# Designing Urban Food Policies

Caroline Brand, Nicolas Bricas, Damien Conaré, Benoît Daviron, Julie Debru, Laura Michel, Christophe-Toussaint Soulard

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Caroline Brand, Nicolas Bricas, Damien Conaré, Benoît Daviron, Julie Debru, et al.

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Urban Agriculture

Caroline Brand

Nicolas Bricas

Damien Conaré

Benoit Daviron

Julie Debru

Laura Michel

Christophe-Toussaint Soulard *Editors*

Designing
Urban Food
Policies

Concepts and Approaches

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

Springer
# Urban Agriculture

**Series editors**

Christine Aubry, AgroParisTech, INRA UMR SADAPT, Paris, France

Éric Duchemin, Université du Québec à Montréal, Institut des Science de l'Environnement, Montreal, Québec, Canada

Joe Nasr, Centre for Studies in Food Security, Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
The *Urban Agriculture* Book Series at Springer is for researchers, professionals, policy-makers and practitioners working on agriculture in and near urban areas. Urban agriculture (UA) can serve as a multifunctional resource for resilient food systems and socio-culturally, economically and ecologically sustainable cities.

For the Book Series Editors, the main objective of this series is to mobilize and enhance capacities to share UA experiences and research results, compare methodologies and tools, identify technological obstacles, and adapt solutions. By diffusing this knowledge, the aim is to contribute to building the capacity of policy-makers, professionals and practitioners in governments, international agencies, civil society, the private sector as well as academia, to effectively incorporate UA in their field of interests. It is also to constitute a global research community to debate the lessons from UA initiatives, to compare approaches, and to supply tools for aiding in the conception and evaluation of various strategies of UA development.

The concerned scientific field of this series is large because UA combines agricultural issues with those related to city management and development. Thus this interdisciplinary Book Series brings together environmental sciences, agronomy, urban and regional planning, architecture, landscape design, economics, social sciences, soil sciences, public health and nutrition, recognizing UA's contribution to meeting society's basic needs, feeding people, structuring the cities while shaping their development. All these scientific fields are of interest for this Book Series. Books in this Series will analyze UA research and actions; program implementation, urban policies, technological innovations, social and economic development, management of resources (soil/land, water, wastes...) for or by urban agriculture, are all pertinent here.

This Book Series includes a mix of edited, coauthored, and single-authored books. These books could be based on research programs, conference papers, or other collective efforts, as well as completed theses or entirely new manuscripts.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11815
Caroline Brand • Nicolas Bricas
Damien Conaré • Benoit Daviron
Julie Debru • Laura Michel
Christophe-Toussaint Soulard
Editors

# Designing Urban Food Policies

Concepts and Approaches

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Springer

OPEN
Editors

Caroline Brand
Chaire Unesco Alimentations du monde
Montpellier SupAgro
MONTPELLIER CEDEX 5, France

Nicolas Bricas
UMR MOÏSA
Cirad
MONTPELLIER CEDEX 5, France

Damien Conaré
Chaire Unesco Alimentations du monde
Montpellier SupAgro
MONTPELLIER CEDEX 5, France

Benoit Daviron
UMR MOÏSA
Cirad
MONTPELLIER CEDEX 5, France

Julie Debru
Chaire Unesco Alimentations du monde
Montpellier SupAgro
MONTPELLIER CEDEX 5, France

Laura Michel
Faculty of Law and Political Science
University of Montpellier
MONTPELLIER CEDEX 2, France

Christophe-Toussaint Soulard
UMR Innovation
INRA
MONTPELLIER CEDEX 2, France

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

First published in 2017 by Éditions Quæ; Construire des politiques alimentaires urbaines: Concepts et démarches

ISSN 2197-1730
Urban Agriculture

ISBN 978-3-030-13957-5

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13958-2

ISSN 2197-1749 (electronic)

ISBN 978-3-030-13958-2 (eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019. This book is an open access publication.

**Open Access** This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
# Foreword

The urban food system sustainability issue first and foremost raises personal concerns regardless of whether you live in a city or rural area, in a so-called poor or rich country, or are a leader or an ordinary citizen. One may ask: Under what conditions can I feed my family? What part depends on my culture, my economic capacity, my personal choices or the prevailing food system? How would I adapt to a crisis situation?

These personal questions soon shift the spotlight onto the systemic dimension of urban food systems and their sustainability. One may then ask: Have I ever lived in a nonsustainable urban food system? Have I been aware of such systems? Individual responses to these questions would be wide-ranging, but several images come to mind: the food plight of people living in cities during wartime, the impact of the 2014–2015 Ebola epidemic in West Africa on the distribution of foodstuffs and the urban riots that gave rise to the Arab Spring in 2010, which were triggered by uncontrolled soaring food prices. Nowadays in Europe, commodity producers are also bearing the brunt of the economic power of supermarket chains—and, who knows, next it could be consumers in that position. In the summer of 1982, meat supplies to a large European capital were at a standstill—but city dwellers managed to mobilize their family networks in rural areas within 2 weeks, leading to the formation of informal supply chains to solve the problem.

There is a risk of feeling powerless when defining an urban food system management strategy because of the complexity of the issue and the diversity of situations, constraints, stakeholders and viewpoints. Experience sharing, awareness of analytical approaches and mobilizable reference frameworks are thus particularly crucial in this setting.

Some urban systems—including transportation and water provisioning—are amenable to technical analysis or systems modelling, while scenario simulation can a priori help to identify weaknesses and preventively implement improvement strategies.

Urban food systems are however much more decentralized, so the authors of this book advocate a sustainability approach geared towards strengthening actors’ expertise, their ability to explain their vision and objectives, identify levers to which
they have access and implement them in co-governance situations. This type of approach is favoured by the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact that was signed in Milan in October 2015 by more than 100 mayors of cities from around the world.

This approach is jointly driven by historical knowledge, which can clarify cur-
rent situations and issues, and by an in situ case study around the city of Montpellier
(France). The main recent theoretical approaches presented in Chap. 4 and the con-
ceptual framework proposed in Chap. 5 will help many urban food system stake-
holders analyse the setting of their city, identify similar experiences, as well as
share, compare and capitalize on knowledge.

Given the major challenge of ensuring the sustainability of urban food systems, this book—coordinated by the UNESCO Chair on World Food Systems, CIRAD and INRA, with the support of Agropolis Fondation—provides a conceptual framework and basis for knowledge development and sharing. It comes as a very welcome contribution on this crucial issue.

Director, Agropolis Fondation
Montpellier, France

Pascal Kosuth
# Preface

Cities have been propelled into the forefront of the debate about sustainable food policies because, with rapid urbanization, the urban realm has become a locus for three of the most significant challenges to the conventional food system—multi-functionality, co-governance and city-regionalism.

Under the banner of multifunctionality, the urban food movement has challenged the conventional idea that food should be treated as a simple commodity like any other. But urban food campaigners resist this idea by arguing that food cannot be so easily commodified because, unlike manufactured commodities, we ingest food and it plays a vital role in the health and wellbeing of people and the planet.

The urban food movement—a loose and sometimes chaotic assemblage of municipal activism and civic engagement—is also challenging the idea that the food policy arena is reserved for corporate interests, national governments and international bodies like the World Trade Organization (WTO). One of the most rapidly growing social movements of our time is the advent of food policy councils, or food policy partnerships, where civil society organizations are joining forces with municipal politicians and officers to fashion a more sustainable urban foodscape, one in which the values of public health, social justice and ecological integrity are treated more seriously in the food policy equation. New forms of co-governance are beginning to emerge in our cities as politicians realize that they have to design policies *with* rather than for civil society—and urban food policy is in the forefront of this process.

City-region food systems constitute a third challenge to the conventional food policy mindset, which has been dominated until recently by the logic of globalization and the placeless foodscapes where price is extolled over provenance. The new urban food movement champions a sustainable food system in which cities are able to reconnect with their regional hinterlands as well as consuming fairly traded products from afar. Sustainability should not be confused with green autarchy! Sustainable city-region food strategies pose a challenge because they contest one of the deepest divisions in capitalist society—between town and country.
Creating sustainable urban food policies will face many barriers, not least because they pose such fundamental challenges to vested interests in the conventional food system. But this system is not set in aspic, and one of the great merits of this book—based on the work of leading scholars associated with the Agropolis Foundation—is that it explores the scope for sustainable urban food policies, one of the greatest societal challenges of the twenty-first century.

Professor of Governance and Development,
School of Geography and Planning
Cardiff University
Cardiff, Wales, UK

Kevin Morgan
Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all those who have participated in the Sustainable Urban Food Systems (SurFood) programme, thus contributing to the emergence of a collective multidisciplinary vision of sustainable urban food and of projects supported by the Montpellier-based scientific community in collaboration with local stakeholders. This programme brought together over 100 researchers, lecturers and engineers of the research units: ART-DEV, CEPEL, CIRED, LET, MRM, NORT, NutriPass, Recycling and Risk and TETIS, in France; ENDA-Graf, IPAR, ISRA and UCAD in Dakar (Senegal); HUST and MALICA (CASRAD and FAVRI) in Hanoi (Vietnam); ETAN in Kenitra (Morocco); IAV and INAU in Rabat (Morocco); as well as Bioversity International. We are grateful to Florence Egal (Consultant, Milan Urban Food Policy Pact) and Anna Faucher (International Urban Food Network) for their contributions to the brainstorming workshops. We also thank Françoise Jarrige, Ronan Le Velly and Simon Vonthron for their work regarding metropolitan Montpellier, along with Valérie de Saint Vaulry, Anne-Sophie Muepu, Sam Sandiani and Isabelle Touzard of Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole.

This book could not have been published without the support of Agropolis Fondation which initiated and backed the SurFood programme, as well as the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation which has been supporting the UNESCO Chair on World Food Systems since 2012.

Finally, we thank David Manley and Paul Cowan for translating this book.
# Introduction

The present book is in keeping with the aims of the Sustainable Urban Food Systems (SurFood) research project supported by Agropolis Fondation. This flagship project was set up to coordinate, amplify and globally showcase the interdisciplinary research of the different institutional members of Labex Agro. It has been written in response to a request from Agropolis Fondation's Science Council to build a conceptual framework for the analysis, evaluation and development of sustainable urban food systems.

## The Twenty-First Century Heralds the Dawn of a New Era for Cities

Following the reign of nation states, there is every reason to believe that the twenty-first century will be a new era for cities.

First because, from a structural standpoint, currently over half of the world population is urban (compared to 30% in 1950), and it will increase to two-thirds by 2050 according to the United Nations (2014). Medium-sized cities have considerable weight in this process since half of the urban population presently lives in cities of fewer than 500,000 inhabitants, while 1 urban dweller in 8 lives in a megacity of more than 10 million inhabitants. Africa and Asia—two continents that are still mainly rural—will be the locus of most of this urban population growth (2.5 billion more people in the next 35 years). Together, China, India and Nigeria will account for nearly 40% of the world's population growth by 2050. This raises major challenges in meeting housing, infrastructure, transportation, energy, employment, education, health and, of course, food needs.

Second because cities are gaining tremendous social, political and economic power. This power rises which—in addition to the demographic weight that cities represent—may be partly explained by production system changes taking place worldwide in a globalization setting and by the financial disengagement of States in
land-use planning. Cities represent powerful local hubs that States can rely on to manage transitions to new development models. Cities have thus extended and asserted their power in many areas of social life to transform an ambient ‘ecodesire’ into tangible local reality (Haëntjens 2009) while developing their scope of operations to ensure their sustainability (Emelianoff 2007).

## Cities as ‘Human Settlements’

This trend is reflected by the growing number of territorial sustainable development policies and the development of global networks of local urban governments. At the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Rio Earth Summit), local authorities in each country were called upon to set up local Agenda 21 programmes tailored to their local setting, considering that: '[...] As the level of governance closest to the people, they play a vital role in educating, mobilizing and responding to the public to promote sustainable development' (Chapter 28 on local authorities' initiatives in support of Agenda 21).

Urban networks (Metropolis, International Council for Local Environmental Initiative and the Global Network of Cities, Local and Regional Governments) have spearheaded initiatives to ensure the tangible implementation of local Agenda 21 programmes.

The sustainability objectives were strengthened 4 years later at the Second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) in Istanbul in 1996. Launched 20 years earlier in Vancouver in 1976, this UN process marked the beginning of an initiative to provide a reference framework for international cooperation on the topic of ‘human settlements’. This expression reflects a desire to consider cities as the outcome of relationships between inhabitants and their structures—a form that urban populations build and organize (Emelianoff 2007).

Many voluntary partnerships between cities worldwide were later formed, especially on the climate change issue, for the exchange of good practices and joint commitments. These networks have often played a major underlying yet little-known role in international governance. Given, for instance, that cities account for around 70% of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions even though they only occupy 2% of the Earth’s surface area (UN-Habitat, 2011), the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (a network of 83 cities worldwide) has made commitments to reduce emissions by 2020, corresponding to the cumulated emissions of Portugal and Argentina. Organized in networks, cities are thus now managing to cope with a number of global challenges.
## Global and Organic Cities

Cities have also gained economic weight in this new globalization phase. A World Bank analysis (Kilroy et al. 2015) showed that three-quarters of 750 surveyed cities had grown faster than their respective national economies since the 2000s.

The American geographer, Saskia Sassen, devised the ‘global city’ concept to describe the impact of liberalization and financialization processes on some cities since the 1980s (Sassen 1991). According to her, the current globalization phase is marked by a simultaneous geographic dispersal and concentration dynamic, whereby economic activities and industrial installations are increasingly dispersed throughout the world, while central management functions (accounting, legal, public relations, etc.) have become highly reconcentrated in a number of global cities that host the headquarters of major multinational companies, financial institutions and stock markets. These global cities are therefore defined by the key role they play—with central command functions—in the new global economy, which has given rise to a transnational urban system. The spatial scale of these global cities, which are benefitting from privatization and economic deregulation, is thus taking ascendance over the national scale.

Globalization has cut main cities off from their national economies, or even distanced them from their territorial anchorage. The food sector therefore represents a tremendous opportunity for cities to recreate the sometimes lost link with the environments that produce their food. It is also a chance to forge new links with ‘organic cities’ of the past (Steel 2008), which prevailed prior to the industrial revolution when cities were literally shaped by food—with the spatial structure of cities organized around central food markets, often surrounded by buildings symbolizing the religious (church), economic (chamber of commerce) and political (city hall) powers, with street names referring to foods or food shops and the architectural design of houses related to food supply, etc.

Feeding cities has therefore become crucial despite the fact that this issue was no longer being taken seriously in some regions of the world. Carolyn Steel takes the example of London, where it seems to be taken for granted that sufficient food must be produced, transported, distributed, sold and cooked daily to feed 8.6 million people, and the generated waste must also then be managed. This challenge nevertheless must be met every day in all cities worldwide.

## Feeding Cities: An Urban Planning Issue

There is rising awareness that growing and often poorly controlled urbanization leads to urban sprawl, socio-spatial inequality, pollution and environmental degradation associated with nonsustainable modes of production and consumption. The increased distancing—geographic (remoteness from basins), economic (increased number of intermediaries) and cognitive (ignorance of production
conditions)—between cities and supply basins raises many problems: increased transport costs, energy consumption and food loss and wastage. Finally, relationships between city and rural dwellers are becoming less tight-knit as a result of the many food processing, logistics, distribution and catering operations.

Food has again become a global discussion issue as a result of the 2008 crisis regarding agricultural raw material prices and following numerous health crises (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, avian influenza, etc.), while cities are increasingly interested in finding ways to meet city dwellers' expectations on improving their diet. This twofold global/local movement is reflected on a territorial level by an increase in initiatives on food relocalization, urban agriculture, farmland protection, school canteen provisioning, etc. This plethora of innovations is still poorly structured, while accounting for or including it in integrated food policies is still a recent phenomenon.

Pothukuchi and Kaufman (1999) were among the first authors to focus on the importance of the role of food in the city. According to these authors, at the time, there were at least four reasons for city representatives' lack of interest in the food issue: the food system did not require special attention as it was considered to be functioning well, the food sector was not within the purview of urban planners, this sector (contrary to the transport and housing sectors) did not attract financing, and, finally, food was considered to be primarily a rural agricultural issue (not an urban one).

