chains” (Rastoin 2015). In line with the mandate of the United Regions Organization (ORU Fogar), in the framework of the International Year of Family Farming, the Association of Regions of France published the Declaration of Rennes for Territorial Food Systems (TFS). This declaration underpins the position of the association in favour of promoting initiatives to entrench agrifood systems and their defense in local national and international public policies.</footnote>
mentary alternative to the agroindustrial model that prevails with regard to food systems (Rastoin 2015).

These approaches mainly aim to encourage urban governments to account for food in their policymaking, in addition to the impacts of their policies beyond the territories they administer. They conceptually contribute to gaining greater insight into scaling issues by suggesting that multiscale food challenges should be taken into account locally.

## Sustainable City Approaches

The territorial approach to food systems dovetails with other sustainable city planners' approaches. The food issue has, since the beginning of the new millennium, been placed back on the urban agenda of developers (Pothukuchi and Kaufman 2000). These approaches tackle urban food systems by taking spatial occupancy and organization or individuals and their practices into consideration—a viewpoint that complements that of the systemic approach.

## Sustainable City Planning

The sustainable development target was promptly taken up by cities to such an extent that an 'urban shift' has been noted with regard to urban territorialization (Emelianoff 2007). Sustainable city concepts, indicators and models have been developing since the 1980s, in addition to the emblematic United Nations Agenda 21 action plans for sustainable development.

Sustainable city thinkers recognize the need for a change to a more sustainable and resilient urban system. Problems facing cities are not the specific problems identified in chapter “Urbanization Issues Affecting Food System Sustainability; Nicolas Bricas” but may be approached via the broader sustainable development concept, which is focused on concerns such as climate change mitigation, air, soil and water quality enhancement and rational resource management (water, energy, soil and biodiversity). These global issues are associated with specifically urban challenges such as urban growth, sanitary issues, water and energy supply, socio-economic and sociocultural issues, waste management and spatial planning. Urban architects, planners and developers thus design sustainable city models geared towards mainstreaming all urban sustainable development issues under one umbrella. These models are shaped by life science concepts, as well as economic, social and political science concepts and are based on cycles and resilience factors, e.g. the symbiotic city (Ranhagen and Groth 2012) and biophilic city (Beatley 2010) approaches. These sustainable city approaches overlap sustainable development issues with a variety of fields of urban action. For instance, the SymbioCity approach developed by Ulf Ranhagen and Klas Groth (2012) interlinks the following fields:
energy, architecture, water supply, waste management, industry and infrastructure,
landscaping, urban transport and traffic, information and communications.

Food is not treated separately under these approaches and is at best one of many
elements in the overall design of cities.

Urban Food Planning

Food is the focus of a targeted approach in the urban food planning field. Since the
2000s, a movement that brings together researchers and practitioners has been
spreading in North America and northern Europe focused on integration of the food
challenge in planning in association with the urbanization process. This field of
research and action is structured on the basis of the noteworthy absence of food in
the purview of planners. The terms used with regard to this absence highlight the
sudden awareness of a missing piece in the thinking: “a puzzling omission” (APA
2007), “the dark side of urban dwelling?” (Viljoen and Wiskerke 2012), and “this
intellectual lacuna” (Morgan 2015).

First, Pothukuchi and Kaufman (1999, 2000) showed that food is a key element
in the functioning of the territories and as important as habitat and mobility which
are the focus of urban planners’ interventions. Secondly, the urban environment has
been identified as an essential framework for showcasing faults and new food prac-
tices (Sonnino 2009; Morgan and Sonnino 2010; Morgan 2015). A ‘new food equa-
tion’<fnref n="4" /> is essential for the future development of areas undergoing an urbanization
process (Morgan 2009; Morgan and Sonnino 2010).

This field is part of a new trend and mindset linked with the urbanization process
and the territorial sustainability paradigm, where the role of actors involved in the
food system as well as the planning of urban and metropolitan areas are reconsidered from a food perspective (Fig. 4.3).

Urban planning is a tool for building more sustainable and equitable food sys-
tems through a range of policy areas, while also reconsidering the status of food
systems in production and spatial organization mechanisms (especially urban).
Territorial configurations provide testing grounds for responses to major global
issues in which the new food equation is nested.

This field offers an integrated vision of food systems whose governance includes
civil society, private and public actors (Fig. 4.4).<fnref n="5" />

<footnote n="4">⁴The new food equation is based on the sudden increase in food prices in 2007–2008, which gave rise to new food security issues of global scope with regard to quantitative aspects of food supply, climate change, conflicts around arable lands and the urbanization process (Morgan 2009; Morgan and Sonnino 2010).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵In Figure 4.4, we have retained the different items concerning the food issue as presented in the schematic diagram of Johannes S.C. Wiskerke (2009) because they seem clearer than in the FoodLinks research report of Ana Moragues et al. (2013). However, we have kept the actor categories presented in the latter report because they seem more precise than those presented in Wiskerke (2009). We have not retained Weskerke’s categorization and characterization of relationships</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_13.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 4.3** Urban food planning – linking sustainability, the food system and the urban system.
(Source: Brand 2015)</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_14.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 4.4** Food governance described and considered in urban food planning. (Source: Brand 2015, from Wiskerke 2009: 376 and Moragues et al. 2013: 6)</figcaption></figure>

between actors because they seem too restrictive of the actual and potential types of relationships between these actors with regard to the food issue (limited in the article to public food procurement, alternative food supply chains and urban food strategies). Moreover, in the 'urban food strategies' category, Weskerke's diagram indicates a relationship between government and civil society. We consider, however, that these strategies should also include economic actors in the 'market' actors sphere.
Urban planners, developers and architects must take the food issue—in all of its complexity—into account in sustainable city management and planning. Practical applications have been reported, such as the food sensitive urban planning and design framework (Donovan et al. 2011) in Victoria (Australia) and the Food Urbanism Initiative (Verzone 2012) in Lausanne (Switzerland), as well as the continuous productive urban landscape concept designed with regard to urban density (Viljoen et al. 2005). The aim is to link the food system, or associated elements such as agriculture, with urban planning.

The interaction between urban space and inhabitants' health in relation to food has been the focus of studies, giving rise to the foodscape concept, i.e. the food landscape—how the urban environment has an impact on food access or on the development of food-related diseases. At the crossroads of health planning and geography, researchers focus especially on the location and characterization of the type of food distribution outlets (Cummis and Macintyre 2002), e.g. studies carried out in the United States on the impact of the urban food environment and built environment on obesity (Raja et al. 2010). The authors showed that the proximity of a supermarket or grocery store to the consumer's home was correlated with women's body mass index (BMI). This concept has revealed new levers for local urban governments.

The organization of urban space has thus proven to be a significant determinant with regard to the food practices of city users (inhabitants, workers, tourists). The recent and ongoing rising awareness of urban planners, developers, architects and leaders concerning the food issue has prompted these actors to focus on the food system. This has fostered dialogue between their disciplines and other food system oriented disciplines (agronomy, management, economy, sociology, nutrition, etc.).

Approaches specifically concerned with the interaction between individual behaviours and the urban space complement these spatial organization oriented approaches. They consider other food system components, such as culture, food knowledge and individual consumer behaviours. The sociology of consumption, which is focused on individuals and their choices, along with other disciplines (e.g. environmental psychology) develop approaches that integrate factors that consciously drive individuals and factors that more unconsciously shape their habits. Behavioural theories that have until now fueled awareness-raising, information and education policies for individuals have been widely questioned (Lahlou 2005; Stø et al. 2008). Among these new approaches, the theory of practices provides an innovative framework, thus breaking away from behaviourism practices that are considered inefficient. Cohen and Ilieva (2015) have suggested using this innovative practice theory to provide cities with effective levers and facilitate the transition to a more sustainable urban food system.
# Theory of Social Practices for a Sustainable Multidimensional Urban Food Approach

## Nevin Cohen

Like all large-scale sociotechnical systems, the food system is so entrenched that it seems unchangeable. Yet it is composed of and shaped by everyday mundane and habitual social practices. Hence it can be modified by policies geared towards changing these practices (Shove et al. 2012; Watson 2012).