According to Morgan (2009), the latter argument is not admissible to justify the 'puzzling omission' on the part of planners regarding food. First, the multidimensional aspect of the food system means that it has a substantial impact on other sectors such as public health, social justice, energy, water, land, transport and economic development. All of these sectors are considered to be key concerns of urban representatives who have every right to deal with them. Second, considering food production as an exclusively rural activity challenges the fact that in many cities worldwide, urban agriculture has a pivotal role in food security and in others it inspires a rich socioeconomic movement geared towards producing food in cities.

## Emergence of New Urban Food Strategies

The food issue—certainly 'too big to see' (Steel 2008)—has long been overlooked by urban actors. Over the last two decades, however, many cities have developed their own food strategy while incorporating different aspects of the system in a common framework: production, processing, distribution, access, consumption and waste management. These strategies are often integrated in broader initiatives to promote urban sustainability (Jennings et al. 2015) and reduce the urban-rural divide (Forster and Getz Escudero 2014).

To this end, local urban governments (cities, conurbations, metropolises) have a number of levers at hand: tenders for collective catering food supplies (school can-teens, hospitals and other public institutions), land management (especially
preservation of production areas), development of commercial areas, neighbourhoods and flows, formation of governance structures such as food policy councils, creation of farmers' markets, etc. A local food strategy along these lines could help in dealing with different issues: improving food quality, reducing losses and wastage, stimulating local economic development, strengthening solidarity between urban dwellers, improving their health, protecting the environment, etc. (Wiskerke 2009).

Strategies implemented by local urban governments are supported by a broader movement of initiatives geared towards relocalizing food systems run by individual or associative bodies, local governments at different scales, farmers, agrifood companies and research stakeholders (Feanstra 1997, 2002; Hendrickson and Heffernan 2002; Feagan 2007; Muchnik et al. 2007; Martinez et al. 2010; *Association des Régions de France* 2014; Rastoin 2016). This food relocalization movement has also been the brunt of criticism, e.g. accused of being a 'local trap' (Born and Purcell 2006)—the claim that the geographical governance scale alone does not ensure food system sustainability. Indeed, the actors and the agenda they set up are the actual guarantors (Hinrichs et al. 1998; Brown and Purcell 2005; Watts et al. 2005; Born and Purcell 2006; Kneafsey 2010).

Urban areas in North America have been testing food policies since the early 1990s (Neuner et al. 2011; Viljoen and Wiskerke 2012), with Toronto being one of the cities spearheading this trend (Blay-Palmer 2009), but this dynamic is not solely embraced by industrialized countries. The Brazilian metropolis Belo Horizonte is thus lauded as a pioneer for having developed an urban policy to combat food insecurity. Its experience provided a model for building the Brazilian nationwide *Fome Zero* (zero hunger) programme (Rocha and Lessa 2009). In the same vein, many other cities have experimented with local food insecurity control strategies via school canteens, urban agriculture and short supply chains, including (among many other examples) Mexico City, Medellin (Colombia), Rosario (Argentina), Gampaha (Sri Lanka), Nairobi (Kenya) and Accra (Ghana).

Civil society mobilization has been decisive in all cases (Morgan 2009). These initiatives provide technical and economic alternatives to the standard food production, processing and distribution model while also giving rise to other modes of governance that stimulate local democracy processes (Guthman 2008; Lang et al. 2009; Starr 2010; Block et al. 2012).

These local initiatives are gaining momentum and converging in national and international networks such as Sustainable Food Cities (UK), Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security (RUAF Foundation), Transition Network (TN), African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN), Eating City, International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), International Urban Food Network (IUFN), Sustainable Food Planning Group of the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP), etc.

Caroline Brand (2015) nevertheless clearly demonstrated that the movement of territories towards an integrated global view on the food issue is not a clear-cut trend. There is still often a gap between the rhetoric on the issue and the actual fact of taking the food situation into account in territories. Moreover, the strategies
implemented are often fragmentary and just deal with one of the many facets of the food system, or else they do not seek to explicitly intervene on the food system per se (Hodgson 2012).

## Towards a Conceptual Framework

This book is structured as follows for the purpose of gaining insight into, analysing and conceptualizing the dynamics between cities and their food systems:

It first focuses on the limitations of the industrialized food system (Chap. 1), which is currently dominant worldwide but nonsustainable. Many reports have highlighted the pitfalls: high nonrenewable resource consumption, socially and economically unfair, not very rewarding for some stakeholders, a major contributor to biodiversity loss and climate change via GHG emissions and a generator of food waste and wastage. Global urbanization magnifies these negative impacts. Meanwhile, however, cities pool a number of resources that provide an opportunity to enhance the sustainability of urban food systems.

The relationship between cities and food is then discussed from a historic standpoint, from antiquity to World War II, while being geographically focused on Europe and the Mediterranean region (Chap. 2). Different types of intervention by urban authorities are analysed over a time scale: safeguarding of food supply chains, organization of local markets, ensuring food quality, combating food fraud, waste and soil fertility management, etc. The aim of this chapter is therefore to showcase the wealth of initiatives undertaken over time to promote urban food policies so as to broaden the scope of discussion options in current debates.

Nowadays, to tackle the issues set out in Chap. 1, what policies have been implemented by cities, and what are the governance aims, means and models (Chap. 3)? This chapter—via a typology of urban food policies on these points—investigates the relevance of urban food supply relocalization and seeks to measure the extent to which food systems could be effectively modified at the local scale.

The sustainability of food systems and especially of urban food policies has become a focus of research along with the development of a number of conceptual frameworks for their analysis (Chap. 4). This chapter provides an overview of existing frameworks. While not striving to be exhaustive, a few emblematic approaches that have been developed are presented to take the urban food issue into account in an integrated way. This chapter highlights the need to combine the different approaches.

This appraisal provides an opportunity to present the approach developed by the SurFood programme, which aims to develop urban food policies and build analysis and assessment tools, while providing knowledge on possible policy options that urban actors could potentially implement to build more sustainable urban food system models (Chap. 5). This approach dovetails three dimensions: levers that cities have at hand to manage food at their scale, the problems they must deal with and the
governance arrangements implemented to launch a food strategy. The objectives of this approach, its uses and potential applications are specified in the chapter.

This approach has been applied in the metropolitan Montpellier area. In 2014, Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole voted in an agroecology and food policy with the support of researchers involved in the SurFood project (Chap. 6). This chapter investigates the urban food governance emergence process, from the point where food is placed on the agenda when drawing up public policies in local urban governments to the mobilization of civil society actors.

Finally, the book concludes by presenting a series of potential avenues of research to gain insight into and support the transition dynamics needed to achieve more sustainable urban food systems.

UNESCO Chair in World Food System,
Montpellier SupAgro, Montpellier, France

Damien Conaré

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# Contents

<table><tbody><tr><td><strong>Urbanization Issues Affecting Food System Sustainability</strong></td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Nicolas Bricas</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Box 1 Urban Metabolism and Territorial Ecology</td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>Sabine Barles and Gilles Billen</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Box 2 Who Generates Urban Conurbation Food Supply Flows?</td><td>13</td></tr><tr><td>Jean-Louis Routhier</td><td></td></tr><tr><td><strong>History of Urban Food Policy in Europe, from the Ancient City to the Industrial City</strong></td><td>27</td></tr><tr><td>Benoit Daviron, Coline Perrin, and Christophe-Toussaint Soulard</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Box 1 Famine, Markets and Public Policy in European Cities from the End of the Middle Ages</td><td>34</td></tr><tr><td>François Menant</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Box 2 Development of Analytical Laboratories in France</td><td>41</td></tr><tr><td>Benoit Daviron</td><td></td></tr><tr><td><strong>Cities' Strategies for Sustainable Food and the Levers They Mobilize</strong></td><td>53</td></tr><tr><td>Jess Halliday</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Box 1 Strategic Urban Governance Capacity Concept and Urban Food Policy Implementation Factors</td><td>67</td></tr><tr><td>Wendy Mendes</td><td></td></tr><tr><td><strong>Theoretical Approaches for Effective Sustainable Urban Food Policymaking</strong></td><td>75</td></tr><tr><td>Julie Debru and Caroline Brand</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Contributions from: Vanessa Armendáriz, Stefano Armenia, Alberto Stanislao Atzori, Nevin Cohen and Paul James.</td><td>75</td></tr></tbody></table>
<table><tr><td><strong>Reconciling Sustainability Issues and Urban Policy Levers</strong></td><td>107</td></tr><tr><td>Nicolas Bricas, Christophe-Toussaint Soulard, and Clément Arnal</td><td></td></tr><tr><td><strong>Putting Food on the Regional Policy Agenda in Montpellier, France</strong></td><td>123</td></tr><tr><td>Laura Michel and Christophe-Toussaint Soulard</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Box 1 Metropolitan Montpellier's Agroecology and Food Policy</td><td>133</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Conclusion</strong></td><td>139</td></tr><tr><td>Nicolas Bricas</td><td></td></tr></table>
# Urbanization Issues Affecting Food System Sustainability

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>

Check for
updates

Nicolas Bricas with Sabine Barles, Gilles Billen, and Jean-Louis Routhier
(Box Contributors)

This chapter identifies urbanization issues affecting food system sustainability. Since the nineteenth century and the onset of industrialization, cities have been both the product and motor of food systems, which are expanding worldwide despite the impression that they are nonsustainable. Since both the problems and resources are concentrated in cities, the latter are also a source of innovation, which can in turn help enhance the sustainability of food systems.

## Cities, Sustainability and Food Systems: Definitions

### Cities

To understand sustainability issues that cities may cause or could help solve, cities may be viewed through several features:

- First the city is a concentration of human beings, a space or habitat with a highly dense population, thus limiting areas for extensive agricultural production. Cities are essentially nurtured by external areas. This population concentration often gives rise to traffic problems given the density of goods needed by city dwellers. Originally a migration focal point, the city is also a space of coexistence and interaction between communities of different geographical and cultural origins (Lamizet 2007)—a source of both innovations and possible tensions.

- The city is also a concentration of resources—power, knowledge, wealth and biomass—contrasting with the scattered resources in rural areas. This generates power asymmetry between rural and urban environments. Some authors consider

<footnote>N. Bricas (✉)
UMR MOÏSA, Cirad, MONTPELLIER CEDEX 5, France
e-mail: nicolas.bricas@cirad.fr</footnote>
that cities develop through perpetual exploitation of rural areas (Salomon Cavin and Marchand 2010; Salomon Cavin and Mathieu 2014), while others point out that cities have been the drivers of agricultural development, offering outlets for higher value-added products (Tacoli 1998; Cour 2004).

- The city is a space of commercial and cultural exchange, with the urban market being a focal point of trade flows, particularly of agricultural goods. It hence represents a network hub whose ramifications can extend way beyond the outskirts of the urban area.

In addition to these three features that have been always been inherent to urban centres, we should mention two other traits that have been specific to cities since the nineteenth century:

- Urban growth has been a product of industrialization for nearly two centuries. This is understood here as involving the development of a mode of production using nonrenewable resources, particularly for energy, rather than the development of manufacturing companies (Krausmann and Haberl 2002). But this industrialization process is also concentrated in cities. Urbanization and industrialization thus seem to be closely linked, especially since issues related to these two phenomena are inseparable.

- The concentration of wealth and power has accelerated as a result of the major productivity gains achieved through industrialization. Industrial cities are spaces marked by high inequality between rich and poor populations living in close proximity, between small and large companies operating in the same markets, and between central governments where industrial, financial and political interests often overlap. The growing inequality is reflected in the marginalization of part of the population due to exclusion from the production system where mechanization is increasingly replacing human labour, thus constituting a reservoir of cheap manpower.

The evolution in the relationship the city has with its food system can be interpreted as a case of multifaceted distancing (Bricas et al. 2013):

- geographical distancing with remote relocation of supply areas because of urban expansion and facilitated by the decrease in fossil fuel based transportation costs;

- economic distancing with the multiplication of intermediaries between agricultural producers and consumers for food dissemination, processing, storage and distribution;

- cognitive distancing with a growing share of the population born in the city as it ages—a population that is unfamiliar with the rural community, with the virtual disappearance of contacts between city dwellers and farmers, and with knowledge of the agriculture and food spheres no longer being direct but instead mediated by science and information media;

- political distancing with citizens losing control of their food system—with their range of preferences being confined to choices between supply areas and products. Despite the development of consumerism, eaters feel deprived of power to orient the system, which is in the hands of a just few dominant stakeholders.
## Food System

The food system represents a set of interrelated activities regarding the production, dissemination, processing and use of food, waste and the required resources. Food issues have long been overshadowed by production sufficiency concerns—a major focus of interest—but the food system concept is broader in scope, encompassing production and all that precedes and succeeds it (Malassis 1983; Rastoin and Ghersi 2010). This concept helps tackle issues specifically related to how agricultural products are used to feed populations (Sobal et al. 1998).

Still recently considered as resulting in consumption (from the Latin term consumere), i.e. destruction, the food system should now incorporate the fate of the waste produced. This waste has historically been used as fertilizer in agricultural production cycles until being replaced by petroleum-based nitrogen fertilizers and mined phosphate and potassium, with the result that waste is no longer a food system concern (Lewin 2009). We include waste as a food system component with the aim of minimizing waste quantities and recycling the intractable part, thus promoting sustainability.

## Food

Food is considered here from a multifunctional standpoint (Fischler 1990; Poulain 2002). It is not solely aimed at meeting human needs (nutritional function), it also serves to create and maintain social interactions through the organization of the movement of products (market role) and the organization of meals (commensality role). It also provides pleasure and thus has an artistic aspect, as promoted by gastronomy (hedonic function). Food has an important identity function since it is incorporated in the body and thus helps build individual and collective identities. The biological function seems vital, but can no longer be considered a priority or fundamental once biological survival is no longer threatened. The relative importance of food functions is generally culture-dependent.

## Sustainability

There is current no consensus on what pertains to sustainability in contemporary society issues. The sustainability concept was developed to cope with irreversible environmental situations resulting from changes in modes of production, especially via industrialization. Then a social dimension soon emerged, including problems of inequality, in addition to health concerns and even cultural aspects. Many problems are nowadays dealt with in the name of sustainability (Godard 1994).
On the basis of definitions proposed by FAO and Bioversity International (Burlingame and Dernini 2010), as well as IPES Food (2015), here we have adopted a definition that considers food systems are sustainable when they:

- protect the environment and biodiversity without depleting nonrenewable resources and biodiversity, and without polluting;

- provide universal access to sufficient, healthy, nutritional and culturally acceptable food;

- rely on an inclusive economic system that creates jobs for everyone while reducing power inequalities between businesses and within value chains so as to ensure a more equitable distribution of added value;

- encourage social cohesion and respect cultural diversity and dynamics;

- restore confidence in the system and enable citizens to participate in its development.

Based on this definition, what are the food system sustainability issues resulting from urbanization and industrialization?

# Promoting Sustainable Agriculture to Feed Cities

## *Reclosing Fertilization Cycles and Reducing Pollution*

Surplus food production is needed to feed nonfarming communities. In Mesopotamia and Egypt in Ancient Times, and around the thirteenth century in the Khmer kingdom, cities were fed by agriculture that benefitted from fertilization via silt transfer from watersheds onto floodplains on both sides of the rivers. This is how Babylon (Van der Spek 2008), Alexandria (Viollet 2004) and Angkor (Evans et al. 2007) were able to grow. Note that this is how, for instance, Angkor managed to maintain a population of several hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, most of whom were involved in building temples.

That said, in 1800, only 3.4% of the world's population was urban, compared to about half in 2000! This soaring urbanization trend since the nineteenth century may be explained by changes in agricultural production methods that, in alternative ways, made it possible to generate surplus crops to feed a growing nonagricultural population. This trend generally occurred in two phases (Daviron 2016): first through an expansion of the cropping area and land colonization, and then by increased use of fossil coal as a fuel source. Coal enabled the development of transportation and provisioning via long-distance supply chains. Then the widespread use of petroleum prompted an increase in agricultural production by providing low-cost fuel to replace human and animal labour, with mechanization in turn leading to a marked increase in labour productivity. The use of petroleum also led to a decrease in material and energy extraction from forests, while also reducing areas devoted to producing animal feed—the main source of energy until then. These areas could subsequently be
converted for food production. With the use of fossil fuels, it was no longer neces-
sary to ensure cycling of nitrogen, which is essential for plant growth. At the expense
of high fuel consumption (generally natural gas), the Haber-Bosh process made it
possible to transform atmospheric nitrogen into chemical nitrogen fertilizer.
Moreover, the use of mined phosphate and potassium overcame the need for faeces
recycling, as was previously practiced (Box 1 and chapter “History of Urban Food
Policy in Europe, from the Ancient City to the Industrial City”).

**Box 1: Urban Metabolism and Territorial Ecology**

Sabine Barles and Gilles Billen

Territorial metabolism—with all of the caution required when considering the
analogy to organic metabolism—refers to how territories consume and trans-
form energy and matter, as well as how they mobilize and transform biosphere
resources. This concept emerged from the idea that territories are dependent
on these resources and modify the biosphere at different scales depending on
how they use them. Interactions between societies and nature can be system-
atically analysed from this perspective: How much energy does a territory
need to carry out all of its activities? How much material, i.e. water, foods and
finished products, etc.? What happens to these flows once they have entered
the territory since they have been used and transformed? In what form are
they eventually returned to the environment? What are the impacts? Territorial
ecology aims to place territorial metabolism in a spatial and social setting—
the material and energy flows involved are the result of political, economic,
social and technical choices, to name but a few. They reflect typical biosphere
processes as well as the functioning of societies and cannot be analysed with-
out taking this functioning into account. These flows link territories to others
that supply them or receive their excreta, so a given territory's environmental
footprint can be quite far from its limits—this situation is highly prevalent in
cities, especially regarding their food.

Cities emerge since they offer at least some of their inhabitants the possi-
bility of developing activities other than just subsistence production, includ-
ing trade. Cities are thus models of social and spatial specialization. The
upshot is that they outsource at least part (and now most) of their metabolism
(Barles 2015). This outsourcing first concerned food flows and flows associ-
ated with heating and food preparation (referred to as ‘energy’ from the nine-
teenth century onward), while building materials were often extracted in the
immediate vicinity of cities to facilitate transport. Outsourcing reached its
peak with the industrial revolutions and urban transition—most cities have
become entirely dependent on external territories for their supplies of ever
more numerous materials and products, and for the elimination of their grow-
ing volumes of waste. Cities’ energy and material consumption have substan-
tially increased, while their metabolism has been levelling off—the reliance

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

on fossil fuel (coal, hydrocarbons) and industrial fertilizers (atmospheric nitrogen fixed via the Haber-Bosch process, phosphate and potassium extracted from mines), etc., enabled human societies to disregard major bio-geochemical cycles and give up urban by-product recovery and recycling. The resulting environmental footprint is global, fragmented and deep-rooted.

Studies of material flows contributing to the urban food supply, especially in Paris which has been the focus of recent research (Abad 2002; Billen et al. 2011, 2014; Bognon 2014), have shown the extent to which these flows reflect the social relations and antagonistic trends that prevail in these cities. Until the early twentieth century, the Paris Basin (roughly the 200–250 km area around Paris) was the capital’s main breadbasket hinterland, where the potential for producing agricultural surpluses was tailored to meeting the increased urban food demand induced by the considerable demographic growth rate. During the second half of the twentieth century, however, cropland specialization and disruption of the complementarity between crop and livestock farming, which was facilitated by the widespread application of industrial fertilizers, resulted in breakup of the supply area. The Paris Basin became devoted to export cereal crops and the *Grand Ouest* area to intensive livestock production based mainly on soybean imports from Latin America. The current Parisian paradox is that it relies on a quite locally circumscribed direct food market (within the limits of its specialization) whereas production is very globally oriented in the surrounding agricultural hinterland, with Paris now being just one of this hinterland’s many market outlets. More than it might seem, the city has remained focused on its rural hinterland while the latter is very largely integrated in the globalization trend.

The future trajectory of the Parisian food system will depend on a tradeoff between two diametrically opposed trends, which correspond to two markedly different visions of the future of the city and agriculture. A centrifugal trend regarding the economic development of agriculture, agroindustries and supermarkets, which promotes the specialization and concentration of production and logistics tools in an increasingly globalized setting. In contrast, rising numbers of urban consumers, politically bolstered by local authorities, e.g. via the 2013 Master Plan for Ile-de-France Region, have created a centripetal trend with innovative forms of relocation of food links between the city and its historic hinterland.

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

**References**

Abad R (2002) Le Grand Marché. L'approvisionnement alimentaire de Paris sous l'Ancien Régime. Fayard, Paris

Barles S (2015) The main characteristics of urban socio-ecological trajectories: Paris (France) from the 18th to the 20th Century. Ecol Econ 118: 177-185

Billen G, Barles S, Chatzimpiros P, Garnier J (2011) Grain, meat and vegetables to feed Paris: where did and do they come from? Localising Paris food supply areas from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Reg Environ Chang 12: 325-336

Billen G, Lasseletta L, Garnier J (2014) A biogeochemical view of the global agro-food system: Nitrogen flows associated with protein production, consumption and trade. Glob Food Sec 3: 209-219

Bognon S (2014) Les transformations de l'approvisionnement alimentaire dans la métro-pole parisienne. Trajectoire socio-écologique et construction de proximités. Thesis dis-sertation, Urbanism-Development, Université Paris 1

The now well known impacts of this industrialization of agricultural production are mixed. They are positive because this industrialization led to a sharp increase in food production, thus making it possible to feed a growing non-farmer population. On a global scale, one farm worker currently feeds around 5.5 people but, because of the still very high proportion of nonindustrialized agriculture in Asia and Africa, this ratio is over 1:140 in North America, according to FAOSTAT data.

The impacts are also negative because this production is achieved at the price of overconsumption of nonrenewable or slowly renewable resources: coal, oil and natural gas, mined phosphorus, as well as water due to the development of motorized irrigation. Fisheries resources have been exploited faster than their renewal capacity because of the motorization of fishing boats. In addition to this resource depletion, the environment is becoming saturated with pollutants: nitrogenous waste, GHGs, eutrophication and pesticides, leading to long-term environmental damage. Finally, agricultural specialization and intensive production strategies have contributed to the erosion of crop and livestock biodiversity, while also upsetting the biological balance (insects and microorganisms).

While it has been possible to feed fast growing cities so far, it seems that it will no longer be possible to continue to do so in the future if urbanization continues. Although industrial production methods could likely be streamlined to waste fewer resources and cause less pollution, they are still generally based on nonrenewable resource use, which is not sustainable in the long run. New production methods must be invented to be able to generate surpluses to feed cities but without using nonrenewable resources. Research on such alternative solutions has revealed that
cities have a high resource supply potential, especially with regard to soil fertilization.

Until the early twentieth century, Shanghai and even Paris recovered and recycled faeces and urine produced by their inhabitants to fertilize the lands that fed them. Thereafter, the use of petroleum—hence abandoning the closure of nitrogen and phosphorus cycles—has resulted in almost unlimited extension of food supply areas of cities. Because of the reduction in transportation costs, cities get their food supplies from increasingly remote production areas. Urban metabolism analyses (Girardet 1999; Barles 2007; Billen et al. 2012) (Box 1) have shown that cities are now gigantic pumps that concentrate materials such as nitrogen and phosphorus. Food supplies come from areas much further away than rural areas where sludge from sewage treatment plants is dumped. These resources, part of which are discharged into the sea or rivers, have potential for use as fertilizer, but they are generally just wasted—becoming sources of pollution, especially nitrogen pollution (Lacroix 1995).

The reclosure of nitrogen, phosphorus and more generally biomass cycles is therefore a key urban food policy challenge. It highlights that cities can help promote new more sustainable modes of agricultural production. In the interstices of residential neighbourhoods, in periurban areas with high land constraints, so-called ‘urban-farmers’ practicing urban agriculture also invent new forms of production that are little or not at all reliant on chemical pesticides, while focusing on crop associations, saving water and making effective use of waste. The expertise that prevails in these nonconventional agricultural systems deserves to be studied and eventually developed.

This first issue highlights that urban food policies do not solely concern urban populations, but they can help shape agricultural production models to make them more sustainable.

## Promoting Employment-Generating Agricultural and Agrifood Models

Industrialization—by markedly boosting labour productivity via mechanization—frees up the workforce in sectors affected by this process. In European countries, the transfer of labour from primary to secondary and tertiary sectors has been ongoing for almost two centuries. The rates of labour productivity growth and of freeing up the agricultural workforce have been relatively consistent with the pace of job creation in industrial and service sectors.

The situation is different in more recently industrialized countries. With urbanization, the emergence of the agrifood sector initially involves a surge of activity and job creation, especially for women. Subsequently, industrial mergers and foreign investment by large capital-intensive agroindustrial groups have the opposite effect. They compete with and rapidly eliminate thousands of micro-businesses and
SMEs (Malassis and Padilla 1986), with the risk of creating situations of high income inequality and mass unemployment (Weatherspoon and Reardon 2003; Cadilhon et al. 2006; Grain 2014). But recently industrialized countries are also in full demographic transition. It is estimated that in sub-Saharan Africa, given the extent of population growth, around 30,000 jobs per million inhabitants and per year should be created (Beaujeu et al. 2011). The agricultural, agrifood processing, distribution and catering sectors are emerging as the main potential sources of employment to meet this challenge (Losch et al. 2012; Farm 2016).

Through their potential to promote the development of relatively labour-intensive businesses—e.g. via commercial urbanism or job creation support—cities have the power to influence production models, especially in the agrifood sector.

# Reducing Reliance on Remote Supplies and Reconnecting Cities to Their Hinterlands

## Dependence on International Markets and Risks Associated with Market Volatility

Urbanization is considered by many observers as a key factor of international market food dependence (Pingali 2007; Wilkinson 2008; Porkka et al. 2013). Some authors consider that this dependence results from the domination of industrialized countries. Dumping of agricultural exports practiced by the United States and Europe until the 1990s, compounded by food aid, led to a competitive situation with regard to local production (Barrett and Maxwell 2007). These regular imports got city dwellers used to consuming foreign products even though they differed from those produced locally. For others, such as Abdou Touré (1981) and Victor Scardigli (1983), the economic and political dominance of Western countries prompts urban consumers to imitate their models. Although these theories of behavioural mimicry and extroversion have been criticized on the basis of empirical findings (Odeyé and Bricas 1985; Requier-Desjardins 1989, on food in Africa; Appadurai 1996, more generally), they implicitly underpin other theories on the ‘westernization’ of food (see studies of Popkin, Pingali, Usitalo, Goodland, etc.), the ‘Coca-colonization’ (Webster 1989) and ‘McDonaldization’ (Ritzer 2011) of diets.

Other authors such as Olivier Sudrie (1985) further explain import dependence as a strategic option for countries to cost-effectively secure food supplies for their potentially politically unstable urban population. This analysis is in line with the historical interpretation of Fernand Braudel (1979) concerning urbanization between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, while pointing out the difficulties that prevailed in building domestic markets: “A relatively flourishing external market usually preceded the laborious unification of the national market” (Braudel 1979: 332).
In other words, it has often been easier for countries to procure distant food supplies while building their national markets. More recently, in an economic liberalization setting, the period of low price stability that prevailed in international markets between the 1980s and the late 2000s prompted many countries to continue securing their supplies via imports.

The soaring international market prices and resulting urban riots that took place in 2008 and 2010 revealed the vulnerability of this food security option. International markets, which operate under a strongly finance-driven tight flow regime with low stocks, are now considered more volatile and riskier than before. In recent years, there has been a noticeable trend towards recapturing urban markets via local production supplies to reduce the dependence on imports. The challenge is not solely to reduce price volatility risks by diversifying supply sources. Indeed, reconnecting cities to their hinterlands is a further way to generate jobs and income in rural areas, thus avoiding rapid outmigration to cities.

## Cities as Drivers of Agricultural Production

The focus on cereals in discussions regarding food dependency should not mask the fact that cities are already connected to their hinterlands. Various authors consider that urbanization has led to domestic market growth to the benefit of farmers. So-called food crops, initially considered essentially as being destined for on-farm consumption, became cash crops mainly to supply urban markets (see studies of Bricas, Chaleard, Moustier, Tacoli, etc.). In addition to being a driving force behind agricultural development, urbanization generates a range of intermediation activities with the rural community, promoting the diversification of income sources in rural areas and job creation in cities (Lopez and Muchnik 1997). A recent analysis of surveys of food consumption patterns in West Africa—a region that has experienced a sharp increase in food imports since the 1960s—revealed cities' high dependence on imported rice and wheat. Imports of these two cereals represent roughly two-thirds of the value of starch-based commodities consumed in cities. However these starchy products themselves account for only about a third of the economic value of urban household food consumption. The rest, i.e. animal products (one third), sauce products (legumes, vegetables, oil and condiments), fruit and sweet products (including drinks) (for the last third), are mostly produced locally (Bricas et al. 2016).

It is therefore not inevitable that food globalization will fuel urbanization, but the role of local production as an urban market driver is still a major policy issue that cities can help address. In this respect, some rely on infrastructure (e.g. farmers' markets or wholesale markets), on regulation or contracting, especially for public procurement (e.g. for collective catering), on local product promotional operations, or on investment in rural areas or financial support (e.g. to rural agroindustries), thus helping to boost the added value for farmers.
## Rebalancing City/Rural Relationships

This connection nevertheless does not represent a balance of power between cities and rural areas (Lipton 1977). Cities—since they are hubs where trade flows converge—force competition between food production areas, thereby putting pressure on farmers. Urban markets dictate prices for local products that farmers consider unprofitable, as well as hard to meet product quality requirements. This pressure can lead to paradoxical situations whereby family farmers generate production surpluses to feed cities while experiencing food insecurity because of their low incomes. In this regard, farmers living far from cities are often obliged to rely on intermediaries to gain access to urban markets, which in turn further reduces their income (Tacoli 1998).

Rural poverty and widening gaps regarding living standards between cities and rural areas often trigger rural outmigration, in turn raising problems for urban authorities. The rebalancing of these city/rural interactions is a rising concern for cities and their inhabitants. This may prompt investment in rural areas to help maintain rural communities, which is a priority of some associations of formerly rural people who have taken up residence in cities (Ouattara 2005) and some municipalities (e.g. Hanoi, with rural development contracts in Vietnamese provinces, or Medellin, with support given to rural agroindustries to increase the added value for Colombian farmers). This rebalancing may also be in the form of contractual agreements between collective caterers and rural production areas to ensure supplies of quality products and better financial gains for farmers.

A movement is emerging that is opposed to the idea of rural areas being reduced to the role of nurturing cities and is striving to create new more balanced and sustainable city/rural relationships. That is the goal of the city-region food systems concept, which stresses the benefits of relocating agriculture to areas around the markets served, and with better balancing of relationships between these complementary worlds (Jennings et al. 2015; Dubbelling et al. 2015).

## Facilitating the Movement of Goods and Access to Food

### Reducing Last-Kilometre Transportation Costs

Daily feeding of large population concentrations raises substantial logistics problems. Transportation, storage and distribution result in high flows of goods in constrained spaces (Gaigné et al. 2011). Most initial urban markets are built at the city core. The market is a place of exchange which gives life to the city and many other activities develop in the vicinity of these markets. As the city expands this central market model is generally replicated in the new neighbourhoods, until the point when such expansion of the urban area and building density starts to hamper the flow of wholesale goods. Many cities are then forced to geographically separate
wholesale and retail functions, with wholesale infrastructure being set up at the outskirts of cities to decongest the city of supply trucks (Densley and Sanchez-Monjo 1999). Moreover, sanitary constraints, including the management of livestock being transported into cities, also contributes to the reorganization of flows. Centralized slaughterhouses are generally built at the city gateways, which avoids livestock entering the neighbourhoods and enables centralized animal health control (Fitzgerald 2010).