Ubiquitous everyday food practices have significant environmental and public health impacts, for instance cooking, refrigeration and dishwashing together account for 25% of household electricity consumption in the United States (Canning et al. 2010), while eating at a restaurant an extra day a week instead of at home can add a bit less than 2 kg a year to a person's weight. Such practices can thus generate a set of diet-related illnesses such as obesity (Todd et al. 2010). Conversely, these seemingly inconsequential food practices—which are often overlooked by food system planners because of their ordinariness—can turn out to be strategic levers to achieve broader social and environmental goals.

## Role of Social Practices in Food Policy

Social practices are the everyday routines that people perform throughout their lives. They consist of *meanings* (beliefs, cultural norms and conventions), *materials* (tools, technologies, and financial resources), and *competencies* (know-how and skills) (Shove et al. 2012). Practices are *social* because they are shaped and reinforced by shared understandings of what is considered ordinary and appropriate ways of doing things. They are thus distinct from behaviours, which are actions based on the decisions of atomized individuals.

Practices are performed in the framework of interdependent sets of practices (Schatzki et al. 2001), so changes to one practice will therefore affect the entire set of practices.

Individuals are *carriers* of practices (Seyfang et al. 2010). They follow the rules and norms and, through their repeated performance of practices, they reproduce and normalize them and enrol others in the practices. According to Anthony Giddens (1984), their role as *carriers* is constrained by the structures and norms that arise concomitantly as they shape the practices. But individuals can also innovate and vary the way they perform practices, which are dynamic and can be reconfigured, leading to the emergence of new practices while others may disappear (Warde 2005). For example, conventional food canning practices have been supplanted by the freezing process. This is accompanied by a change in the meaning and skills associated with household food preparation practices and in the way of shopping.

Despite attention to environmental and social conditions and other upstream factors that contribute to obesity (Story et al. 2008; Freudenberg et al. 2015), policy-
makers have mainly focused on interventions geared towards changing individual behaviours rather than social practices (Warde 2014; Delormier et al. 2009). Behavioural interventions in the United States are generally designed to encourage healthier eating while reducing the incidence of obesity. They include mandatory disclosure of calorie information at fast-food restaurants to discourage excessive consumption. Moreover, financial incentives are proposed for new supermarkets to open in low-income communities in order to encourage fruit and vegetable consumption, or for individuals to buy healthier food at farmers markets (Cohen 2014).

The focus on individual behaviour is based on a framework that treats consumption as a function of the aggregated behavioural choices of individuals determined through individual preferences and rationally calculated assessments of risks and benefits (Halkier and Jensen 2011). Theories of behavioural change such as the planned behaviour theory and social marketing persist because of public health and policy conventions. They are in line with neoliberal ideology and relatively simple compared to more complex multi-sectoral approaches (Baum and Fisher 2014). Despite their popularity, behavioural approaches—which Shove (2010) criticizes as being an A-B-C (attitudes, behaviours, choices) theory of change—have not led to systemic changes in eating or to sustained reductions in the incidence of obesity (Cohn 2014).

In contrast, a social practice approach views that consumption models are embedded in the ways practices are structured. This approach does not overlook the effects of policies like regulations, consumer information or economic incentives to influence behaviour, but rather analyses and seeks to change unhealthy or unsustainable practices. Attention is paid to the meanings of a practice, the material dimensions and competencies associated with the practice. Focusing on the practices, how people perform them and what they use when carrying them out reveals the technologies and infrastructures, cultural and social images and conventions, and knowledge that constitute these practices. The focus of this approach—rather than being about the ways individuals make food decisions—is on how their social practices (shopping, cooking, travel, dining with friends, taking a work break) structure their food practices.

Understanding the persistence and transformation of everyday food practices reveals opportunities for a transition towards healthier practices through policies that change the underlying meanings, materials and competencies. Consider for instance the practice of preparing food at home from scratch instead of eating less healthy fast food. Cooking should be a normal and socially desirable practice, not a burden that diminishes quality of life. Individuals need the requisite food storage and cooking equipment, in addition to time. Skills and know-how are also needed to prepare meals. If these three elements—meanings, materials and competencies—are not in place, the practice will not take hold and develop. Food practices must be viewed as part of a cluster of interdependent practices. A given practice may be changed (switching to cooking fresh products), along with associated practices (shopping on foot rather than by car) or how a practice is carried out may be modified (reducing the locations, e.g. classrooms or libraries, in which eating is considered acceptable). Hence, a social practice-based policy should also simultaneously
consider a set of related practices associated with preparing meals at home (shopping, washing dishes, waste management, etc.).

## Towards Strategic Management of Social Practices

Cities are uniquely positioned to engage in ‘strategic practice management’ (Cohen and Ilieva 2015), the process of stimulating new practices, re-establishing old ones, or changing the nature of existing ones. They can institute policies and programmes that could foster new meanings of practices, change the material and infrastructure conditions under which practices are performed, while altering competencies or disseminating new ones. Cities have many food practice transformation levers (Cohen and Ilieva 2015; 2016).

Cities—as centres of media and dense social networks—are able to support the creation of new meanings. Cities also run public school systems that offer strategic entry points to influence the practices of youth. Urban planning departments shape the spatial layout of practices by acting on the locations of fresh food retailers or authorising urban rooftop farming. Urban public health departments also influence the materials of urban food practices by setting nutritional standards or regulations for trans-fats, soda or salt. Moreover, cities can enhance the visibility of unconventional but healthy urban food practices.

Practice elements themselves can be sources of dynamism and challenge systems of practice. For example, making misshapen fruit culturally acceptable by serving it in public canteens can change buying practices and reduce food waste. Reviving school cooking instruction can change cooking competencies, stimulate home cooking and eventually increase fresh food purchases. Urban policymakers need to be attentive to practices with the greatest health and environmental effects. But they must also be mindful of weak signals and small changes not significant enough to transform entrenched sociotechnical systems. They can over time transform bundled practices, stabilize and become the new normal, eventually leading to broader change.

Moreover, food practices are connected to other sociotechnical systems like water management and transportation. Several sociotechnical systems can be adjusted at once by considering urban food systems as a complex of social practices (Cohen and Ilieva 2015). This provides an opportunity for cross-sectoral work. The practice approach induces organizational innovations, such as the creation of interdepartmental teams or multistakeholder task forces to work on more sustainable urban food systems, while suggesting that urban planning goals should be rethought, but not only in terms of land use, economic activities or infrastructure. Practices prompt reflection on the replication or reconfiguration of everyday practices that influence urban development. This generates new urban development expectations: a shift in focus to the elements that shape social practices; drawing up policies for sets of practices to enable withdrawal from conventional administrative silos; and a move away from models that assume an ability to predict behavioural changes based on interventions to boost individual awareness and information.
Approaches drawing on the theory of practices that are presented here have the advantage of not channelling attention towards economic, sociological and demographic determinants of individuals, as is often the case in consumer surveys. They can also be used to study the material, economic and social environment in which individual practices are carried out (Shove et al. 2012; Dubuisson-Quellier and Plessz 2013). Focusing more on the environment of practices so as to gain insight into the related behaviours broadens the prospects of policies geared towards influencing behaviours. They are intended to play a role in environmental change rather than boosting consumer awareness.

These approaches shed new light on policy instruments that local urban governments have at hand to enhance food systems and their sustainability. In dealing with urban management issues, food can serve as a tool to jointly meet various sectoral objectives borne by local urban governments in terms of health, wellbeing, ecology, economy, social equity, etc. Practice-based approaches offer a new framework to gain further insight into urban food sustainability determinants and to identify efficient levers for policymakers. They provide fresh opportunities for dialogue between researchers and policymakers.

## Sustainable Development Applied to Urban and Food Issues

A final approach to review the complexity of food systems and formulate tailored policies should also be mentioned, i.e. sustainable development applied to urban and food issues. Sustainable development is an instrument for assessing the way societies work. Paul James and his colleagues developed an innovative sustainable development model applied to urban problems, and more recently to urban food issues, in a project carried out between 2007 and 2014 that was funded by the UN Global Compact Cities Programme in partnership with Metropolis and other international organizations. The Circles of Social Life approach aims to support cities, neighbourhoods and communities in the sustainable planning process. It combines qualitative and quantitative sustainability indicators, while drawing on a diverse range of actors with complementary expertise, to generate a holistic picture of the overall situation. This method has been applied particularly in Johannesburg, Melbourne, New Delhi, São Paulo and Tehran.

## Towards a Holistic Understanding of Food Systems Via Circles of Social Life

Paul James

There is an Irish joke that provides an instructive way of thinking about useful beginnings and sustainable directions. The tale describes a disoriented traveller in
rural Ireland asking directions of a local. The local begins to give detailed directions and each time falters, finally saying, "If it was meself that was going to Letterfrack, faith, I wouldn't start from here."<fnref n="6" /> In addressing the question of sustainable urban food policies, we suggest the same thing, i.e. not beginning with the very issues that directly concern us most: food, urban settings, sustainability or policymaking. When focusing on the immediate areas of interest of specialists and professionals, the latter tend to conclude that their specific area is the most important starting point, while excluding all other possibilities.

Where then should the complex process of systematizing issues related to sus-
tainable urban food policies be started? The usual place to begin is by approaching
the food issue as an activity or economic value chain. But this starting point is
restrictive with regard to urban sustainability, political power and cultural signifi-
cance issues.

In Search of an Alternative Holistic Approach

One alternative—the circles of social life approach—begins with the question of the human condition, which encompasses food. Then how can we begin to depict that condition in a holistic way while identifying the food policy domains and subdomains? Most pressingly, how can we do so without being overwhelmed by the usual starting point of economics?

This is what food system analysts have started doing. For example, Geoff Tansey and Tony Worsley's work (1995) does this through a three-domain model. They begin with the biological domain (i.e. the living processes used to produce food), the economic and political domain (i.e. the power exercised over the food system) and the social and cultural domain (i.e. personal relationships, community values and cultural traditions that influence the way people use food) (ibid, p. 4). This blanket approach is much better than the commonly applied triple bottom line approach,<fnref n="7" /> which includes three sustainable development spheres (Fig. 4.5).

The triple bottom line approach effectively considers economics as the master
domain, with the environment as an externality that is costed against the economic
aspects in accounting terms. The social domain pools all elements that do not fit the
other two domains, including human rights, land rights, cultural identity, gender
issues, etc. Hence, analysts' approach to the food system thus tends to better account
for the social complexity, i.e. considering the economics without making it the start-
ing point for all analyses. However, as soon as we start to look at the starting point
for the work of Geoff Tansey and Tony Worsley, it quickly becomes clear that the
prevailing complexity was not completely accounted for. Like the road to Letterfrack,
the directions taken to develop a positive model for food system sustainability can
soon get complicated. If one of their domains is biological, where in this approach

<footnote n="6">⁶The Hibbert Journal, vol. 22, 1924: p. 417.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷By the triple bottom line approach, the sustainable development concept is applied to the business
sector.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_15.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 4.5** Two depictions of the triple bottom line approach</figcaption></figure>

are non-living and non-biological things which are so critical in food system func-
tioning (e.g. nonorganic fertilizer and cadastral maps)? If their second domain is
economic and political, does this mean that all economic questions are solely or
primarily power issues? However, when striving to understand what it means when
a peasant-farmer in the Andes sows seed in harrowed ground, it is essential (even if
only for policy and analytical purposes) to separate questions of power—e.g. who
controls the legal rights to seed reproduction of that seed—from economic ques-
tions such as what form of agricultural production frames seed sowing. Finally, if
their third domain is cultural, where can the culture of capitalism, commodity
fetishism and ideologies of growth be analysed? These too are cultural issues, but
none of them begin with personal relations or cultural traditions. In short, their
domains do not offer adequate generality and analytical coherence.

This underlines the importance of choosing the right methodological framework when conducting such studies. For circles of social life, circles of sustainability and circles of food, we worked with dozens of experts and local representatives worldwide and set up a lengthy dialogue process (James et al. 2015).<fnref n="8" /> We sought to identify domains that would enable us to gain insight into the life of a traditional farmer respecting customs in the Andes and that of an agricultural futures trader in Paris. Four domains were first defined: economic, ecological, political and cultural. All of these were treated as social domains that could only be separated analytically, with the social domain always encompassed by and grounded upon the natural (Fig. 4.6).

Defining Social Domains

The ecological is defined as a social domain that focuses on practices, discourses and material expressions that occur at the crossroads between the social and natural realms. We recognize the distinction between these two realms in traditional (cosmological) and modern (scientific) understandings, with the natural being a context

<footnote n="8">⁸For further information on associated projects, see also: www.CirclesofSustainability.org and www.CirclesofFood.org</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_16.png" /></figure>

# DOMAINS OF THE SOCIAL

## ECONOMICS

- Production & Resourcing

- Exchange & Transfer

- Accounting & Regulation

- Consumption & Use

- Labour & Welfare

- Technology & Infrastructure

- Wealth & Distribution

## POLITICS

- Organization & Governance

- Law & Justice

- Communication & Critique

- Representation & Negotiation

- Security & Accord

- Dialogue & Reconciliation

- Ethics & Accountability

<figure><img src="image_17.png" /></figure>

## ECOLOGY

- Materials & Energy

- Water & Air

- Flora & Fauna

- Habitat & Settlements

- Built-form & Transport

- Embodiment & Sustenance

- Emission & Waste

## CULTURE

- Identity & Engagement

- Creativity & Recreation

- Memory & Projection

- Belief & Meaning

- Gender & Generations

- Enquiry & Learning

- Wellbeing & Health

<caption>**Fig. 4.6** Circles of social life understood in terms of four domains</caption>
of the social realm. But we enhance these two realms with human engagement with and within nature. This means that the ecological domain is focused on questions of interconnection between the social and natural, including the human impact on the environment and the place of humans in the environment. Foods may be sourced from nature, but as soon as they are grown, harvested or consumed they are no longer simply natural.

The economic is defined as a social domain that focuses on practices, discourses and material expressions associated with the production, use and management of resources. Here the resource concept is used in a broad sense, even in settings where resources are not instrumentalized or reduced to a means to achieve other ends. This allows us, for example, to compare different forms of food production and consumption. Although the economics domain was only differentiated as a named area of social life and deliberately practiced as a separate domain in the early modern period, by this definition it can be used in a broad range of places and time periods.

The political is defined as a social domain that focuses on practices and mean-
ings associated with basic issues of social power as they pertain to the organization,
authorization, legitimation and regulation of a social life held-in-common. This
domain thus extends beyond the conventional sense of politics to include social
relations in general. It bridges the public/private divide. The key related concept is
a 'social life held-in-common' as many political issues bear directly on the sustain-
ability of social life in general and food in particular. Consumption of a food in a
certain way is political and thus concerns power.

The cultural is defined as a social domain that focuses on practices, discourses and material expressions, which express the continuities and discontinuities of the social meaning of a life held-in-common over time. Culture can be trivially defined as, 'how and why we do things around here'. The 'how' is how we practice materi- ally, the 'why' emphasizes the meanings, the 'we' refers to the specificity of a life held-in-common, and 'around here' specifies the spatial and implicitly temporal particularity of culture. The culture concept had its beginnings in agriculture and cultivation, with subsidiary senses of 'honour with worship' of the word cultura, which in the sixteenth century was linked to the understanding of human growth and development (Williams 1976). This has obvious implications for food sustainability.

Seven subdomains are defined for each of these domains to provide tools for
assessment, monitoring and evaluation. The approach strives to achieve sustainabil-
ity and resilience through a combination of qualitative and quantitative indicators. It
sets up a conceptual framework for investigating problems faced by communities
and is intended to be applicable in very different neighbourhood, city and regional
contexts.
## Circles of Food in Practice

This method is currently being developed by Sustain: The Australian Food Network, with the aim of working with municipalities on their respective food systems.<fnref n="9" /> Over the past 18 months, we have been working jointly to develop a food-profile process.

The first step in this process was to develop a food charter based on the four domains. The set of principles of the charter can be found online at: http://www.circlesoffood.org/principles.

Associated with these principles, the second step involved developing a set of questions for each of the four domains, their seven subdomains and seven aspects of each subdomain, for a total of 196 questions on food sustainability.

When taking the ecological domain as an example, the first subdomain is ‘materials and energy’ (Fig. 4.6). The following is a series of questions that were posed for the seven aspects of this food system subdomain:

1. Availability and abundance: how sustainable is the use of resources to produce food in the immediate region?<fnref n="10" />

2. Soil and fertility: to what extent are areas of arable land in the immediate region suitable for growing a variety of food produce?