This logistics restructuring generally began taking place during the twentieth century and is still ongoing without any real energy constraints. The environmental impact of the different logistics models, particularly the issue of transportation energy costs, has become problematic with the relatively recent threat of soaring petroleum prices. However, few studies to date have focused on this issue (Masson and Petiot 2012). In Great Britain, Alison Smith et al. (2005) calculated that household car food shopping trips—mainly to supermarkets located on the outskirts of cities—represented 47.5% of the overall food transport distance covered in 2002 and 13% of CO2 emissions and 40% of total social costs due to food transport. At a time when new potential logistics models are emerging, along with the development of e-commerce and new delivery modes (click & drive, drone), the last-kilometre organization issue has become important from an environmental standpoint. Sally Cairns (2005) thus showed that home food delivery, rather than household food shopping trips, could reduce the overall food transport distance covered by 70% (Box 2). Reconfiguring urban food logistics is also a social issue (Morana and Gonzalez-Feliu 2011). The food supply mode also impacts consumers’ relationship with food. Depending on whether or not there is human contact in the commercial exchange, this mode more or less leads to commodity standardization, while also having an impact on the diversity of the supply.

## Preventing the Emergence of Food Deserts

The development of supermarkets can generate competition with local shops and even eliminate them. This often results in a dearth of grocery stores in some city neighbourhoods, which means that only households with medium-distance means of transport will have access to healthy and nutritionally suitable food (Beaulac et al. 2009). Taking the nutritional impacts of these so-called ‘food deserts’ into account has thus become a strategic priority in commercial planning policies in some cities in the Global North.

This fight to prevent the development of food deserts nevertheless does not always involve preserving small shops in which products may be sold at relatively high prices. In some cities, such as Medellin in Colombia, a municipal policy to ensure that the poorest people will have access to quality food has led to the building of central purchasing units in popular neighbourhoods of the city, where only small shops previously prevailed (Correa Pelàez 2016).
Box 2: Who Generates Urban Conurbation Food Supply Flows?<fnref n="1" />

Jean-Louis Routhier

Under the conventional pattern that prevailed until the early 1960s, house-
holds mainly shopped on foot at local stores that were provisioned by truck.
However, it is now possible, thanks to the widespread adoption of car trans-
port, for consumers to fetch supplies at stores located far from their homes.
The pattern has thus evolved in favour of the development of supermarket
food shopping by car. Supermarkets in turn have a role as urban distribution
warehouses, providing an alternative to operators who provision local shops.
The supply is therefore split between shops and households.

Provisioning Food Shops

In the light of the findings of the ETMV ‘goods in cities’ survey conducted in Ile-de-France region in 2011, if we just focus on the store supply chain, it emerges that out of the 4,250,000 goods deliveries or pick-ups that take place weekly, 850,000 (19%) concern foodstuffs. In detail, these movements are split into three parts:

- a large third upstream share related to industrial and small-scale produc-
  tion (11%), wholesalers (20%) and warehouses (6%);

- around 45% related to catering for cafés, hotels and restaurants (31%), and corporate catering (13%);

- finally, retailers represent barely 20%, headed by small traditional food businesses (groceries, bakeries, butcheries and markets; 13%), followed by supermarkets (only 5%; but obviously in batches of several tonnes and delivered by heavy trucks!).

Light vehicles are mostly used to carry out these operations (54%), com-
pared to 39% trucks of more than 3.5 t and 7% semi-trailers.

The weight and packaging of deliveries of course differ from one end of
the chain to the other. On average, the mean tonnage per delivery to ware-
houses, industries and hypermarkets ranges from 4 to 7 t, while for supermar-
kets and wholesalers it is 2.5 t, and 1 t for small supermarkets. Finally, cafés,
groceries and markets receive batches of around 500 kg. For home deliveries
of foodstuffs, the mean weight ranges from 50 to 90 kg, whereas when indi-
viduals themselves transport their purchases, the foodstuff weight ranges
from a few kilogrammes when they are walking to 20 kg on average when
they are in their private cars.

(continued)

<footnote n="1">¹I would like to thank Florence Toilier, Marc Serouge and Mathieu Gardrat for their invaluable help in generating several of the results summarized here.</footnote>
**Box 2:** (continued)

**Consumer Shopping Trips**

The EGT ‘general transport’ survey conducted in Ile-de-France in 2010 revealed that residents of this region make 34 million shopping trips a week, 33% of which take place on the weekend. Overall, 42% are by car, 50% walking, 8% by public transport or soft modes. With a corrected car occupancy rate of 1.29 passengers, there are 11 million purchase pick-ups a week in private cars. Foodstuffs should be separated from the purchases in order to be able to compare these findings with the figures in the previous paragraph, but this is currently hard to accomplish because daily mobility surveys generally do not specify the type of goods purchased. Moreover, since it is not possible to specifically focus on food purchases, we compare household shopping trips overall and movements of goods generated by the business supply chain (consumer goods producers, wholesalers and retailers). This results in 1,700,000 goods deliveries and pick-ups a week, which is about sixfold fewer than private car shopping trips.

The most relevant measure for assessing the sustainability of urban food flows is, however, not the number of trips. It is better to focus on road occupancy by motor vehicle traffic to account for the scarcity of road space that typifies the urban space. The ETMV and EGT surveys make it possible to estimate this road occupancy linked to supplying businesses and households.

80 million km are travelled weekly by Ile-de-France residents during shopping trips, 70% of which is to supermarkets. Compared to the 41 million km-PCE<fnref n="2" /> generated by the retail supply chain in 1 week, the road occupation for shopping trips is twofold greater than that of vehicles involved in the business supply chain.

These few figures clearly show that urban food supply issues are very closely related to consumer mobility practices for shopping.

**Are ‘New Practices’ Exemplary?**

In this domain, as elsewhere, there is marked diversification in food supply modes in the cities: Markets, local shops, supermarkets, as well as the many cafés and restaurants. The practices are also diversified, ranging from ‘click & drives’ to ‘relay point’ (pick-up and drop-off location) and home deliveries, as well as neighbourhood AMAPs (consumer associations providing bulk

(continued)

<footnote n="2">²PCE: passenger car equivalent: a weighting factor used to take the vehicle road footprint into account (a light commercial vehicle [LCV] = 1.5 PC; a straight truck = 2 PC; a heavy articulated truck = 2.5 PC). Calculations performed using the FRETURB© model.</footnote>
**Box 2:** (continued)

delivery of produce) and even harvesting of produce in market gardens by nature-loving urban households. The supply pattern is therefore further evolving and becoming more complex.

Preliminary calculations based on a survey conducted in late 2015 in metropolitan Lyon (France) showed that each household generates about 20 equipment acts of purchase a year that are 'disconnected' with shopping trips, i.e. receipt of goods by the buyer does not take place at the same time as the act of purchase: Home or relay point delivery following a phone or online purchase, etc. if this figure is transposed to conventional shopping trips in the Ile-de-France area, it would represent around 6% of the total shopping trips by individuals and 18% of their car shopping trips. Of these 20 disconnected annual purchases, only four involved food shopping and three online meal orders. This emerging and fast-growing phenomenon has yet to structurally modify flows and road occupancy. These new practices are likely to add to, or partly or totally supplant, conventional shopping trips. Ongoing research should make it possible to assess the impacts of these new behavioural and operational trends on the city.

This text is based on data processed by the *Laboratoire aménagement économique transports* (LAET) research unit (Lyon) based on findings from the following reference sources.

**References**

* 'Deferred Household Purchases' survey, 2015, Metropolitan Lyon - ADEME

* EGT 2010 survey, Ile-de-France region, DRIEA, IAU, STIF

* FRETURB© model applied to Ile-de-France, DRIEA-LET

* TMV 2011 surveys, Ile-de-France Region, ADEME, DRI of the French Ministry of Transport

# Promoting More Sustainable Urban Food Styles

## *To Cope with Food Style Changes Related to Urbanization...*

The growing remoteness of agricultural production areas that supply cities leads to the development of processing activities to reduce the volume and weight of food to be transported, while extending their shelf life: drying, shelling and extraction of the useful fractions (oil, sugar, juice, etc.). The agrifood sector is also developing to provide urban dwellers already processed foods that are more convenient to use and increasingly diversified (Colonna et al. 2011). Human concentration also leads to the development of distribution and catering activities in cities. These activities,
which are initially carried out on a small scale, have become industrialized with the
gradual increase in consumer purchasing power, thus providing income for an
increasing number of services incorporated in food commodities, i.e. products that
are precooked, have a long shelf life or are divided into individual portions. These
processed commodities are promoted by agrifood companies, sometimes with a lot
of publicity (Kearney 2010; Monteiro and Cannon 2012; Stuckler and Nestle 2012).

The higher purchasing power of urban dwellers generally results in an increase in the consumption of animal products, i.e. meat in many countries and dairy products in places such as India.

...the Environmental Cost of Diets Has to be Reduced

From an environmental viewpoint, this dietary shift towards more industrially pro-
cessed products is reflected—as for agricultural production—by high nonrenewable
or slowly renewable resource consumption and pollution. The extent of the agrifood
sector's contribution to environmental degradation is hard to calculate due to the
absence of data differentiating the food contribution from industrial, transportation
and other factors. The NGO Grain (2011) attempted this calculation on a global
scale and concluded that the food processing sector, including refrigeration and
packaging, accounts for 13–15% of total GHG emissions, with transport only rep-
resenting 5–6%, distribution 1–2%, and agricultural organic and food waste decom-
position 3–4%. Overall, the agrifood sector represents 15–20% of total GHG
emissions, compared to 11–15% for agricultural production alone and 15–18% for
land-use changes, mainly related to deforestation, 70–90% of which is caused by
farmland expansion. When considering environmental impacts other than GHG
emissions (acidification, ecotoxicity, eutrophication, etc.), the contribution of the
food sector seems to be lower. Food and beverage products contribute 20–30% to
the overall environmental impact (Tukker and Jansen 2006).

Packaging pollution is also a noteworthy issue. The proliferation of individual
packaging, ranging from simple polyethylene bags to more elaborate packages
combining plastics, aluminium and cardboard, is a major source of pollution and
concern in cities where such packaging occurs in dense concentrations (Marsh and
Bugusu 2007). This has prompted some cities (e.g. Dacca, San Francisco, Kinshasa
and Dakar) to regulate the use of certain packaging, thus forcing companies to seek
alternative solutions.

From a biodiversity standpoint, the standardization of products and the growing
need for uniform quality raw materials because of technological processing con-
straints leads to erosion in the diversity of raw material varieties used (McKinney
2006). Hence the number of varieties that may be used by the agrifood industry is
declining. Nevertheless, a very diverse range of processed products could be
obtained via raw material fractionation (Soler et al. 2011). Through their preferred
logistics models, cities have the levers needed to help preserve biodiversity. The
development of central purchasing centres serving supermarket chains results a
reduction in the number of items marketed due to volume bulking. In comparison, the wholesale market model promotes the marketing of a wider variety of products as it provides a better linkage between smallholder farmers and niche markets (De Raymond 2010).

The industrialization of food products and the increased consumption of animal products decreases the energy efficiency of food. A growing amount of energy is required for animal production, food processing, packaging and marketing to be able to guarantee a daily intake of 2000–2500 kcal per person (Pimentel and Pimentel 2007). The worldwide adoption of the so-called Western consumption model is turning out to be unbearable for global resources, while also generating high levels of pollution. The impacts of this trend, however, are not solely environmental in scope.

## Jointly Combating Obesity and Micronutrient Malnutrition

Changes in diet related to urbanization also have nutritional impacts. In rural areas, food insecurity has long been linked (and continues to be in some regions) to food supply insufficiency because of the low or highly variable production conditions, high postharvest losses or limited market access due to remoteness. Difficulties in eating properly in urban areas are primarily related to economic poverty rather than to the available food supply. In developing countries that have undergone rapid urbanization, many urban inhabitants live below the poverty line as they do not have a sufficiently lucrative job to meet their baseline needs. According to World Bank poverty statistics, this situation prevailed in 50% of the urban population in Mexico in 2014, 36% in Côte d'Ivoire in 2015, 25% in Colombia in 2014 and 21% in India in 2009. These people do not have enough purchasing power to gain access to foods of good nutritional and health quality, and they are very vulnerable to price hikes.

Middle classes are also emerging in cities of the Global South despite the extent of urban poverty. The average living standards of urban households are everywhere higher than those of rural households (Ginneken 1976). These cities are thus the main locus of the so-called double nutritional burden, i.e. the coexistence of undernutrition and overnutrition (Boutayeb 2006). Undernutrition due to insufficient calorie or protein intake is not as prevalent as it is in rural areas. This condition is especially the result of micronutrient deficiency (iron, vitamin A, zinc, etc.) which causes stunted growth. But one specific feature of cities is the considerable increase in diseases related to overconsumption of fat, sweet and salty products, combined with reduced physical activity, especially amongst the emerging middle class: overweight and obesity, often associated with diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and certain cancers (Popkin 1999; Maire and Delpeuch 2004; Goryakin and Suhrcke 2014).

After long having favoured options to boost awareness and educate populations, policies are now more oriented towards actions that will enhance consumers’ knowledge and attitudes as well as their environment (Cohen and Ilieva 2015). The food supply is no longer seen as being an independent response to a demand but
rather as a means to shape it (Lahlou 2005). Consumers’ behaviours are not solely shaped by their knowledge and wishes, the facilities and incentives of their environment or foodscape also create behavioural habits. This major shift in perspective highlights the role that urban policy could potentially have, e.g. by the way collective catering is organized, as a means of learning about food habits, or by commercial urbanism, e.g. spaces left for gardens, markets, restaurants, waste management organization, etc.

## Enhancing the Health Quality of Food Consumed by Poor Communities

In poor city neighbourhoods, work schedule and traveling hour constraints as well as the lack of space in precarious habitats (Satterthwaite et al. 2010) often leads to a reliance on popular restaurants and street food. These small-scale activities generate job opportunities but are carried out with limited resources, i.e. scant access to drinking water or quality raw materials, unsanitary environments, lack of food storage facilities, etc. (Henson 2003; Broutin and Bricas 2006). Moreover, anonymity and low institutional quality control capabilities promote unfair commercial exchange behaviour. The informal food sector—although providing essential services to feed populations with limited purchasing power—is thus often considered as a generator of consumer health risks (Ekanem 1998; Winarno and Allain 1991).

Food insecurity in these environments also involves difficult access to healthy food. More generally, market segmentation takes place with a supply of strict quality controlled products targeting relatively rich consumers, alongside the development of a supply targeted to populations with low purchasing power. This supply comes mainly from informal microenterprises and itinerant trade, but also from more specific sectors in which unsold products from formal markets are recycled for popular markets.

The development of market stalls to improve the health conditions, the creation of equipped areas devoted to popular restaurants and the training of craftspeople, are different ways that some cities implement to enhance the health quality of food.

## Reducing Inequality and Power Asymmetry

In addition to the essential rebalancing of power between small and large enterprises and between cities and rural areas, reducing inequality within the urban population is a major social and political challenge.

The concentration of poor people in cities who have no access to the abundant available supply, while living alongside rich and super rich populations, can generate a powder keg of social instability in crisis situations, as shown by the urban riots
that took place in 2008 and 2011 triggered by the rising energy and food prices. Many of these clashes resulted in the destruction of public infrastructure, violence and the fall of governments. They revealed the importance of food price stabilization (HLPE 2011), as well as the employment issue.

Beyond this political risk, geographic, economic, cognitive and political distancing can create a credibility gap between consumers and their food system, further accentuated by power asymmetries.

This distancing results in a feeling amongst consumers that they are losing control of the system—a decline that is spurred by the acceleration of modernity (Rosa 2010)—thus lowering the risk acceptability (Slovic 1987). Personal confidence in food quality is less dependent on each person's sensory and cognitive cues and relies more on third parties (intermediaries, labels, prices, brand reputation and State seals of approval) (Cheyns and Bricas 2003). This process is not self-evident and may give rise to worry and suspicion, especially when these third parties prove to be fallible (mad cow crisis, contaminated blood crisis and Chernobyl cloud crisis) or are suspected of protecting their own economic interests before the health of consumers.