3. Minerals and metals: how sustainable is the use of fabricated metals such as steel and aluminium in the food system across the broader region?<fnref n="11" />

4. Electricity and gas: is the electricity used in the various stages of the food system produced through ecologically appropriate and/or renewable means?<fnref n="12" />

5. Petroleum and biofuels: is the local food system overly dependent on fossil fuels?

6. Renewable energy and recyclable materials: does the local food system use recyclable materials?

7. Monitoring and reflection: does local monitoring of resource use result in the implementation of positive strategies relevant to the local food system?

The questionnaire is focused on the present period and the projection limits are the next 30 years, or one generation, according to the United Nations’ definition of sustainable development. The idea is to meet current needs without compromising those of the next generation.

The series of questions are linked to indicators and a nine-level quality scale was drawn up. *Critical* is at the negative end of the spectrum, referring to an aspect of the food system requiring critical or urgent change now to ensure continuing basic viability over the next 30 years. *Vibrant* is at the positive end of the spectrum, refer-

<footnote n="9">⁹Project led by Kathy McConnel and Nick Rose.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰‘Immediate region’ here means the area in question and its hinterlands. ‘Material resources’ includes all resources from water, food and energy to concrete and steel.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹‘Broader region’ means within 3 h reach by land transport.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹²Unless qualified by the adjective ‘local’, the ‘food system’ concept refers to the whole system upon which the local area depends—from local to global.</footnote>
ring to an aspect of the food system that is currently active in reproducing vibrant social and environmental conditions enabling positive long-term advancement for the next generation and beyond. *Basic* is in the middle of the spectrum, referring to a quality that, at a pressure level equivalent to that of other levels, enables a basic balance to be achieved to meet the needs of the next generation over the coming period.

We suggest that each assessment ideally include 3–10 people from the targeted urban area who are specialists in different and complementary fields. In 2015, we conducted food assessments in three municipalities: Yarra Ranges with more than 100 people involved, including members of civil society, Whittlesea with 10 experts and Ararat with about 25 people representing regional organizations. In each case, when assessing the four social domains, we entered into the profile assessment process through discussion sessions on critical issues in the municipality. We asked each group to annotate their reasons for giving certain scores linked to these critical issues.

Food policies are currently being developed on each of these municipalities on the basis of the study findings. The future of this project will depend on how the method works in practice and contributes to developing a prosperous food system both in places where it is implemented and elsewhere.

## Conclusion

This presentation of various approaches that are geared towards gaining insight into the complexity of the sustainable urban food issue highlights the promising potential of an integrated approach. The complexity of the topic warrants application of a combination of approaches. A systemic and cyclical view of food enables us to consider the activities, flows and sets of stakeholders involved and thus to understand the system as well as the underlying dynamics. The food system concept—recognized and used by scientific communities and food system stakeholders—thus helps to build a common vision of the complexity of urban food system sustainability.

The territorial approach to food systems in urban regions has the advantage of providing a framework for analysis and practice. It is an opportunity to facilitate political-scientific exchange and thus identify new prospects in the researcher-decision maker dialogue. It also provides a way to dovetail food sustainability and urban sustainability approaches and thus to focus maximum attention on a variety of determinants and levers.

Some of the theoretical approaches presented in this chapter already have practical applications through the development of local stakeholder support tools or measurement and assessment tools. Many food strategy action plans or documents outlined in the grey literature are structured according to a food system framework represented by a chain of activities (production, processing, distribution, consumption, waste management). They sometimes also include sectors like health and cul-
ture. To support the emergence of an urban food policy, practical application begins by an assessment of the situation, generally based on an analysis of socioeconomic activities (Carey 2011; Conley et al. 2011). Combinations of different analysis tools are implemented according to stakeholders’ viewpoints and the local setting (territorial diagnosis from flow or lifecycle analyses or via qualitative methods, food desert mapping, food mile calculations or the ecological footprint, etc.).

However, urban food policymaking processes have timeframes of variable length and may be of different forms. The local history and political calendars are essential elements that preclude their emergence (chapters “History of Urban Food Policy in Europe, From the Ancient City to the Industrial City; Benoit Daviron, Coline Perrin, Christophe-Toussaint Soulard” and “Cities’ Strategies for Sustainable Food and the Levers They Mobilize; Jess Halliday”). Some policies are promoted and identified at the international scale, while others are more discrete. Cities already have an impact on the food system through instruments that they use for management of land, school catering, social sector, economic activities, waste collection and disposal, etc. They sometimes have a targeted impact, e.g. on vulnerable populations, subsequently leading them to reflect on broader food issues. At other times, cities set up a crosscutting programme to coordinate sectoral initiatives to deal with food issues.

This diversity of processes questions the conceptual frameworks used to analyse and facilitate the formulation of urban food policies in all their forms and timeframes. The approaches outlined in this chapter inform us on two levels of understanding of this issue, i.e. the food system and its sustainability, and urban public action. These two levels are encompassed within broader frameworks for understanding sustainable development. These combined approaches can lead to the formulation of a monitoring and action framework at the crossroads between urban food system sustainability issues and levers implemented by local urban governments (chapter “Reconciling Sustainability Issues and Urban Policy Levers; Nicolas Bricas, Christophe-Toussaint Soulard, Clément Arnal”).

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<figure><img src="image_18.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_19.png" /></figure>

Nicolas Bricas, Christophe-Toussaint Soulard, and Clément Arnal

The development of urban food policies is not based on unified approaches. This policymaking process is relatively recent and there is still insufficient hindsight for the development of approaches that could encompass the complexity of food systems. In the previous chapters we have seen that many initiatives are under way around the world, taking very different approaches. Hence, research needs to focus on how to design such policies, and tailored methods are beginning to be formalized. As was shown in chapter “Theoretical Approaches for Effective Sustainable Urban Food Policymaking”, some methods are based on the food supply system or value chain, and look at urban systems through that prism, whereas others build on a certain conception of the urban system and attempt to integrate agricultural and food considerations into urban sustainability scenarios. In either case, the knowledge that must be leveraged is multifarious and difficult to formalize. So great are the resulting uncertainties that the more general question arises as to the value of expertise in urban food policy making—a question already current with respect to environmental policies (Lascoumes 2010). While the players must clearly rely on evidence in order to decide and take action, they are confronted with a bewildering array of areas of endeavour, given the need to reconcile complex urban and food systems with sustainability issues.

In practice, we see that stakeholders are often not fully aware of that complexity when taking action or measures and are hence unable to predict all of the impacts on the various dimensions of sustainability. As the effects of their actions cannot be accurately foretold, they follow their intuition. Failures and partial misfires may result, but also successes and cases of systemic leverage. As this book has pointed

N. Bricas (✉)

UMR MOÏSA, Cirad, MONTPELLIER CEDEX 5, France

e-mail: nicolas.bricas@cirad.fr

C.-T. Soulard · C. Arnal

UMR Innovation, Montpellier University, INRA, CIRAD, Montpellier Supagro,
Montpellier, France
out, city dwellers take many different initiatives, individually or in more or less formal organizations, seeking to overcome the constraints and limits of urban life.

To pay more heed to these initiatives, as is proposed by advocates of social practice theory, is not without political consequences. That theory suggests that public policies aimed at changing the impact of consumption on health or the environment should target practices and the environment that determines them rather than individuals and their knowledge and attitudes (Warde 2005). Similarly, it holds that the cumulative effect of changes in customary practices will bring systemic and institutional changes (Shove et al. 2012). In the urban food system context, as shown in chapter “Theoretical Approaches for Effective Sustainable Urban Food Policymaking”, social practice theory would dictate that urban food strategies should be developed and consolidated synergistically, through a multiplicity of micro-initiatives (Cohen and Illieva 2015). Policies are no longer to be developed in isolation, without input from the citizens engaged in these initiatives, but rather based on citizens’ practices and the transformative effects thereof.

Keeping in mind that desired manner of designing urban food policies, in this chapter we propose a conceptual framework under which cities’ public actors will be better able to devise, manage and evaluate their food policies, or in other words to target and synergize the actions they take and assess their outcomes. These public actors, which we refer to as local urban governments (LUGs), are of course not the only stakeholders in the food system. They work alongside business and civil society, but we conceptualize their role as that of an enabler within the urban food system, able to spur these other actors to action or synergize them. The idea then is not to consider these local public actors in isolation, but to provide them with the tools they need, firstly, to enhance actions for which they could provide impetus via their expertise, and secondly to enhance their intermediary role vis-à-vis the other actors in urban food governance: the market and civil society (Viljoen and Wiskerke 2012). From that point of view, the food system sustainability issue is not solely concerned with the nature and effects of the actions taken, but also with the relevant policies’ modes of governance (Brunori 2015). That duality is specifically illustrated in the account of the development of an urban food policy presented in chapter “Putting Food on the Regional Policy Agenda in Montpellier, France”.