The growing anxiety amongst food consumers is further accentuated by the individualization of their eating habits (Fischler and Masson 2008). What was once 'self-evident', a routine embedded in a universe of rules and conventions, has become a question of individual choice. In the abundant and diverse supply, food consumers must now make choices between nutritional, taste, environmental, practical and price attributes, etc., but without having any solid benchmarks in the face of controversies and uncertainties about food quality. The increase in everyone's freedom of choice has led to a paradox (Schwartz 2004), i.e. it generates anxiety and a feeling of not being able to properly orient one's diet (Poulain 2002; Poulain and Corbeau 2002). Finally, consumer over-responsibility tends to clear suppliers of their responsibility to shape consumption patterns, in turn accentuating consumer anxiety (Figuié and Bricas 2011).

The search for new proximities may be viewed as a reaction to this distancing and individualization, while reassuring food consumers. Many urban food policies, especially in the most industrialized countries, are focused on relocating supplies and building more inclusive governance. Local supplies, short food supply chains, direct marketing, territorial food systems, local food policy councils, etc., are amongst potential ways to reassure food consumers, while giving them the feeling that they are recovering some control over their diets.

## Living Together

The city is a space where populations of various cultural origins and contrasting social backgrounds coexist. For some, it is a place of deculturation and anomy, generating social tension or even violence exacerbated by economic precarity and growing inequality (Hérault and Adesanmi 1997). In the food domain, the city has
often been considered as a place where people lose their ‘traditional’ bearings that serve to structure food habits (Fischler 1979; Mestdag 2005), and as a privileged place for the extension of global culture (Westernization). In response, these phenomena may lead to demands for respect of the specific food habits of some cultural or religious groups—a sign of hyperculturation (Barber 2010; Jourdan and Riley 2013).

Other authors consider instead that the city is a space for integration and development of a unique culture. Urban identity is formed especially via cooking, i.e. through gastronomy and chefs associated with the city or, more often, by the development of popular kitchens associated with small-scale catering (Bricas and Odéyé 1985). In Africa, Dakar-style fish and rice (thiébou diène) (Sankale et al. 1980), Abidjan-style cassava semolina (garba d'attiéké) (Konaté 2005) and Ouagadougou-style cornmeal and greens (baabenda) are typical urban dishes that contribute to urban cultural integration and identity building.

In one way or another, changes in food styles associated with urbanization are major sociocultural issues, including food heritage changes in a setting of strong external influences, and living together in a setting of growing social tension (Tibère 2009).

Here again cities can, through their food policies, help inhabitants live better together. Cooking and gastronomy are eminent cultural and identity enhancing activities and can contribute to generating inclusive identities, understanding and appreciating other cultures, for instance via collective catering.

## Conclusion

Literature on sustainable urban food systems often tends to be focused on the relationship of cities with agriculture, particularly on the food supply issue. These studies are part of a movement seeking new geographical (promotion of local commodities), economic (short supply chains), cognitive (learning about agriculture through community gardening) and political (food governance) proximity. The city region food systems (CRFS) concept promoted by several international organizations and NGOs also reflects this movement. Other studies with the same ratio-nale of bringing urban and rural areas closer together are also focused on the possible closure of cycles of materials that tend to build up in cities and which could be effectively used in agriculture.

These studies place less emphasis on the internal organization of the food system within cities, on the effects of forms of urbanization or on city dwellers’ behaviour. However, the non-sustainability of urban food systems is also a result of urban life-styles, spatial configurations and consumption practices. In this sense, all food system sustainability issues related to urbanization cannot simply be solved by reconnecting cities to their rural environment.

Cities have long had resources that impact food. They manage land and can thus maintain agricultural activities within or around the city. They manage the space
and thus shape the foodscapes and dictate the location of shops and market places. They organize their supply logistics through wholesale market management, with a direct impact on the type of agriculture that these modes of management promote. They often manage collective catering, particularly for children and youth—a multifunctional tool for food and nutritional security, education and social integration. They encourage the development of economic activities, especially in the agrifood sector, by developing spaces devoted to the creation or establishment of businesses, while taking advantage of taxation conditions and organizational services. They manage waste, which in turn is a resource that may be useful in agriculture.

These many levers, which generally concern distinct sectors, are now being reconsidered from a more integrative standpoint. It is no longer a question of guaranteeing a constant supply, of ensuring universal access to quality food or of reducing congestion in cities. Increasingly, these levers are now used to help invent new and more sustainable food systems.

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# History of Urban Food Policy in Europe, from the Ancient City to the Industrial City

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /></figure>

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Benoit Daviron, Coline Perrin, and Christophe-Toussaint Soulard with
François Menant (Contributor)

> "What distinguishes and indeed contrasts the nation system and the city system is their structural organization. The city state avoided carrying the heavy burden of the so-called primary sector: Venice, Genoa and Amsterdam consumed grain, oil, salt, meat, etc., acquired through foreign trading; they received from the outside world the wood, raw materials and even a number of the manufactured products they used. It was of little concern to them by whom, or by what methods, archaic or modern, these goods were produced: they were content simply to accept them at the end of the trade circuit, wherever agents or local merchants had stocked them on their behalf. Most if not all of the primary sector on which such cities' subsistence and even their luxuries depended lay well outside their walls; and laboured on their behalf without their needing to be concerned in the economic and social problems of production. In all likelihood, the cities were but dimly aware of the advantages this brought and rather more conscious of the drawbacks: obsessed with their dependence on foreign countries (although in reality such was the power of money that this was reduced to almost nothing), all leading cities desperately tried to expand their territory and to develop their agriculture and industry. What kind of agriculture and industry though? The richest and most profitable of course. Since Florence had to import food anyway, why not import Sicilian grain, and grow vines and olives on the hills of Tuscany?" (Braudel 1984a: 295)

In this chapter we focus on urban policies in the field of food and agriculture, in Europe, from antiquity to World War II, seeking to relate the current debates discussed in this book to long-term developments. In so doing, our primary objective is to show how very diverse are the actions taken under urban food policies and thus to enlarge the range of possibilities considered in the current debates. Our second

B. Daviron (✉)

UMR MOÏSA, Cirad, MONTPELLIER CEDEX 5, France

e-mail: benoit.daviron@cirad.fr

C. Perrin · C.-T. Soulard

INRA, UMR Innovation, Montpellier, France
objective is to reappraise cities’ role in comparison with that of States, which have gradually acquired the status of major players in the area of food.

This historical approach reflects a certain diversity but makes no claim to completeness. European cities’ relation to agriculture and food takes myriad shapes. One must in any case distinguish the two tendencies that have shaped urban Europe over the long term: ‘central place’ cities and ‘network’ cities (Hohenberg and Lees 1995: 4–7).

Under the central place model, the city provides services to (and administers) its surrounding area. That model produces a hierarchical urban structure, with many small towns, a diminishing number of larger centres, and a single capital—an organization that is very stable over time and may be implemented top down or bottom up.

Under the network model, the city participates in commercial, informational and political exchanges that go well beyond the region or the country and depend on the existence of (tangible or intangible) communications facilities. Distance is of little consequence. The network model promotes specialization and division of labour between cities and is exemplified by the emergence of industrial and mining cities. Such a hierarchy is unstable because of competition between cities of the network and the specializations they develop.

Both models are found in Europe. During the middle ages, the network model spread gradually from northern Italy, to Germany, to Flanders. Fernand Braudel writes: “[...] The destinies of these very special cities were linked not only to the progress of the surrounding countryside but to international trade. They were indeed to free themselves from rural societies and outdated political ties” (Braudel 1984b: 511).

Conversely, on either side of that corridor, to the northeast and southwest, the ‘central place’ model held sway. Both models were subject to imperial or national interference, whether through tax levies or predatory actions. The ‘prince’ would make his coercive powers available to a city, either directly, by commandeering products (episodically, or permanently, as tribute), or indirectly, by levying taxes.

Given that very diverse backdrop, we shall trace the history of urban food policy under three headings: first, the stages of Europe’s urbanization. Second, cities’ supply policies from antiquity to the modern era. And third and last, cities’ public health policies at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Under the last two headings we shall be noting the progressive decline of urban policies because of rising State involvement. To conclude, we shall look at how cities could once again take food supply in hand.

## The Four Stages of Urbanization in Europe

Four stages can be discerned in the history of European urbanization (Bairoch 1985; Hohenberg and Lees 1995; Mumford 1989). The first corresponds to the Greco-Roman civilization. It is marked by issues of supply for the imperial cities of the Mediterranean. The second stage begins in the middle ages, the golden age of cities
as political entities with their own ambitious food policies. The Black Death (1347–1352) marks the start of the third stage, which comprises over three centuries of slow, sporadic urban growth (Hohenberg and Lees 1995: 6), and is marked by the emergence of nation States and a decline in urban food policies. The fourth stage begins in the mid-eighteenth century, with industrialization and the development of public health policies. Following our presentation of these four stages in the history of urbanization, we shall be looking at food policies.

## Greco-Roman Urban Civilization

Ancient Greece was urban. At its height, c. 500 BCE, Athens seemingly had a population of some 100,000, while each of a number of other Greek cities had around 40,000 inhabitants. If we include towns with more than 5000 inhabitants, the urbanization rate may have been around 15–25%. The same is true, on a larger scale, of the Roman Empire. The population of the city of Rome alone appears to have been in excess of one million around the second century CE.

The end of antiquity is conventionally dated to the sack of Rome in 410. In the ensuing centuries, Roman civilization declined owing to the combined impact of invasions. Between 200 and 600, the population of Europe fell from 40–55 million to 20–35 million and became markedly less urban. The change in Rome’s population is an extreme example of that process, as it fell to 50,000 by 700 and only some 30,000 by 1000 CE, despite the presence of the papacy. Other towns disappeared completely.

## The Golden Age of Mediaeval Cities

Beginning around the year 800, the population of Europe, including the cities, began to grow again. Until the year 1000, the effects of urbanization were felt mainly in the regions of southern Europe that were part of the Arab world (Spain, Sicily), which at that time accounted for 50% of the population of European cities of more than 20,000. In that year, Cordoba and Palermo were the largest cities in Europe after Constantinople, the largest cities in Europe, with respectively 450,000 and 75,000 inhabitants (Chandler and Fox 2013).

In the rest of Europe, the urban renaissance began in the tenth century: “[...] thanks to the emergence of two foci, one in southern and one in northern Europe: Venice and southern Italy, on the one hand, and the Flemish coast on the other hand” (Pirenne 1927: 75).

Between 1000 and 1300, the population of Venice grew from 45,000 to 110,000 inhabitants, Genoa’s from 15,000 to 100,000, Milan’s from 30,000 to 100,000, and that of Florence from 13,000 to 60,000; while in Flanders, Ghent, Bruges and Ypres
totalled 220,000 inhabitants in the middle of the fourteenth century. In the latter case, the growth was linked to the wool industry.

The urban renaissance then spread continent-wide, favoured by the resurgence of trade within Europe (especially between North and South) and with the Orient. The peak Roman-era population was quickly outstripped. Between 1000 and 1300, the total population, and that of cities, doubled, as the number of cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants rose from 35–45 to 100–110. Most of today’s large cities emerged at this time.

Population growth came to a halt, however, at the beginning of the fourteenth century. A string of poor harvests caused famines, and then the Black Death struck Europe in 1347 and, over the next 5 years, killed a third of the population. Europe paid a heavy price for its resumption of trade: the first plague outbreak was in Caffa, a Genoese outpost north of the Black Sea (McNeill 1976). The plague then spread rapidly along trade routes, reaching Scandinavia 2 years later.

## Slow Urban Growth in the Modern Era with the Rise of Nation-States

Population growth resumed in Europe after 1400. By 1500 the population had returned to pre-Black Death levels, but growth was slow and hesitant: over two centuries, it increased from 76 to 102 million. City development was in step with that increase, with no significant increase in the rate of urbanization. Large cities, indeed, save only London, had slower growth from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. Charles Tilly (1990) believes that this was the consequence of a shift of industrial activity to small towns and countrysides, as merchants and entrepreneurs sought to escape the rules of town-based guilds. As a result, though new settlements did spring up, they were unchartered.

This new phase of urbanization was shaped, in particular, by two processes:

- First, the geographical centre of gravity of long-distance trade moved from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, benefiting the United Provinces, where by 1700 urbanization exceeded 40%. The population of London grew tenfold between 1500 and 1700, from 50,000 to 550,000 inhabitants. The same was true, to a lesser extent, of other cities: Seville (up to 1600) and Lisbon, the ports of entry for products shipped from America to Spain; and in France, Nantes and Bordeaux.

- As regards the distribution of power, the period is characterized by the raise of territorial States, their growing grip on urban life, and the decline of cities' autonomy. Mercantilism (in Adam Smith's parlance) prevailed: sovereigns promoted the establishment of national markets by limiting the freedom of long-distance trade and by eliminating obstacles to internal circulation (e.g. by removing customs offices and tollbooths).
The sixteenth century marked a turning point. Speaking of the cities of the Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel wrote:

"[...] in the long term, they were healthy, since they were still growing: at any rate they overcame crises and difficulties; however, all towns without exception saw their liberties bring whittled away by the extension of the territorial states, which were expanding even more rapidly than the towns, surrounding them, subjugating them, or even chasing them from acquired positions. A new political and economic age was beginning." (Braudel 1995: 326).

In a discussion of the lengthy urban policy crisis in the sixteenth century, Braudel also wonders: “What disappeared in the course of this prolonged crisis? The medi-aeval town, the city state, mistress of her own fate, set in the centre of her surround-ing gardens, orchards, vineyards, wheatfields, and nearby coasts and roads.” (Braudel 1995: 345).

In the seventeenth century, at a time when economies and populations were shrinking, the capitals of the then emerging territorial States administered by sover-eigns, such as Paris, Madrid or St. Petersburg, became distinctly more populous than other cities. London, which was at once the seat of the Atlantic merchants and a royal city, became the second largest in Europe after Constantinople.

## The Industrial Revolution Spurs Strong Urban Growth

As of the 1700–1750 period, a new phase of growth began with the rise of the cities of the Industrial Revolution: Europe's urban population grew sixfold during the nineteenth century. In both London and Paris the population grew to more than a million. In 1900, Europe's average urbanization rate was nearly 40%. “The main elements in the new urban complex were: the factory, the railroad, and the slum” (Mumford 1989: 657).

Mining and steel-making areas became important places of settlement: the German Ruhr, the Black Country of England, Borinage in Belgium, and in France the Pas-de-Calais and the Loire coalfields. It was there that the industrial city or ‘coketown’ as Mumford, after Dickens, calls it (Mumford 1961: 642 et seq.), emerged.

Industrial activity also developed in the older cities. Thanks to coal and steam power, with thermal (metallurgy, chemistry, etc.) and mechanical energy (spinning, weaving, machining, etc.), industry shed its dependence on wood, wind and water-courses. Steam engines also made it easier to supply cities with food, fetched from farther and farther afield. Long-distance supply had previously been much more complex, and had since antiquity needed rulers’ direct involvement to ensure its safety.
# Securing Food Supply: Rise and Fall of Urban Policies

> "From antiquity to the modern day, feeding city dwellers to ensure political tranquillity and social stability has been a constant concern for rulers, and in discharging that function they forged strong bonds between the peoples and their sovereigns." (Marin and Virloulet 2003).

## Special Features of the Mediterranean Food Supply

The Mediterranean is one part of the world where, since ancient times, urban governments have taken a direct role in long-distance supply, in particular of cereals. The overview by Marin and Virloulet (2003), *Nourrir les cités en Méditerranée – Antiquités – Temps modernes*, shows that supplies of wheat were a constant concern but that urban governments were never involved in the supply of all commodities: the private trading system still dominated trade. The reasons for cities to take an active public role varied by city, by State and by era: military strategy could be involved, or prestige, food quality, or control of famine and conflicts.

In the Mediterranean, the economic structures that governed city food supply underwent little change between antiquity and the modern period: poor or chancy agricultural yields, with unchanging transport and storage arrangements. The Mediterranean was still the geographical framework of the food trade. Cities set up wheat boards or ‘offices of abundance’ (public granaries)—institutions specifically intended to see that city dwellers received the grain they needed and so to forestall food shortages and starvation. But, while grain supply to the cities of the North was mainly organized by private agents (except for sporadic price-fixing), in all Mediterranean cities there was at once a private supply and a public *annona* (Grantham and Target 1997).

Thus, the history of the Mediterranean affords us valuable information on cities’ strategies and ways of influencing grain supply markets. The foundational *annona* system of ancient Rome is the guiding thread for this first historical period. Subsequently we shall see how the *annona* system evolved in modern times.

## The Ancient Annona System in the Mediterranean

The principle of the ancient *annona* is as follows: magistrates have specific responsibility for monitoring the city's markets and must, should difficulties arise, buy foodstuffs and distribute them at cut prices or free of charge. Rome innovated by making these distributions, at first exceptional, a regular occurrence, transforming the *annona* into a civic institution, which would later be copied by Constantinople. It was a prerogative of the capitals, as the system existed only briefly in other cities.
Wheat redistribution by the *annona* was made possible by in-kind levies on certain provinces, such as Egypt and Africa, and the income of the Imperial domains. Ancient Rome drew its supplies chiefly from Egypt (33%), North Africa (10%), Sicily, Sardinia and the rest of Italy. The African share subsequently grew, as Constantinople developed and consumed a growing proportion of Egypt's production. The Black Sea region and Egypt were the sources of supply for Athens and Constantinople. The major Mediterranean ports were Pozzuoli, Alexandria, Narbonne, Cadiz, and Carthage.

The *praefecti annonae*, the Imperial officials who supervised the grain supply, had other duties as well: with a role to play in port infrastructure, incentives for carriers and merchants, and management of a special fund for merchandise purchases. The office of the *annona* also regulated foreign trade in grain, banning exports to forestall shortages or, when harvests were abundant, encouraging them instead, to head off a collapse of domestic prices. Periods of scarcity were marked by the sending of senatorial grain commissions, which would make emergency purchases of foodstuffs that were then distributed in the city.

A key role was played also by the great landowners (senators, knights) in possession of extensive agricultural estates, not just in Italy but also in the provinces of Sicily, Egypt and Africa. Often they owned warehouses, which they would let for a tidy profit.

The *annona* system contributed to ancient cities' strength, being founded on the links between prominent merchants and the ruling classes.

## The Annona System in Modern Times

In modern times, the Mediterranean ceased to operate in a vacuum. The supply area had expanded. In the eighteenth century, Marseille became the largest Mediterranean port of trade for grain.

The modern *annona* differed from the ancient one (Marin and Ventura 2004): its role was no longer to regularly distribute free grain to part of the city's population. The modern equivalent was a marketing board, acting to regulate market prices: buying and storing grain in good years and, in bad ones, putting it back on the market at low prices, to drive prices down. It could also act to control bread-making, for example by regulating the number of ovens allowed for public sale of bread. Thus, organizations of this kind became graduated response systems that did not control the whole urban food supply.

They were caught between conflicting priorities—social peace and profit—and afforded many examples of collusion between officials and food supply professionals, constituting licit or illicit interest groups (Martinat 1999). These policies were also often based on a power balance between a city and a territory over which it sought to wield a monopoly, or at least to ensure that it had the pre-emptive right to buy agricultural commodities. In practice, however, a balance was created between consumer protection and the need to keep both producers and traders solvent.
From antiquity to the modern era, the *annona* system helped feed large urban populations in a world still dominated by rural life. That kind of balance was sustained for a long time in some cities (Constantine, Rome, Madrid), less so in others (Naples), but storage-based regulation of market prices put a great strain on municipal finances. For that reason, with the increasing urban population as one factor and widespread price inflation as another, a breakdown occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century as the old *annona* systems failed. Thenceforth those systems could no longer satisfactorily deal with cities' food supply, which States would now be called upon to regulate (Revel 1975).

**The Golden Age of Urban Supply Policies: The Middle Ages in Europe**

The mediaeval period was a golden age for urban policies, particularly food supply policies. For cities in the Middle Ages, facing the spectre of famine, food supply was a major challenge (Box 1). “[T]he regulation of food markets within the city was a major area of activity. It was very complex in detail and the authorities continuously adjusted rules to deal with practice and to meet the requirement of changing markets.” (Keene 1998: 4).

**Box 1: Famine, Markets and Public Policy in European Cities from the End of the Middle Ages**

François Menant

**Urban societies at risk of famine**

Beginning in the twelfth century, but especially the 13th, Europe was undergoing rapid population growth, which was only finally halted by the great plague of 1348. Paris and a few Italian cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants; Catalonia and the Valencia region, Flanders, the Rhine Valley and a few other regions had dense urban networks. Much of their inhabitants' livelihood came from the salaries paid by industry, which at the time was achieving growth by exporting its products, including textiles, to European and Mediterranean markets. The people's staple food was bread: most of them would buy wheat in the market, have it ground at the mill, knead the dough themselves, and take it to the bakery to be baked.

Beginning in the 1270s, but especially after the ‘Great Famine’ that ravaged Flanders and England in 1314–1317, recurring food crises hit these poor workers, just like the poor rural masses. The deteriorating climate Europe was experiencing at the time certainly had something to do with this, even if it is not a complete explanation: poor harvests now happened every 4–5 years, causing more serious shortages. In Florence, there was an episode of inflation

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

on average every 6 years between 1309 and 1375, with the price of wheat rising each time: its average decadal price, referred to an index of 100 in 1271–1286, reached 481 in 1339–1353.

Food shortages came to a head just before the plague of 1347 that affected all of Europe. Nor did they end thereafter, as might have been suggested by Malthus's theories. That goes to show that they were not simply an effect of overpopulation, as the population had in fact dropped sharply. Post-plague conditions were nevertheless a little better, as workers' wages had risen to a point where they could feed their families except in times of extreme shortage.

**Mechanism of food crises**

Europe now had a market economy in which shortages were reflected in rising and indeed soaring prices, known by the Latin word *carestia*. Poor harvests were only the trigger, or indeed pretext, for the inflation (Sen 1981). The decisive inflationary mechanism went as follows: when a crop failure was expected, at winter's end or even earlier sometimes, brokers—merchants and wealthy landowners—banking on rising prices, would keep their stocks off the market. Some grain would be released to market, but because quantities were limited, the prices stayed high.

The working poor, who had not been able to put anything by, had no option but to continue to buy when prices rose, and ended up spending much of their money, then all of it, on wheat. As a result, demand for manufactured goods, and in general everything but staple foods, temporarily plummeted: the crisis hit the entire economy.

**Public food shortage policies**

Beginning in the last third of the thirteenth century, in most cities and states, institutions and tools were put in place to lessen the seriousness of such crises. Supply from distant sources was now largely the responsibility of States and, especially, municipal authorities, who had the wherewithal to prevent and combat shortages: money, shipping and storage capacity, as well as intelligence on foreign production sites. It should be added that in the cities, the ruling circles were strongly motivated, on ideological and political grounds, to take action against scarcity: thus, Italian municipalities acted for the 'common good' or simply out of fear of the people's anger.

The great cities of the 14th and 15th centuries, especially those with easy access to the sea, were largely supplied by imports: Sicilian wheat fed Florence and the other cities of Tuscany; Venice was supplied by Puglia; Genoa from the far end of the Black Sea; and the cities of northern Germany from the eastern shores of the Baltic. In times of scarcity, imports played a bigger role, because it was very rare for the whole of Europe at once to be

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

affected by a poor harvest of all cereals. The landing of a cargo, or even just the announcement of its arrival, was enough to ease market prices. As soon as they heard the news, those who had been holding back their stores hastened to put them on sale, to take advantage of the last days of high prices; which immediately drove those prices down.

Learning the lessons of the major food shortages of the late thirteenth century, urban authorities bought wheat as soon as concerns were raised about the harvest. At times, too, they would build up stores in advance, without waiting for warnings of scarcity, and sell them at moderate prices to those who needed them. However, the municipality's wheat would not be sold at too much of a discount to the market price, so as not to undercut commercial supply. Alternatively, the municipality could act to distribute wheat to bakers, or even produce bread itself, which was then sold at affordable prices. Charitable institutions (hospitals), which had extensive landholdings and monetary resources, also played a significant role in preventing mortality; in that sense they took over from the monasteries, whose histories reveal the charitable role they had played in times of famine since the early Middle Ages.

Another part of the supply management measures was coercive: producers and middlemen were forced to put their reserves on the market (which meant stock checks and searches) and forbidden to export, while prices could not be raised beyond a set ceiling; but the ceiling price led to wheat becoming unavailable on the market, and urban authorities soon learned to wield the double-edged weapon of price controls with caution.

Supply, then, especially in times of food shortage, was a capital issue for the cities of the late Middle Ages: a demographic and public health issue of course, but also a political and ideological one.

Mediaeval cities' food policy must be placed in the more general context of the five objectives pursued in their economic policy (Heckscher 2013: 128):

1. To guarantee the city abundant supply by preventing its supply from being diverted to another destination.

2. To prevent the development of rural activities that would compete with the city's. (These two objectives were sometimes pursued jointly, for example in Germany, where cities delimited an area on their outskirts that was reserved for agricultural production and in which manufacturing was forbidden.)

3. To ensure that local merchants participated in trade and to forbid any direct relationship between *outside* merchants and the rural population.

4. To do everything possible to ensure that trade took place within the city, for example by requiring unloading to be done in the river cities.

5. To guarantee everyone a livelihood in keeping with their social status, for which purpose it was vital to limit competition (role of guilds).
In the food industry, the first objective is what defines and distinguishes mediaeval cities' policies:

"[...] The dominating feeling throughout the Middle Ages, mostly in towns, which were almost the only repositories of medieval economic policy, was the one natural to consumers; they wanted to hamper or prevent exports but favoured imports; their tendency was a 'love of goods'; their policy may be called one of provision." (Heckscher 1936: 49).

Henri Pirenne (1917) outlined the legislation of the Netherlands' mediaeval cities. With the goal of "providing the townspeople with cheap, abundant foodstuffs", intermediaries were considered speculators. "It followed that the country seller and the urban buyer must be put in direct contact so as to prevent the market from being cornered by a group of speculators" (Pirenne, 1917:100). He cites the example of Liège, where, in 1317, the Lettre des vénaux:

"[...] forbids 'regraters' [middlemen] to buy poultry, cheeses or venison within a two-league radius of the city. All such foodstuffs must be brought to the market, and wholesale merchants shall be able to acquire any surplus only after the burgesses [townspeople] have been supplied therefrom. Butchers are forbidden to keep meat in cellars and bakers to buy more grain than they need 'for their own baking'." (Pirenne 1917: 100).

All possible measures are taken to keep food prices down: "Not only is a maximum price set, but it is absolutely forbidden to sell outside the market, i.e. anywhere except in public and under the supervision of the burgesses and officials of the municipality" (Pirenne 1917: 100).

The ban on traders' buying in the vicinity of the town and the requirement that trade take place in a public market were found in many towns. The purpose was both to eliminate traders' profit margins and to ensure that local products would not be sent elsewhere. In Paris, traders were forbidden to buy within a radius of 10 leagues in the case of wheat, 20 leagues for wine (Aymard 1983: 1404). In Geneva, as late as the seventeenth century, the city administration sought to make fairs and markets the only places where trade with farmers was permitted. A political decree or police order set a radius in which production was reserved for urban supply: producers had to sell in town, while buyers were not allowed to buy directly from producers within four leagues (18 km) of the city (Niwa 2015). In Venice, this policy of exclusive sale was taken to another level. In 1234, a treaty required the merchants of Ragusa to sell wheat and salt only in Venice. Another treaty, from 1236, forbade all trade in the northern Adriatic except the transport of food to Venice (Hibbert 1963: 174).

As another way of securing the food supply, taxes were often low or nonexistent on inbound goods, while those leaving were subject to high taxes, as in the German towns or in Florence. Such taxes were often price-adjusted, being imposed only when prices rose above a certain level (Hibbert 1963: 176).

Similarly, towns often had bylaws making their own people priority buyers or indeed the only ones entitled to buy for a set time after the products' arrival.

Finally, towns sought to avoid any takeover of supply by a monopoly or commercial cartel. In 1268, in Douai, there was a legal limit on the daily quantity (e.g. of wheat) a person could buy (Hibbert, op. cit.). Trade and processing of food
products were often the last and only business sectors not subject to a guild
monopoly.

Trade circuits could also be directly controlled. In 1555, in Valencia, Spain, there
was an elected magistrate, the *clavarie del vituallement*, assisted by deputies who
dealt with wheat and meat (*administradors dels forments* and *administradors del carns*). The municipality helped supply grain to the city. This took the form of
wheat (*forment asegurat*) that it bought in bulk and sold at a fixed price, to keep the
market price low (Lapeyre 1969: 134] cited in Tilly 1974: 438).

All major Italian cities also had a wheat office, and sometimes and oil office too: *Abbondansa* in Florence and Siena, *Officio delle Biave* in Venice. Maurice Aymard notes that all of them were in agreement that: “[...] the city’s supply could not be left to private enterprise alone, for entrepreneurs had neither the means nor no doubt the concern to ensure the abundance and regularity of supply deemed considered necessary” (Aymard 1966: 72).

Because of its size and power, Venice exemplified in the extreme this commitment to the flow of foodstuffs. All grain entering the city was monitored. Locally produced grain could be sold only in Venice, and Venetian farm owners were required to send in their harvest by summer's end. Grain imported from farther afield was subject to long-term purchase contracts with merchants that included loans. A system of import premiums was provided for crisis situations (up to 40% of the domestic price). Purchases from the most distant growing regions (Burgundy, Bavaria, Poland) were made directly by the authorities. Importers were allowed to retain only a limited share for their own consumption. All the rest was put on sale in the two public shops that supplied flour to individuals to make their own bread. The bulk of the grain, however, was set aside for bakers, whose numbers were limited and who must comply with strict rules on the quality, weight and price of bread. The retail price remained fixed but the weight would vary depending on wholesale prices, which the authorities sought to control. Wheat could under exceptional circumstances be sold below market price.

At this period the cities were clearly seeking to keep the countryside in a subor-
dinate role, as a source of biomass but also of labour, even though their relations
were commercial in nature. The city often had a conflictual relationship with war-
lords and other neighbouring feudal powers, playing a middleman role and serving
as a refuge for farmers seeking to evade their local lords’ suzerainty. The cities had
a high mortality rate and a structural population deficit that made them dependent
on rural immigration.

Hence, urban wheat stores could be used to supply the countryside: in Geneva,
as of the late seventeenth century, farmers received assistance in the form of seed
wheat or bread whenever a subsistence crisis arose (Niwa 2015). In providing that
assistance, the Wheat Board did not merely seek supplies from the countryside, but
actively contributed to the development of agriculture.

Lastly, the existence of a nearby town provides an outlet for rural production.
That, according to Max Weber, was what made the difference between the agrarian
structures of Germany to the west and east of the Elbe. To the east, the lack of towns
meant that only lords who could export grain over long distances (particularly to
Amsterdam) had access to the market. To the west, in contrast, a dense urban network allowed farmers to get rich and gradually achieve emancipation (Weber 1991).

## Rise of the States and Decline of Urban Food Policy

In the modern era, the construction of the territorial States upset the urban food policies described above. States intervened more and more directly in food production and distribution beginning in the sixteenth century and up until the great wave of liberalization of the second half of the 19th. Unification of the national market was a goal of the territorial States, but one that went against all the measures the cities had adopted to secure their people's food supply. It was nevertheless eventually achieved. In France, unification was not complete before Colbert, despite the enactment of successive decrees by the predecessors of Louis XIV.

Again, under mercantilism, the territorial States adopted strategies of autarky (Clément 1999: 38) that jeopardized urban supply policies based on long-distance trade. Moreover, the States, having responsibility for the government of cities and countryside alike, pursued policies that skewed more toward producers' interests, while consumers' interests tended to be overshadowed. Thus, in England, the first national measures taken at the end of the seventeenth century sought to promote grain exports, an orientation that was diametrically opposed to what mediaeval cities wanted.

This rise of the States continued well beyond the eighteenth century. It is true that, in the nineteenth century, Europe experienced a “free trade interlude” (Bairoch 1993: 39), which began in 1846 with the abolition of the United Kingdom’s Corn Laws, but it did not last long. As early as 1870, continental Europe adopted protectionist policies and the two world wars as well as the crisis of the 1930s reinforced State intervention: creation of domestic marketing boards, proliferation of border controls on foreign trade, food aid distribution, etc. This state of affairs was perpetuated by the creation of the Common Market, then the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, which introduced a mechanism for protection of agricultural prices in the domestic market. States only withdrew from the management of food markets with the enactment of the European reforms of the 1990s and the World Trade Organization agreements.