While chapter “Urbanization Issues Affecting Food System Sustainability” set out an analytical framework for urban food system sustainability, what we propose to explore here is an area that has been little studied in the literature: the means of action and leverage available to LUGs. Most approaches to the development of urban food policies call for a preliminary objective assessment of the urban food system to be addressed and identification of the problems to be solved. But such approaches seldom take the realistic scope of action of LUGs into account. Leverage, however, is another frequent consideration in their endeavours. The first part of this chapter deals with the various forms such leverage can take. Sustainability issues can be jointly plotted for comparative purposes on a double-entry matrix. Each lever being used can thus be assessed in terms of food system sustainability issues or, moving to the other side of the matrix, the different levers available to act on a given problem can be examined.
Urban food policies can then be developed through a back-and-forth between the identified problems and possible levers. The different ways of devising urban food policies will be analysed in the second part of this chapter.

## Local Urban Governments’ Scope of Action

Cities’ renewed interest in the food issue is being expressed in the dual context of globalization and decentralization. LUGs are seeing a change in their jurisdiction and an increase in their powers, as evidenced for example by the implementation of territorial food projects (PATs) in France or Local Food Promotion Programs (LFPPs) in the United States. However, the degree to which State powers are decentralized to more local levels is very variable by country and often evolving in both respects, jurisdiction and scope of authority. In identifying the levers available to LUGs we do not mean to imply that all can always be deployed by all. Moreover, the typology proposed in this chapter is intended as a basis for reflection and needs to be adapted to each institutional and political situation.

## Definition of Levers

In order to explore the levers available to LUGs, we propose to begin with the capacity for action that States endow them with: economic development, social, education or health policy, etc. To identify these levers, we looked at the internal organization of LUGs (administrative divisions, etc.) using the organization charts of a sample of world cities and conurbations for which that information was available.<fnref n="1" />

To be clear, we must differentiate these levers from the instruments, procedures or means available to an LUG to wield a lever. A ‘lever’ is defined as an LUG purview or area of activity. Spatial planning would be one example: an area of activity for which one or more initial objectives have been defined, for example the people’s wellbeing, inequality reduction, or economic development. To achieve these objectives, the LUG has instruments of its own, such as its local urban plans (Plan Local d’Urbanisme, PLU), territorial coherence planning (Schéma de Cohérence Territoriale, SCoT), etc., in the case of France, and its own investment capacity. For a PLU or a SCoT, these instruments are based on various procedures: assessment, initial environmental state, sustainable planning and development plan (Plan d’Aménagement et de Développement Durable, PADD), orientation and objectives

<footnote n="1">¹Cities and conurbations in France (Lyon, Lille, Bordeaux, Nantes, Montpellier, Annecy, Bourg-en-Bresse, Romans-sur-Isère, Alençon, Angoulême), in North America (Toronto, Quebec City, Montreal, New York City), in Europe (Lausanne, Geneva, Brussels, Liège, Bristol, London, Munich), and in Africa (Niamey, Dakar, Marrakesh, Tunis).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_20.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 1** Levers that local urban governments can deploy in support of agricultural and food policies</figcaption></figure>

document (DOO), regulations, etc. Finally, LUGs have the human, technical or financial resources available to the units responsible for a lever or the use of an instrument. A lever—seen as an area of activity—thus possesses its own instruments, tools, procedures and means.

At an international conference that we held in Montpellier,<fnref n="2" /> bringing together numerous Latin American, African and Asian cities that had implemented agricultural and/or food policies, we identified various levers used by them to ensure food security and improve popular nutrition or, more generally, to improve food system sustainability. Following that meeting we held a workshop with urban food systems experts at which we developed a typology of these levers and past and current objectives assigned to them.<fnref n="3" /> As we discovered, those objectives have changed over time as new concerns emerge.

The main levers identified during this workshop are charted in Fig. 1 and described in the following paragraphs.

<footnote n="2">²An international meeting on ‘Urban Food Policies; markets, catering, rural/urban connexions’ organized by the UNESCO Chair on World Food Systems, CIRAD, Agropolis Fondation, FAO, the French Development Agency, RUAF Foundation, ORU-Fogar, the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie, the International Sustainability Unit and the Foundation for the Progress of Humankind, held from 16 to 18 November 2015 in Montpellier (France).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³Workshop participants on 14 December 2015 were: Clément Arnal (consultant), Nicolas Bricas (CIRAD, UMR MOISA), Damien Conaré (Chaire UNESCO AdM), Benoit Daviron (CIRAD, UMR MOISA), Julie Debru (UNESCO Chair), Florence Egal (consultant, Milan Pact), Anna Faucher (IUFN), Paule Moustier (CIRAD, UMR MOISA), Dominique Paturel (INRA, UMR Innovation), Coline Perrin (INRA, UMR Innovation), Christophe Soulard (INRA, UMR Innovation).</footnote>
Spatial Planning and Management

Cities are not exclusively built environments. They also include natural areas (forests, rivers, bodies of water and banks, etc.) as well as farmed or fallow land, in particular on the outskirts, whose future uses—maintenance or conversion—may be decided by LUGs. But built-up areas are also amenable to planning of alternate uses of ‘free’ areas or land uses related to urban projects: housing, infrastructure, shops, activities, etc.

Agricultural land needs to be protected from soil degradation and the leapfrog development associated with urban sprawl in order to maintain local agricultural production or create recreational or kitchen gardening areas, in particular for vulnerable populations. Several environmental objectives are fostered by these preservation efforts: biodiversity maintenance (green corridors), climate risk management (city cooling, buffer zones in case of flooding), greening of the city and creation of recreational areas and, lately, promotion of agricultural production for local food supply or even job creation. This farmland preservation may be done through regulation (see planning documents such as the local master plan or, in France, the territorial consistency plans (SCoTs), or farmland protection measures creating protected agricultural zones (ZAPs) and/or buffer zones around farmed and natural periurban land) and/or land acquisitions or rights of first refusal.

Some municipalities may acquire land well beyond their territorial limits, and in some cases have done so since ancient times. Lausanne, for example, owns eight farmsteads and some one hundred individual lots totalling about 900 ha. While all of this land was formerly leased out and worked independently of the city, Lausanne's new food policy has sought to take advantage of the land base to supply school canteens and develop educational farms as green technology showcases. The city's new agricultural policy also helps forge closer relations between town and country (Jarrige 2013).

On a finer scale, town planning regulations play on habitat density and the size and use of private plots. The choices made then determine the possibilities of cultivated gardens and domestic or shared orchards and hence food self-production. Similarly, marginal areas—fallow land, public gardens, schoolyards, sidewalks, vacant lots, building roofs—can be used for gardening, fruit production and animal husbandry (bees, hens), as a means of encouraging urban agriculture. Among the possible goals are: to provide access to sources of additional food or income under social policies, to create leisure areas or meeting places through gardening, to create places where people—and in particular children—can be introduced and sensitized to agriculture, to enhance management of the environment and livelihoods, and to promote health-giving physical activity. On this last point, designing town planning to facilitate physical activity can significantly improve people's nutritional status, particularly those who consume excess calories, through the provision of cycle paths, fitness trails and sports areas (Yin et al. 2013; Epstein et al. 2012; Raja et al. 2010).

When it comes to commercial town planning, LUGs can to a great degree dictate the location of food shops, markets and eateries. The food landscape is greatly affected by the establishment of malls on the outskirts or, conversely, the development of
neighbourhood retail marketplaces—often for reasons of sanitation—and permanent or floating eateries (e.g. food trucks), all of which also makes a difference to how far households need to go for food supplies and to whether certain products are consumed as they become more or less accessible. Where no policy exists on food shop location, there is a danger that ‘food deserts’ will appear where it becomes difficult or expensive to easily find quality food, in particular fruit and vegetables. The reorientation of commercial town planning to prevent food deserts has become a concern for very many North American cities.

## Flow Management

Substantial flows of food and water are needed to supply cities, which export their production and send their waste the other way. Everything that is consumed, recycled and discarded is affected by the management of these flows.

Wholesale market management, though initially concerned with the logistics of the flow of food into cities, can serve to connect or reconnect them to local farmers. City administrations that manage these wholesale markets can set aside specific direct sales areas to which small-scale producers, not just wholesale dealers, will have access. That is one priority for these markets, given the development of retail logistics that tend to reduce the number of reference products marketed and hence product diversity. Where the wholesale markets are sited, how producers access them, and how they interface with retail stores or markets are all determining factors for the conurbation’s relationship with its hinterland. Proactive actions can encourage certain forms of agriculture by opening up the urban market to farms too small for the usual retail channels or by setting aside areas reserved for organic farmers.

The creation and management of municipal slaughterhouses on the outskirts of town generally serves a public health purpose: to eliminate the risks involved in having livestock within densely populated areas and to monitor the health of slaughter animals. In addition, they give nearby farms access to the urban market and favour the development of businesses to process meat, hides, horns and other by-products. Slaughterhouses also give structure to the economic organization of livestock industries.

City administrations often have jurisdiction over the provision of drinking water. In developing countries, that has a direct effect on nutrition in that it prevents infectious digestive diseases that are largely responsible for diarrhoea and hence childhood malnutrition. In industrialized countries where groundwater is polluted by agriculture chemicals, LUGs can acquire land within watersheds (e.g. Munich, New York) to ensure that it is not polluted, or give incentives to farmers operating within the catchment area to switch to organic farming in exchange for guaranteed outlets for the food they produce, to supply school cafeterias or municipal establishments (e.g. Munich, Lons de Saunier) (Le Strat 2008; Hellec et al. 2013). In that way cities can play an incentive role with respect to agricultural production conditions in areas outside their direct span of control.
Similarly, some LUGs contract with producers even in relatively remote rural areas to ensure quality food supplies. In exchange for a commitment to selling their produce to the city, LUG services can then advise them and even promote investment in the rural areas concerned. The municipality of Hanoi in Vietnam negotiates such contractual relations with 52 of the country's rural provinces in order to ensure a supply of good-quality, healthy products, thus contributing to the provinces' rural and agricultural development.

Urban waste management, for organic waste in particular, is essentially intended as a sanitary measure but can also serve to recycle organic waste into green manure, which, when used in agriculture, restores the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles broken by the use of chemical fertilizers. The distribution of poultry to inhabitants, or subsidies for henhouses provided by some municipalities, has the same objectives: reduction of urban organic waste by recycling, and promoting egg production.

## Promotion of Economic Activities

Most LUGs seek to encourage or sustain economic activities that generate employment or income for the people, but also sources of tax revenue. They do so in a number of ways, creating areas for companies to set up (business zones, transport infrastructure connexions, clustering of research and innovation institutions, etc.), lending or leasing premises cheaply, adjusting business tax regimes (duty-free zones), organizing networks and services, etc. Food processing and distribution sectors, as well as catering, provide significant numbers of jobs, in particular in developing countries, where micro- and small businesses are the norm (Broutin and Bricas 2006). A number of objectives are pursued in supporting these sectors: job creation, particularly for women, often the majority in this industry; access to food for populations with little purchasing power; and even enhancement of gastronomic heritage that can help boost a tourism development policy. In European countries, some LUGs promote the development of social and solidarity economy businesses.

A characteristic form of economic stimulus involves the commercial promotion of specific products of an area, often with a view to tourism promotion, for example in the form of a special accreditation or local brand. That leverage can however also be used to foster greater connexion between the city and the countryside. For example, the municipality of Montpellier has set up a series of summer events to promote gastronomic products and specialties of the surrounding countryside to the urban population.

## Social and Cultural Policy

Leverage is also frequently applied through the city's social policy, in particular as regards food aid for the most vulnerable populations.
Thus, municipal centres for social action (CCASs) distribute some of France's food aid and can assist the poorest residents with food vouchers or coupons or by paying part of the cost of children's school meals, meals on wheels for the elderly, etc.

Other food supply actions may be taken to promote the integration of certain population groups. One example is the provision of public land for people fleeing conflicts, as in Bogotá, or the creation of farmsteads by people in the process of social reintegration.

Service to the people is one lever frequently used, in particular with respect to catering, whether for children (cafeterias at schools, nurseries or recreation centres), the elderly (nursing home cafeterias, soup kitchens, meals on wheels) or vulnerable populations in general. The initial purpose of school meals has often been to encourage parents to send children to school, but they have become an assurance of food security for all, in particular in dire inequality and poverty situations. In Latin America, many cities are implementing ambitious social policies through catering, for both children and adults. The idea is not just to provide everyone, even the poorest, with a balanced meal; those who supply the school meals may, as in Brazil, be recruited exclusively from among local family farmers, thereby extending the reach of the city's social policy into the countryside that supply it. Brazil's pioneering municipal policy on food security, in Belo Horizonte, served as a model for the Lula Government's national 'Zero Hunger' policy (Rocha 2001).

In some countries, school meals are also a means of integrating the population in social and cultural terms (Pinson 1995). Repeated sharing of the same meal at school is an integrating factor. It may however also be divisive, as is evidenced by contemporary debates on cafeteria menus with or without pork, or without any meat. There are many priorities for school meals today: improved nutrition, taste and nutrition education, learning how to fight waste, awareness of agriculture thanks to school gardens, promotion of green agricultural systems (use of organic farming products), or relocation of sources of supply.

The last-named objective is now very common in industrialized countries' urban food policies. It reflects a strong demand for proximity, both geographic and organizational, among city dwellers who are concerned with the remoteness of their relationship with agriculture and food (Chapter "Urbanization Issues Affecting Food System Sustainability") as well as the new risks associated with food system industrialization (chemical use, food artificialization, concentration of power and financialization of business, etc.).

LUGs may have public health responsibilities and apply risk prevention measures, food hygiene controls, etc. French communes, for example, have a 'hygiene' unit that comes under mayors' policing authority and may exert control over food businesses, restaurants and open-air markets, to ensure that the food provided to consumers is safe. This involves checking that food storage temperatures are complied with, that the establishments monitored are generally clean, and that staff have training in hygiene, proper attire, etc. In some cases municipalities may enter into local health contracts, under the auspices of the Ministry of Health, to be able to implement more ambitious monitoring and prevention policies.

Finally, the field of food supply may be affected by cultural policies, which may seek to take advantage of a historical heritage, or even forge an urban identity
through food. They may also seek to promote mutual awareness among communities of different sociocultural origins through culinary exchanges, neighbourhood meals or ‘discovery menus’ in school catering.

## Evaluating Leverage in Terms of Sustainability Issues

Again, using this inventory, sustainability issues can be jointly plotted with the leverage available to LUGs on a double-entry matrix, which can be used either to ascertain what types of leverage could be applied to a given food issue, or to look into what types of issue a given type of leverage might be suited to.

A matrix such as this would also raise a series of research questions about the leverage available on the different sustainability dimensions involved. As pointed out above, many of the existing levers were devised to deal with issues other than those covered by the promotion of more sustainable food systems. There are still a large number of very open-ended research questions. For example, how do we evaluate what effect it will have on the environment, on the sustainability of agricultural production patterns, on job creation, and on city dwellers’ relationship with agriculture, to keep agriculture going in or around the city? Again, how can we evaluate the effects on food practices and representations of an urban food environment, and in particular commercial town planning or the offer of garden plots? How can we evaluate catering actions’ effects on nutrition or intercultural dialogue? And finally, how can we evaluate the effects of food supply relocation on the environment, nutrition, or social relations?

That is not to say that answering all of these questions is a prerequisite for the development of urban food policies. Such a matrix can nevertheless at least be used for discussion purposes and to highlight the relevance and potential impacts of the available levers via collective expertise. In practice, many political actions are decided on without any real certainty as to whether they will have the desired effect, even supposing the objective to be well defined. Food policies are rarely instituted on the basis of thorough knowledge of the effects and risks of the actions to be taken. Often, they simply follow on from former practice, by inertia, with ad hoc experiments that are then tailored to the circumstances. Hence, the actual conditions under which the policies are made need attention, which is the subject of the next part.