As of the nineteenth century, another major area of intervention for urban policies emerged with the hygienist movement and the cities' separation from the organic world.

## The Cities’ Separation from the Organic World

“I have argued that the sanitary idea and its enthusiastic adoption by many in the public health movement were responsible for two major changes in the mid and later nineteenth century. First, there was a materialization in physical
infrastructure of the idea that waste products and their smells had to be removed before they could cause disease. A range of technologies, from sewers to waste destructors, were employed to achieve this purpose. Second, food-producing animals and animal by-product industries became unwelcome in many cities, with the ultimate aim of establishing nuisance-free, and therefore cleansed, environments. Together, these amounted to a greater conceptual and physical separation of the urban realm than had ever been experienced before.” (Atkins 2012: 77).

In the nineteenth century, rapid urbanization caused health problems, as epidemics arose (McNeill 1976). Transportation development facilitated the spread of germs. Industrial activity increased pollution of the air, water, and even soil (Mumford 1989). Such pollution was the result of new technologies and the fact that cities now hosted insanitary premises that had previously been spread across the countryside. Finally, organic waste from food and the presence of animals in the city (particularly draught horses) was a potential source of contamination and proliferation of germs. As a result, excess urban mortality increased during the first phase of industrialization. In 1840, a man born and living in the country (County of Surrey) had a life expectancy of 44 years, compared to 35 for a Londoner and 24 for a Mancunian. Such large discrepancies were related, in particular, to infant mortality in cities, where infectious diseases (typhoid, tuberculosis, pneumonia, cholera) and food- and waterborne illness were frequent.

By the end of the eighteenth century, that situation had given rise to discussions that would soon engender hygienist policies. The 'progress' of science and technology was paralleled in medicine by the promotion of public health. The goal was prevention rather than cure, a cleansing of the environment (Jorland 2013: 24). This 'century of hygiene' spanned the last decades of the eighteenth century to the first of the 20th (Frioux et al. 2011).

We shall illustrate that shift by taking up the following topics successively: the regulation of food wholesomeness, the issue of animals' place in the city, and organic waste management.

## Regulation of Food Wholesomeness

Urban authorities (municipalities) were important promoters of hygienist policies, but gradually the national public authority (State) asserted itself. Healthful food was at first a concern of municipalities, which at that time had lost all their prerogatives regarding market price regulation. But, by the turn of the twentieth century, in this area too the State had evinced the cities, which became mere local agents of the State, which, through legislation, assigned them a great part of their duties and obligations.
The wholesomeness or nutritional quality of food is not always easy to assess. The presence of pathogens or adjuvants is detectable only by complex techniques. In 1909, Sheridan Davis, the officer in charge of Manchester's milk supply, said that:

*"The inhabitant of large towns has generally no access to the sources of his food; he is seldom able to satisfy himself by personal observation of the genuineness and soundness of the articles offered to him for consumption, and has to depend upon the knowledge, skill and vigilance of persons appointed for the purpose of protecting him against the dangers associated with insufficient or unsound food supplies"* (Delépine, quoted in Otter 2006: 526).

In the nineteenth century, however, the development of chemistry and biology considerably expanded the range of analytical methods and of risks to be assessed. Thus, typhoid contagion through milk had been demonstrated by the 1870s, while the transmission of bovine tuberculosis to humans, in milk or by meat eating, was the subject of very serious concern. That was the backdrop for the establishment in many European cities of municipal laboratories to monitor product quality (Frioux et al. 2011) (Box 2).

Box 2: Development of Analytical Laboratories in France

Benoit Daviron

In France, a 1790 ordinance gives as one of the municipal police's powers: "inspection of fair dealing in measuring commodities sold by weight, length or volume and of the safety of foodstuffs offered for public sale" (Paquy 2004: 45).

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, at the Restoration, 'wholesomeness councils' were created in various cities (Lyon 1822, 1825 Marseille, Lille 1828...). They were made mandatory by the central government in 1848. Then, in the late 1870s, municipal hygiene offices proliferated. In particular, they looked into the wholesomeness of food and drink.

The history of the Grenoble laboratory studied by Lucie Paquy is a case in point (Paquy 2004). In Grenoble, the idea of creating an analytical laboratory to combat food fraud and adulteration was first floated by City Council in 1881. Its implementation drew on several major cities' experience with such laboratories: Brussels (1856), Antwerp, Paris, Lyon, Saint-Étienne, Brest, Le Havre, Montpellier, Le Mans and Marseille (Tanguy 2007). At first, the qualitative and quantitative analyses people requested were billed to them, to finance the laboratory and avoid to great a number of requests. In that way, Grenoble differed from Paris, Lyon, Toulouse or even Le Havre, where analysis was based on the existence of permanent inspection and sampling services.

(continued)
**Box 2:** (continued)

"In Lyon, for instance, inspection of foodstuffs, and more broadly of 'any item whose use may have health effects', was the responsibility of the laboratory's four expert inspectors, who had the police provide samples of suspect products. These samples were then sent to the lab for analysis and, if fraud was detected, the municipality referred the case to the Prosecutor's office. The effect was that Lyon was able to continuously monitor product quality" (Tanguy 2007: 50).

During the first few years, wines made up nearly 80% of the samples analyzed. Among the other products were milk (skim or 'blue'), vegetable oils (often mixed), butter and liquors.

But the law of 1 August 1905 relating to "the suppression of fraud in the sale of goods and falsification of foodstuffs and agricultural products" redefined the division of powers between the State and the municipalities. It implemented a central fraud unit at the Department of Agriculture. Prefects were given the responsibility of organizing local collection and analysis services. Hence, they appointed collection officers who would send samples to the lab and, if fraud was suspected, refer the matter to the Prosecutor's office.

The communes were expected to play a role in stamping out fraud. The laboratories set up by the municipalities were, like the State labs, authorized to perform tests, provided they had been previously approved by the Ministry of Agriculture. The Grenoble laboratory received certification for the departments of Isère and Hautes-Alpes on 18 April 1908. In 1910, however, after some faulty analyses, the Ministry of Agriculture decided to temporarily suspend its certification and made reorganization recommendations to the municipality of Grenoble. The laboratory's operating procedure and staff recruitment process were increasingly set by Paris. Before the First World War, the municipal laboratory mainly survived on State subsidies and became the local authority for the repression of fraud.

Debates and regulations on animals' proper place in the city formed part of the same hygienist movement.

## Regulation of Animals' Presence in the City

### From Private Slaughterhouses to Industrial Municipal Abattoirs

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the slaughter of animals was done at a large number of private, cottage-scale slaughterhouses located in the city close to consumers. The public authorities progressively took over their activity. The French term 'abattoir' is said to have been coined to designate slaughterhouses
commissioned by the authorities: the large-scale ones built from 1806 to supply Napoleon's troops (Otter 2005: 95). An 1838 ordinance classified slaughterhouses among "the most unhealthy, dangerous and noxious places", but the regulations relating thereto were the responsibility of municipalities, which set their own health policies. In the course of the nineteenth century, municipalities began building and managing their own abattoirs (Muller 2004: 107).

Séverin Muller reports on the process of creating a municipal abattoir at Saint-Maixent-l'École in the 1860s. The municipality's goal was to limit nuisances, such as odours and contamination. Strict construction rules were laid down to ensure hygiene. Slaughterhouse inspection was the responsibility of veterinarians employed by an 'animal health police' organized by the department, but in practice field inspections were carried out by municipal roadmen, police officers, or the establishment's security guards. In Saint-Maixent-l'École, because the municipality could not afford a full-time veterinarian, a 'veterinary artist' was hired to inspect the abattoir every two days and issue slaughter permits for animals certified healthy. Continuous monitoring of the slaughterhouse was done by a *garde champêtre*. As time went on, the slaughterhouse director too was tasked with examining cows raised within the commune to make sure they did not have diseases that could contaminate the milk.

In the United Kingdom, the same abattoir municipalization movement got under way later. In 1870, there were still 1500 private slaughterhouses in the city of London alone (Atkins 2012: 84). The slaughterhouses were most often unspecialized spaces that were occasionally used for animal slaughter. Being so numerous, and not purpose-built, they were virtually impossible to inspect. The Public Health Act of 1875 directed local authorities to create public abattoirs, and in 1890 a new law authorized them to shut down insanitary slaughterhouses.

## Once Ubiquitous, Animals Are Expelled from the City

Before they were expelled, animals were everywhere in nineteenth-century industrial towns. “[I]t is possible to argue that animals were constitutive of a certain stage of the urban. They facilitated growth, they fuelled it, and they provided an essential continuing link with the parallel rural economy.” (Atkins 2012: 35).

A number of factors contributed to animals' presence in the city. Most important was the perishability of fresh products, milk in particular, in the absence of refrigeration technology. From 9000 at the end of the eighteenth century, the number of cows in London had increased to 15,000 by the mid-19th; they were fed on the by-products of breweries and distilleries. For urban consumers, local supply also offered some guarantee against the frequent practice of watering down the milk.

The next greatest reason was urban growth, which required unprecedented numbers of carriage horses for local transport. In London, the number of horse-drawn cabs rose from 1265 at the beginning of the 1830s to 6800 in 1863 and 11,000 in 1888 (Thompson, 1976). Horse buses numbered 620 in 1839, whereas in 1902 there were 3696 (with 11 horses per bus, as they needed rest!). In Paris, the number
of horses per 1000 inhabitants rose from around 23 to 35 between 1820 and 1880 (Barles 2012: 175).

Finally, the proliferation of animals in the city was encouraged by massive influxes of country dwellers, who brought their livestock with them and often kept up an agricultural activity while adapting to city life. In Manchester, Irish migrants were criticized for keeping pigs in town, even though that practice was actually common well before the great waves of immigration (Scola and Scola 1992: 39).

All of these factors contributed to the omnipresence of animals in the city, a situation that Peter Atkins called “urb-an-imal” or “animal-constituted urbanism” (Atkins 2012).

In a subsequent phase, however, after 1850, more and more measures were taken to ban animals from the city. Particularly complained of were the physical danger they posed to passers-by (Barles 2012: 182 et seq.), noise, odours, and especially the risk of contamination and disease. Thus, urban cowsheds where the cows lived tightly packed together and never got out (until they left for the slaughterhouse) were vilified as reservoirs of typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria and tuberculosis.

Atkins gives a chronology of the London by-laws adopted from 1844 on that little by little eliminated animals' place in the city (Atkins 2012: 28–33). The Metropolis Management Amendment Act of 1862, for instance, reaffirmed urban authorities' power to close unfit pigsties and prevent their keepers from opening new premises. It also introduced a compulsory licensing system for cowsheds. A fuller set of measures was created following the enactment of the Public Health Act of 1875.

Live animal markets were also outlawed. In London, Smithfield Market, which had been in operation since the tenth century, was moved in 1855. By the end of the nineteenth century, standards had been adopted for cowsheds setting out construction materials, the type of openings required, and a minimum space per animal. A monitoring system was established. In 1900, the city of Glasgow inspected 1220 cowsheds and 13,919 cows (Otter 2006: 525).

In London, the number of cows fell from 15,000 in the mid-nineteenth century to no more than 3000 on the eve of the First World War. London's self-sufficiency in milk fell sharply: from 80% in 1850 to 28% in 1880 and just 3% in 1910 (Atkins 2012: 41). Of swine in Manchester, Roger Scola writes:

> “[...] While as late as 1866 the sanitary authorities of [Manchester] remarked on the persistence of 'a passion or infatuation amongst very many of the working classes for pig breeding and pig fattening', only ten years on they were able to report that they were meeting less resistance in their efforts to clear away the pigs, even from the poorest areas.” (Scola and Scola 1992: 40).

Thus, by the turn of the twentieth century the ‘Great Separation’ of human residence and animal production was accomplished (Atkins 2012: 2). Soon only pets would remain in the city. Regulations were compounded by successive innovations in the conditions of transportation and product storage. Fresh produce could now be grown in places remote from consumers, and as the automobile gained ground, horses too were banned from the city.

The drive to rid the city of its organic waste dates from the same era.
## Organic Waste Management

The invention of urban waste is recent (Barles 2005a). Only when the city reached a certain size and its links to the countryside and agriculture loosened, so that waste was no longer mainly organic, did waste management become a problem, requiring a public policy and municipal management.

## Ridding the City of Its Waste

The best-known ancient sewers are probably those of ancient Rome, which are partly still functional. An open-air ditch (the *cloaca maxima*) was built by Tarquin the Elder in the sixth century BCE, at a time of rapid population growth, to drain stormwater as well as wastewater into the Tiber. The canal, probably inspired by Etruscan techniques, also helped drain standing water between the Palatine and Capitoline Hills, a lowland area that then became the site of the Circus Maximus. By the second century BCE, it had already become a real underground sewer. These major urban projects of ancient Rome were built by Imperial command, so the term 'municipal policy' was not yet apposite.

Most Western cities took over waste management as one of their prerogatives in the second half of the nineteenth century, following the Industrial Revolution, with the goal of cleaning up the city, to get rid of waste that was deemed a source of disease. Engineers were then called upon to come up with technical solutions whereby the city could efficiently clear away a daily increasing flow of waste.

In London, wastewater was at first discharged directly into the Thames with the rainwater, a recommendation of the Consolidated Commission of Sewers created in 1848 (Trench and Hillman 1984). Only in 1854 was the connection made between poor water quality and the recurrence of cholera epidemics. A new, high-capacity underground sewer system was then designed by the engineer Joseph Bazalgette. Parliament voted to finance the project after the 'great stink summer' of 1858. The work was entrusted to the Metropolitan Board of Works. Wastewater was collected by a gravity sewer and flowed into the Thames estuary, where it was raised into reservoirs by monumental pumping stations (driven by steam engines). The reservoirs emptied into the sea by tidal action. The new sewer system, personally inaugurated in 1865 by the Prince of Wales, made cholera epidemics a thing of the past and cleaned up the Thames. As it was a Parliamentary project, it was directly managed by the London County Council beginning in 1889.

In Paris, wastewater emptied into the Seine, the Bièvre or Ménilmontant Brook. As in London, following recurring cholera epidemics and pollution of the Seine, a modern underground sewer system was created during the great urban transformation undertaken by Haussmann as Prefect of the Seine from 1853 to 1870 (Reid 1993). For the first time, town planning was being done according to a comprehensive plan grounded in hygienic principles: the opening up of the Grands Boulevards cleansed and aired out the urban fabric. Underground conduits followed the line of
the new streets. The sewer system was designed by Eugène Belgrand, a civil engineer polytechnician who in 1867 became Director of Paris's water and sewerage department. It is a combined gravity-fed sewer (collecting runoff and sewage). Progressively, buildings were obliged to connect to it: in 1852, an Imperial decree provided that: "[...] any new construction, in a street with sewers, must be configured so that rainwater and greywater feed into them" (Haussmann's memoirs, cited by Barles 2005b).

An 1894 law prohibited direct discharges into the Seine. The first sewage outfall was at Clichy, downstream from Paris, in settling ponds. The drainage channels were extended to Achères in 1895 (Reid 1993). In Paris and London both, it was hard to draw a line between State and municipal policies. In both cases the sewers were funded by the central government, a key role being played by a few expert engineers (Barles 2005b). Once the infrastructure was in place, it was managed by a municipal engineering department (the County in London, the Prefecture of the Seine in Paris).

As this hygienist period unfolded, a new vision of nature emerged: romantic, clean, sanitized. It advocated the physical separation of city and agriculture. And yet some urban waste continued to be recycled to feed the city.

## Waste Recycling to Feed the City

Waste management is a specifically urban problem, one municipal authorities are faced with only when the city exceeds a certain size. Before it became a problem, waste was considered a resource.

Until the nineteenth century, self-regulation and recycling held sway: waste was organic and was recycled in agriculture as fertilizer, as animal feed (pigs, chickens) and sometimes in industry (dyes, papermaking pulp). Swine ran free in the city, feeding in the streets on domestic waste that residents were encouraged to leave for them (Clubbe 1992). In London, however, ordinances were adopted as early as 1357 prohibiting residents from throwing their garbage in the streets (Trench and Hillman, 1984).