## Steps for the Construction of Urban Food Policies

Given the many city initiatives to devise food policies, i.e. a coherent set of actions to improve food supply, some institutions have felt a need to propose conceptual and methodological frameworks for such policies (Chapter “Theoretical Approaches for Effective Sustainable Urban Food Policymaking”). The goal is often to try to put all the environmental, nutritional, economic, social, cultural and food issues into one framework, and all food system elements over which they hope to exert control:
production, trade, catering, consumption, waste management and their various determinants. When such frameworks are developed the temptation is to urge LUGs to map their agricultural and food situation, while quantifying flows, surfaces, consumption, population; identifying and often locating all the players; listing corporate and citizen initiatives; and tracking changes for each of these elements. What makes this such a difficult exercise is the dispersal of the data, which are often kept by many different players, not necessarily working at the same scale (Brand 2015). Data may even be lacking for certain problem dimensions—one example is the environmental costs of food, a relatively new issue that has yet to be the focus of many statistical studies. It is time-consuming to do this kind of mapping and may be quite costly. It does often allow the importance of the various parts of the system to be gauged: how important urban food production is to consumption, what share of total employment agricultural and agrifood jobs account for, how serious food insecurity and nutritional diseases are, etc.; but often it has little direct usefulness in initiating actions.

The approach we advocate begins with the facts set out in the literature and observed in our practical research, namely that cities often take up the food issue for reasons other than an explicit intention to develop a sustainable food policy. There are certainly cases where that intention does exist, but it is not always, and in fact rarely is, the prime mover in current food policies. Instead, the issue arises because of other urban concerns such as health, hygiene, poverty, the environment, social movements, unemployment, etc.

In some cases, problems needing solutions will then focus attention on food, either directly (e.g. if a quality problem arises in school cafeterias), or indirectly, when food is one of the areas of activity in which solutions to a given problem may be found (to create jobs, for example, the food sector offers considerable scope for new activities).

In other cases, certain types of leverage can afford an opportunity to address urban food issues. While direct leverage is possible, through the creation of new, food-specific tools, the approach is also often indirect, as the food issue is addressed using tools originally designed for other purposes. Thus, cities have to manage waste, initially from the standpoint of health, but they then may seek to use the waste as fertilizer as an agroecological strategy in order to reduce waste storage and reprocessing needs. However, as we mentioned in the previous section, the potential for use of these means of action for food policy purposes is an area of knowledge that needs to be investigated.

## Toward Policymaking on the Urban Food Issue

Starting with these three points of entry (policies, problems, levers), and the example of Bristol, where a food policy was formulated on the basis of an experience capitalization document (Carey 2011), we established a matrix of ways in which LUGs can address food: from policymaking approaches to the urban food issue.
One approach is to begin with the levers available to LUGs. Given the great variety of perceived food problems, or a desire to regain some control over food supply but without any clear identification or formulation of the problems, a first step is to look at what can be done with the levers available. In that case, the action to be taken is arrived at not on the basis of an 'objective' assessment of the situation, indicating the objectives to be achieved, but rather of the levers LUGs can use to address food issues. That approach can be described as building a 'policy of means'. Few LUG officials have food expertise, but they are experts on the means they have available, and their predisposition is to use those means in addressing the new food supply area.

In our facilitation work with municipal officials in preparation for the agricultural and food policy of metropolitan Montpellier (Chapter “Putting Food on the Regional Policy Agenda in Montpellier, France”), we often noticed that mindset, namely that the officials thought about what those levers would allow them to do to achieve different goals than they were intended for. Thus, discussions took place around ideas such as using school cafeterias to promote organic farming in the region or hosting social and solidarity economy agrifood companies within the wholesale market.

A second approach is to begin with the specific problems LUGs need to solve. Those problems are not necessarily identified through a full assessment of the city's overall food situation, following which priority actions are mapped out. Instead, the problems are generally put on the political agenda by a few influential actors. In France, the fight against food waste has emerged as a problem to be solved not in the wake of any alarming assessment, but as a moral imperative, impelled by a number of actors who were able to mobilize politicians.

In our work with metropolitan Montpellier elected officials, we discussed the question of food insecurity, a particularly thorny one for them, with a view to identifying the levers the LUG could deploy against it: cafeteria prices, access to garden plots, food aid, support for solidarity groceries, etc.

The third approach is to start with a policy proposal, conceived of as a set of actions to remedy (and/or forestall) a set of food-related problems. That involves mapping out an action framework linking the problems to be addressed with the levers available to solve them.

These three approaches to urban food policies are summarized in Fig. 2.

In practice, these approaches will be combined, interlaced, or tried in sequence. The levers are scattered through different units of the LUG and the problems to be solved are varied and may be tackled by several of them. Some units will already

<figure><img src="image_21.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 2** Toward policymaking on the urban food issue</figcaption></figure>
have set levers in motion when others get involved, acting on other concerns that may nevertheless have an impact on the first-comers' actions. Therefore, the construction or management of urban food policy is subject to considerable coordination and arbitration issues.

Another feature of urban food policies is that there are many initiatives and actions undertaken by civil society or the private sector that the LUG must seek a way to interact with. Hence our central focus, in this analytical framework, on the issue of food supply governance as a work in progress. That governance is indeed the central process, wherein policy choices, problems to be solved and levers to be pushed must be reconciled.

## An Iterative and Integrative Methodological Approach

What consequences will such a conception of food supply policymaking have at the urban scale on support operations and research? In considering how to capitalize the support to be provided to metropolitan Montpellier's agroecology and food policy, the following three methodological principles may be proposed:

Principle No. 1: combine the three elements. The support to be provided is not a 'turnkey' operation. It will embody a procedure that combines the three elements to be included in food supply governance. While not in contradiction with existing approaches based on expert assessments, it will seek to integrate these into a comprehensive approach that will be fleshed out by the actors undertaking it, not laid down *a priori* by researchers or design offices.

Principle No. 2: provide tools for exploration of each element. Many kinds of knowledge will need to be generated to support urban food policies; using our design framework we can discern various types of assessments to perform.

- Problems: assessments to ascertain and understand them. Here, classic expert assessments will be needed in areas of food policy where the action that should be taken cannot proceed for lack of knowledge. Perhaps we have identified or are aware of a problem but its causes are poorly understood. In such a case an assessment establishing the causes or an investigation may make it clear how to proceed.

- Levers: assessments to control them. Such assessments are often lacking. While we may know how a given lever affects the problem it was designed for, it is much less clear how it will affect other problems, or what its systemic effects on food supply will be. What is needed in that case are assessments and joint innovation approaches that help actors to formalize work procedures that both take account of the objectives and embody suitable ways and means of acting.
- Governance: assessments for positioning and evaluation. One requirement here is for models of the food system that can give actors an objective idea of the context in which their actions will be taken. For this purpose, the available outlines showing the various components of the food system and the issues involved, such as the one produced for metropolitan Montpellier, may be useful (Fig. 3). Another requirement, however, is to equip these actors with a way of evaluating the governance actually being undertaken by means of indicators of how far the objectives have been met and with what effects. Evaluation, so conceived, is the outcome of a learning process in which scientific knowledge and contextual knowledge are combined (Rey-Valette et al. 2014).

Principle No. 3: support governance. The international literature and our local experience (Chapter “Putting Food on the Regional Policy Agenda in Montpellier, France”) teach us that urban food governance develops over the long term. Its objectives are ever-changing, the actors involved in achieving them change during the process, and the achievements and their knock-on effects bring about lasting readjustments. This kind of governance is adaptive and specific knowledge is required to direct it. Human and social science research can play a supporting role in the monitoring of governance, employing tools that ‘map’ the actors involved and, of these, those who are or are not ‘enrolled’ in the socio-technical process (according to Michel Callon’s sociology of translation 1986).

<figure><img src="image_22.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3 An outline of the possible purviews of urban food policy</figcaption></figure>
A further requirement is for internal analyses of the strategies that players develop within organizations involved in governance (according to the ‘sociology of organizations’ of Philippe Bernoux et al. 2015).

The involvement of researchers in such processes implies that these flows of knowledge must not be seen only as reports of observations at a remove, but that interactions must be designed and directed throughout the public policymaking process. The design of procedures to support action research (Liu 1997) can be used to frame cooperative relationships between researchers and actual practitioners. Using such designs, the three research figures/postures may be combined to ensure a lasting partnership between researchers and actors on the ground (Soulard et al. 2007; Petit and Soulard 2015): expertise on targeted assessments, facilitation aimed at integrating disseminated knowledge during decision making, and the action of an evaluator seeking to endow the policy with an ongoing evaluation of the governance process.