The *jardins maraîchers* (market gardens) of Paris illustrate the dual role played by agriculture: as a food source and a waste disposal.

The French term *maraîcher* is derived from the *marais* (marshes) on the right bank of the Seine (today's Marais district) occupied from the twelfth century by farmers who drained the marshes to produce fruit and vegetables and sold them at the neighbouring market, Les Halles (Quellier 2015). Eventually, under the Ancien Régime, the term *marais* came to be understood as any market garden, no matter where it was or what kind of soil it grew on. Indeed, these areas of agricultural production were pushed out to the suburbs as the city expanded and the fortifications were rebuilt farther out, but links to the city remained close, for both marketing and fertilization.

Up until the eighteenth century, the contents of Paris's cesspools were stored and dried at the foot of the Buttes-Chaumont and then sold to farmers as fertilizer (Guerrand 1985). Up until the end of the nineteenth century, when farmers came to
sell their products at the Halles market, they collected organic waste, including horse manure (Taylor-Leduc 2015). It was the same in London (Thick 1998). In Paris in the 1870s, some market gardeners had an actual contract with the municipality to pick up sludge at every street corner. These nightsoil collectors were granted a 3-year licence to ply their trade in a given neighbourhood by the adjudicators whose job it was to have the sludge and refuse of Paris removed. The sludge, a mixture of earth, water, manure, straw and domestic waste, was particularly rich in chemical elements (Barles 2005a).

Once the sewer system was in place, agriculture again had a role to play in purifying sewage before its discharge into the Seine. The engineer A. Mille drew on what Edwin Chadwick had done in London to develop the landfarming system. After a promising experiment near the Clichy outfall, which was deemed successful, the Paris water and sewerage department reached an agreement in 1869 with the commune of Gennevilliers for an expansion of the landfarming area, which went from 6 ha to 115 in 1874, 295 in 1876, 379 in 1878, and 422 in 1880 (Barles 2005b). This rapid expansion shows the success of an organization that was deemed: “[...] economically viable, agronomically effective, and hygienically satisfactory as it removes nuisances from the capital” (ibid.: 71).

Though physicians feared the sludge spread on farmland would cause disease, the strategy was immediately successful. Crop irrigation did in fact filter the water and protect the Seine. Barren gravel soils became fertile. The sleepy little town of Gennevilliers turned into a garden of Eden. Emperor Napoleon III visited the town and came back laden with vegetables (Steel 2008). By 1879, about 10% of the fruits and vegetables at the Halles market came from landfarming sites; often they were sold cheaper than the produce of conventional farmers because yields per hectare were greater (Taylor-Leduc 2015). So successful was the system that it was adopted Europe-wide: in 1878, Berlin abandoned chemical treatments to follow Paris's example. By 1900, crop irrigation sites covered 6800 ha and gave employment to 3000 farmers (ibid.).

Suburban agriculture is a particular phase in the history of cities' food supply systems and an innovative production model that is closely linked to urban life. It made possible great technical feats, as illustrated by the market gardeners and fruit growers of Argenteuil and Montreuil. Remarkable results were achieved by 'laitiers nourrisseurs' (urban dairymen) considering that all of their cows' feed was purchased. "While farms constituted an independent economic unit, these suburban operations undertook only one phase of production" (Philipponneau 1952: 204).

It is true that this virtuous circle of urban ecology, whereby urban waste such as manure and wastewater was reused as fertilizer in periurban agriculture, fell into decline in the twentieth century. After the Second World War, suburban farms closed and farms in general became dependent, not on cities, but on distant farms and factories that provided seeds, feed, and chemical inputs. Paris's belt of market gardens disappeared due to such forces as the rise of the automobile, competition for land in peri-urban areas, and the ability to quickly bring in by train fruit and vegetables from regions with a warmer climate (Stanhill 1976). From that point on, municipal policies focused on the storage and treatment of urban waste.
Conclusion

The history of urban food policy is marked by very varied objectives as well as ways and means: ancient cities of the Mediterranean that guaranteed much of the urban population access to food thanks to tribute from the colonies; medieval and modern cities that made sure of their supplies by setting up exclusive catchment areas and by financing trade; and hygiene-conscious contemporary cities that issued regulations on the use of waste and where animals could be kept.

That history, however, reflects two major shifts. First, cities had to become entities that could really pursue a food supply policy. And second, the place the city would assign to agriculture, and more broadly to all living things, had to be established.

Through a slow evolution, beginning at the end of the Middle Ages, cities gradually lost their ability to conduct food policies. The rise of the States and their struggle to establish a unified national market were decisive. Right from the beginning of the twentieth century, but especially after the First World War, States increasingly gained a stranglehold on food supplies.

Again, the rapid urbanization attendant on the Industrial Revolution frequently created headless communities unable to implement policies throughout their territory. Conurbation phenomena gave rise to 'clots' of human habitation split between a number of politico-administrative entities. As much as 50 years ago Lewis Mumford noted: "Such urban clots could and did expand a hundred times without acquiring more than a shadow of the institutions that characterize a city in the mature ecological sense" (Mumford 1989: 458). He went on to say:

"The new urban emergent, the coal-agglomeration, which Patrick Geddes called the conurbation, was neither isolated in the country nor attached to an old historic core. It spread in a mass of relatively even density over scores or even hundreds of square miles. There were no effective centres in this urban massing: no institutions capable of uniting its members into an active city life: no political organization capable of unifying its common activities" (Mumford 1989: 470).

How can policies exist, absent any entity able to design and implement them? That is the very issue which, in modern Europe, is leading to the creation of metropolises that merge a number of cities into one.

Cities' separation from the organic world is the second long-drawn-out shift. This more recent phenomenon is also a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. Unlike the ambition nourished by Ildefons Cerdà, who wanted to "ruralize the city, urbanize the country" in his 1859 plan for Barcelona (Consales 2004: 798), no such synthesis occurred. While the countryside did become increasingly urbanized, thanks to the automobile, the reverse never came to pass. Cities' close relationship with the rural and organic world—through the presence of animals and market gardening, and organic processing activities such as slaughterhouses or tanneries, and through the use of urban waste in agricultural production—has disappeared in favour of simple importation of food products, lacking any connection to the living world.
These slow transformations are today being called into question, as new political spaces are being created so that cities can again be involved in food issues. At the same time, States' policies are being challenged by liberalization. Metropolises that can endow today's conurbations with a capacity for action commensurate with their size are being created. Lastly, the dispersal of production chains is increasingly being challenged on account of the risks it entails for the environment and health.

Food supply is once more on cities' agenda (Chapter "Cities' Strategies for Sustainable Food and the Levers They Mobilize"), and it follows that urban food policies can no longer discount agricultural production and the rural world. In their struggle against the cities, States often allied themselves with the countrysides, as appears from the protection policy adopted in France after the Commune by Méline and the self-sufficiency policies of the twentieth century. Today, one stage in devising ambitious urban food policies is certainly the building of new alliances with agricultural and rural areas.

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# Cities' Strategies for Sustainable Food and the Levers They Mobilize

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Jess Halliday with Wendy Mendes (Box Contributor)

There is a growing realization of cities’ vulnerability to the problems posed by the food system that are described in the chapter “Urbanization Issues Affecting Food System Sustainability”. Reliance on globalized supply chains puts food provisioning arrangements at risk from environmental, political or economic disruptions. Cities lack productive space to produce all the food needed to feed their populations (Steel 2008, 2012), yet cities in less developed countries of the Global South will host most of the growth in world population, projected to reach 9.1 billion by 2050 (FAO 2009). Household food insecurity (or food poverty) is a major issue in many cities in developing countries, but incidence has also risen in the Global North, where the long-term effects of the 2008 economic downturn are still felt. Moreover, urban consumers are increasingly disconnected from the origins of their food (see chapter “Urbanization Issues Affecting Food System Sustainability”), and modern cities are obesogenic environments where calorie-dense/nutritionally-lacking food is cheap and available, but where opportunities for physical activity are limited (Morgan and Sonnino 2010). Consequently, diet-related ill-health has reached epidemic levels.

While the capacity of cities to implement food policies has ebbed since the end of the Middle Ages (see chapter “History of Urban Food Policy in Europe, from the Ancient City to the Industrial City”), a small but increasing number of cities around the world are devising policies to address food-related problems or to mitigate their effects. This chapter describes the range of cities’ aims in so doing, while drawing on existing literature to develop a broad typology and exploring relations between cities and their hinterlands, since many policies have repercussions that are felt beyond the boundaries of cities or involve external actors. The analysis in this chapter focuses on the levers and instruments that are employed by cities to meet their objectives, with attention to the importance of cross-domain working and determining

<footnote>J. Halliday (✉)
CIRAD, UMR MOISA, Montpellier, France
e-mail: j.halliday@ruaf.org</footnote>
what is possible within each city’s context. A typology of governance models for cities’ food-related interventions is then outlined, and the need to draw on capabilities of civil society and the private sector to overcome barriers faced by the public sector is highlighted. Several ways in which the success of urban actions can be measured are subsequently discussed. Finally, two possible future directions for cities’ role and influence in the food system are identified.

## Objectives of Urban Food Policies and Challenges of Urban-Rural Relationships

Any attempt to find homogeneity in the intentions behind cities’ food policy efforts is fraught with difficulty.

Firstly, political and socioeconomic histories have led to differences in perspectives and priorities with regard to food. These differences are apparent from city to city but are most evident when comparing cities in developed and less developed countries. In many places in the Global South, food security is supported by close connections between rural and periurban producers and urban consumers, and (often informal) urban agriculture, but migration to cities means connections are failing and encroaching urbanization causes land-use conflicts. Prosperous cities of the Global North, on the other hand, tend to rely heavily on the globalized, industrial food system that transports ingredients and composite products across continents. Yet in developed countries there are wide inequalities in access to healthy, nutritious and quality food. Food insecurity is often manifested as obesity rather than starvation, while ‘precarious food situations’, as defined by Dominique Paturel (Paturel et al. 2015), are marked by a lack of physical, economic or cognitive access to healthy and nutritious food.

Secondly, there is a lack of consistency in how cities express their aims, their entry points and framing of the issues. It has been proposed that cities’ main aim is to ensure future food security (Morgan and Sonnino 2010; Sonnino 2014), which is a situation when, “[...] all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (World Food Summit 1996). The phrase ‘food security’ seldom appears in the titles of urban food strategy documents in the Global North, as Roberta Sonnino (2014) found in her discourse analysis of 15 such strategies, but it tends to be implicit and embedded within health and sustainability language. While there is sometimes direct reference to food security in the body of these documents as one of several priority themes, it is usually framed as a health or food access issue.

Thirdly, the aim of a food-related policy is not always articulated separately from the levers to be employed to implement it. Sometimes a city’s entry point is not the identification of a problem to be addressed, but rather an aim, a strategy, or a desire to implement an available instrument (as discussed in greater detail in chapter “Reconciling Sustainability Issues and Urban Policy Levers”).
Fourthly, not all food-related policy is framed as such, but the headline aim can be wider, with food being one of several strands. This is the case for Medellín's *Todos por la vida* ('everyone for life') policy, which builds the city's infrastructure to alleviate the effects of the civil war, with an ethos of greening, biodiversity and social inclusion. The wider programme includes food security enhancement strategies (Laidlaw 2015).

Despite these difficulties, nine food-related aims were identified in a review of literature on cities' food policies published in 2015 or earlier.<fnref n="1" /> These aims are presented in Table 1, with examples of policy levers and instruments through which 11 cities work towards their aims. Levers are defined as policy domains or responsibilities that reside at the local level and which usually have an associated local government department or service. Instruments are the procedural means that the departments or services have at their disposal (see chapter “Reconciling Sustainability Issues and Urban Policy Levers”).

Regeneration, the first aim in Table 1, uses food-related activities to revitalize the social fabric of an urban area that has become run-down following a crisis. In Detroit, urban agriculture could be a means of regenerating the city after its economic collapse, as Detroit is exempt from the State Right to Farm Act which otherwise prohibits agriculture in urban areas (Detroit Future City 2012). In Medellín, the crisis was sociopolitical, and funding was provided for urban agriculture projects by the State electricity provider as part of a long-running urban development programme (Laidlaw 2015). In both of these examples, urban agriculture is central to regeneration efforts and can address problems of physical or economic access to healthy food, while boosting cognitive reconnection with food sources and food production, thereby helping to improve diets.

Regeneration is closely connected to economic development, the second aim, as diverse and prosperous food businesses reinvigorate the economy through their own activities and by attracting customers for all local businesses. Within cities, viable food enterprises contribute to local economic prosperity through taxable revenues and job creation, with an emphasis on *good* jobs that pay a living wage and offer safe and fair conditions and training in healthy food preparation and sustainability (Freudenberg and Silver 2013). In London, funding and campaigning for food apprenticeships by the Greater London Authority helps tackle joblessness whilst creating a pool of skilled professionals (Johnson 2013). Moreover, as in Barcelona, investment in food market infrastructure yields benefits within the city and regionally. It improves food access in cities, while securing access to the profitable urban market for regional producers, thereby helping to overcome long-term resilience problems by ensuring that the local food supply is viable (Forster et al. 2015).

<footnote n="1">¹Academic papers were identified through a search of City University London's library online using the terms 'food policy' and 'city' or 'urban', and 'food policy council', and 'urban food strategy'. Non-academic literature was identified through online searches (Google) using the same terms. Policy documents were sourced where the author had prior awareness of food policies. The policies included in Table 1 are examples and not a definitive list of cities' food-related policies.</footnote>
<table><caption>**Table 1** Examples of cities' aims, levers and instruments</caption><thead><tr><th>Aims</th><th>Levers</th><th>Instruments</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1. Regeneration</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Detroit, USA</td><td>Planning</td><td>Urban agriculture zoning regulation</td></tr><tr><td>Medellin, Colombia</td><td>Urban development</td><td>Funding urban agriculture</td></tr><tr><td>2. Economic development</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Barcelona, Spain</td><td>Market management</td><td>Investment in food market infrastructure</td></tr><tr><td>London, UK</td><td>Economic development</td><td>Campaigning, funding food apprenticeships</td></tr><tr><td>3. Food supply resilience</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Belo Horizonte, Brazil</td><td>Agricultural development</td><td>Technical and financial incentives for agriculture; Production-consumption schemes; Promoting urban agriculture</td></tr><tr><td>4. Food security and access</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Belo Horizonte, Brazil</td><td>Social welfare</td><td>Subsidies for canteens and staple foods; School food funding</td></tr><tr><td>Medellin, Colombia</td><td>Business/trade<br>Social welfare</td><td>Price regulation; Public-private partnerships; Participatory budgeting for emergency food</td></tr><tr><td>Toronto, Canada</td><td>Urban development<br>Public health</td><td>Funding for urban agriculture; Subsidies for mobile fruit and vegetable vending</td></tr><tr><td>5. Environmental protection</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Malmö, Sweden</td><td>Public canteens</td><td>Procurement contracts; Training</td></tr><tr><td>London, UK</td><td>London 2012 Olympics</td><td>Contracts specifying sustainability criteria</td></tr><tr><td>6. Public health</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>New York, USA</td><td>Public health<br>Public procurement</td><td>Regulation on trans fats, calories on menus; Executive order on nutrition standards</td></tr><tr><td>Waltham Forest, UK</td><td>Planning</td><td>Planning restriction on food takeaways</td></tr><tr><td>7. Food safety</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Hanoi, Vietnam</td><td>Retail modernization</td><td>Public-private partnerships; Private standards</td></tr><tr><td>8. Social inclusion</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Rosario, Argentina</td><td>Planning</td><td>Public land use designation for urban agriculture; Tax relief for private landowners; Participatory budgeting</td></tr><tr><td>9. Food culture</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>London UK<sup>a</sup></td><td>Mayoral support</td><td>Funding on urban agriculture; Support campaign</td></tr></tbody></table>

<footnote><sup>a</sup>Social and cultural aspects of London food is one of several themes in the London Food Strategy, while the others are covered under other identified headings</footnote>