## Conclusion

What kind of conceptual framework can we develop that will cover at once the environmental problems posed by cities' food supply systems, nutritional problems or those occasioned by living together in the city? Rather than add one more new proposed scheme to the many that already exist, each of which seeks to map the complexity of urban food systems (Chapter “Theoretical Approaches for Effective Sustainable Urban Food Policymaking”), we resolved to explore an element that is little studied in the literature: the levers available to local urban governments to influence food supply. By identifying these levers and matching them with the food challenges caused by urbanization, we have been able to map certain research issues. In looking at each of the levers, we can investigate its real or potential effects on each of the potential problems to be solved. At that point, a specific conceptual framework needs to be developed for each of those issues. A study of the effects of commercial town planning on the sustainability of food practices cannot be done in the same context as one that looks into the effects of agricultural recycling of urban waste. Yet another framework will be needed to study the job creation impact of a food production relocation policy.

Accordingly, rather than propose an integrative scheme based on an expert's or planner's vision, we have sought to recognize the many different paths of policy development required by food issues. As we learned from our experience of supporting food policies, that approach can cater to actors from many different areas of activity, with often different and even divergent interests. If we as researchers are to
support these actors in the construction of their policies, we need to acquire the abil-
ity to test the hypotheses that emerge at the interface of the new problems to be
resolved and the levers available to them. Further, we need to cooperate with them
to come up with new approaches suited to new challenges.

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# Putting Food on the Regional Policy Agenda in Montpellier, France

<figure><img src="image_23.png" /></figure>

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updates

Laura Michel and Christophe-Toussaint Soulard
with Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole (Box Contributor)

While the food supply question virtually disappeared from the agenda of the cities of the developed world after World War II, a growing number of cities in the developing and developed world alike are now giving it their attention (Chapter “Cities’ Strategies for Sustainable Food and the Levers They Mobilize”). That renewed focus has been brought about by a food supply discourse that seeks to promote a sustainable urban policy (Pothukuchi and Kaufman 2000). In that context, food supply has come to be at the heart of a new category of public urban action—sustainable development—that has now been widely undertaken in local public action (Béal et al. 2011).

It appears, however, that the types of policy pursued are highly variable depend-
ing on which cities are looked at. Some propose policy instruments focused on the
food-health link, as in Toronto, while others are concerned with the food cycle and
target waste management, as in San Francisco (a ‘zero waste’ city). City administra-
tion of food issues is very recent in France (Perrin and Soulard 2014). Though a few
pioneering cities did adopt food policies, often agriculture-based at first, this level
of government only recently received legislative authority from the State, in the
form of the territorial food projects established under the 2014 Orientation Act.<fnref n="1" />

In this chapter, by tracing the experience of metropolitan Montpellier, which in
2015 devised an agricultural and food policy, we explore the pathways being taken
as the urban food issue emerges. How is it put on the city’s political agenda? How
does it take shape as a public issue? In other words, how does food as a social fact
become an object of concern and debate and possibly public action? How does the

L. Michel
UMR Cepel, Montpellier University, CNRS, Montpellier, France

C.-T. Soulard (✉)
UMR Innovation, Montpellier University, INRA, CIRAD, Montpellier Supagro,
Montpellier, France

e-mail: soulard@supagro.inra.fr

<footnote n="1">¹Act No. 2014-1170 of 13 October 2014 (Loi d'avenir pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et la forêt).</footnote>
food issue end up taking institutional form as a food policy? At the local level, what knock-on effects does that have?

To answer these questions, we shall be making three general assumptions that are likely to have an impact on the urban food agenda and the way the food issue is framed. Our first assumption is: while sustainable food policies may seem new, they take their place within existing institutional configurations, affecting both the potential emergence of a new agenda issue and the way that issue is framed. The food issue does not crop up spontaneously on the political agenda. It must be put forward by actors—entrepreneurs—who socially construct it as a public issue for the city. Indeed, the literature on public problems underscores the role of policy entrepreneurs (Becker 1963; Cobb and Elder 1972) in the emergence of new problems in the public area, thanks to cognitive work to define the problem and a mobilization effort. There is a wide variety of issue entrepreneurs in the area of food: thus, actors such as States, the European Union (EU), FAO, the scientific community, social movements and networks of cities, have proposed food action models to be pursued within and between urban areas. While the models do propose innovative supply arrangements, which can spark public debate on the food issue, and provide some framing of ways to deal with it, they need to be taken up and interpreted at the local level by actors who can facilitate a connexion between the processes of mobilization around problems and their management under public policies. These actors are then called policy entrepreneurs (Kingdon 1984; Guiliani 1999). In some cases, the local food movement plays a central role in this interpretative process. Our perception in Montpellier, in contrast, is that the decisive role has been played by local State bodies, certain local authorities and the scientific community. Finally, the transformation of existing institutional configurations can offer a window of opportunity for a new problem like food supply to be placed on the political agenda (Kingdon 1984). Territorial restructuring of the State’s role leads to responsibility being delegated to (but also caught by) city governments for these new issues. Similarly, times of institutional change or political coalition renewal are also conducive to the adoption of innovative policies—or policies perceived to be so. Our third hypothesis, then, is that the emergence of a new agricultural and food policy is bound up with changing institutional and territorial configurations, and especially the reshaping of the socio-political relationships between the city and its interstitial farm or garden areas as well as between the city centre and its rural outskirts.

By retracing the process of food policy development in Montpellier we can gain an understanding of how the food issue was put on cities’ agenda in the French context. In 2015 an agroecology and food policy was voted in by Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole and came into effect in its 31 constituent municipalities. The food issue was added to the agenda in a legislative, electoral and regional context that needs some explanation. The first part shows under what conditions a city was able to address the food issue. Then, in the second part, we explain how that was done, by whom, and by means of what framing effects with respect to the policy proposal passed in 2015. In the third part we look at the effects the policy has had on local institutional configurations, relations between the constituent municipalities of Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole, and the emerging governance modes there.
# Putting Food on the Regional Policy Agenda: An Agricultural Prism

Gilles Pinson defines the urban policy agenda as ‘the set of social facts that count as public problems, controversial and debatable at city level and calling for public action at the same level’ (Pinson 2006: 620). In the case of Montpellier, the food issue did not arise directly as such. It was the agricultural issue that was first raised by local actors as a public action item, in the years from 1990 to 2000 when wine-growing was in crisis. The action first developed was support for local wine production and, subsequently, protection of farmland from development in the metropolitan Montpellier area. Paradoxically, the prime movers in raising the food issue in local public discussions were the State—in particular through the national health nutrition plan (PNNS), then the national food program (PNA)—but also the Agropolis scientific community. As it turned out, the 2014 municipal elections gave some new political actors an opportunity to put the food issue on the metropolitan agenda.

## Emergence of Agricultural and Food Insecurity Problems

Whereas under the Fordist model the State, through planning, dominated the organization of local production systems, the State’s disengagement as of the mid-1980s—a boon or a constraint?—opened up new areas in which cities could act (Pinson 2009). Certain problems previously dealt with by the State—such as the agricultural issue—then cropped up on local agendas. In the urban area around Montpellier, the first initiatives of the district, then of the Montpellier conurbation community, were to promote local vineyards. These initiatives were supported by elected officials of small periurban municipalities, who advocated for a wine-growing region dominated at that time by monoculture. Thereupon, city dwellers’ demand for quality local products led to the development of shorter food supply chains, taking the form of farmers’ markets or points of sale on the farm or in town. While wine-growing had to that point been supported by the State, then the European Union, part of the industry then pivoted toward the production of quality wines, and other winegrowers that had been producing mass-market wines permanently grubbed up their vines. As a result of these changes in the periurban vineyard landscape, production diversified in response to the needs of farmers near Montpellier who switched to market gardening or grain crops and to a certain demand from urban consumers (Perrin et al. 2013; Scheromm and Soulard 2018).

Local actors’ other main focus, as regards the food issue, was a social one. The economic crisis spurred social inequalities in the cities of the developed world, and in particular food insecurity. The shock was much sharper in English-speaking countries, where cities in crisis in the 1980s were basically left to their fate (Stoker 1991). In this context, the issue of access to food emerged as one of the baselines for urban food planning policies (Chapter “Theoretical Approaches for Effective