Sustainable Urban Food Systems

Surfood²

Unsustainability of food systems

Environment• Natural resources • Pollution and emissions • Biodiversity

Health• Nutritional diseases • Growing anxiety

Society and culture• Unequal access to food• Social exclusions • Identity claim

Economics• Vulnerability• Employment

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Why is the city interesting?

Unsustainability

Resources

Innovations

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Urbanfactors of unsustainability

• Distancing - Geographical: transport (externalities) - Economical: intermediaries - Cognitive: poor understanding of the system

• Linearization - Accumulation of materials

• Acceleration- Sense of lack of control

• Standardization- Identity tensions

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Concentration of resources

• Biomass ( incoming flows > outcoming flows) • Population: workforce and diversity • Knowledge: education, research • Money• Markets• Infrastructures • Information (networks) • Power

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• Relocation- Short chains - Urban and peri-urban agriculture

• Recycling- Recovery of waste

• Deceleration- Slow food, slow city

• Diversification - Melting pot

• Network- Small businesses which generate employments- Resources and food de-commodification (incredible edible)

Cities generate innovations

Public policies• The cities (local authorities and citizen groups)

want to regain control of their food.• They examine the agri-food models,

localised/globalised to varying degrees, which they can influence (e.g. land use, school canteen, markets localisation, etc.)

• However, they lack the tools to evaluate the effects of these models on sustainability.

Why is the city interesting?

Objective of Surfood

• To co-construct and test the tools for evaluating the models which the city and its stakeholders might influence, with a view to ensuring a more sustainable food supply.

Sustainable urban food system

• Relevant factors relating to sustainability depends on the operators (e.g. exhaustion & saturation / adaptation to shocks)

• Different values across the sustainability policies are observed (e.g. frugality/green growth)

• A choice is made to limit the evaluations to a small number of factors determined by consultation among stakaholders

Project structure

• WP1: Research– T1.1.: Urban food styles– T1.2.: Urban food cycle and metabolism– T1.3.: Regulations promoted by the city

• WP2: Enhancement platform • WP3: Training

WP1 /T1.1. - Urban food styles

• Why food styles :– Limited study of the domestic link…– …yet it weighs on sustainability issues.– Consumers organise themselves and innovate.

• An approach in terms of typical neighbourhoods:– Survey of the population’s food styles– Identification of equipment in the neighbourhoods

(foodscapes): productive land, shops, restaurants, transport, etc.

The neighbourhood model• Convergence of the socio-spatial organisation of globalised cities

(Van Kempen & Marcuse, 2000)• The neighbourhood: a socio-spatial forum, a lifestyle model

combining relatively homogenous factors:– Economic level– Cultural origin– Type of habitat– Type of activity– Centrality

• The neighbourhood: a relevant representation of an urban population manager

• Hypothesis to be tested: differences in the sustainability of food styles depending on the neighbourhoods and role of foodscape

Factors of sustainability of the food styles of typical neighbourhoods

• Food consumption– Nutritional quality (diversity indices, MAR index, NAR index)– Sanitary quality of food– Carbon cost of consumption– Vulnerability to price fluctuations

• Supply practices– Distance covered to buy (last km)– Level of private production (agriculture, stock farming)

• Processing and consumption practices– Importance of domestic cooking / eating out of the house, street food– Type of cooking and identity openness– Waste management: what is wasted and recycled

• Forms of food solidarity– With the agricultural/rural world– With populations in a precarious situation

Methodology

• Urban region cut into typical neighbourhoods based on urban planning data and satellite maps

• Multi-disciplinary collective construction of the questionnaire based on prior qualitative surveys

• Survey on sample representative of each typical neighbourhood by means of closed questionnaire in several stages

WP1 / T1.2. – Urban food cycle and metabolism

• Why the food cycle?– The “supply” side of the system + waste– Levers on which the cities can act (e.g. re-localisation)

• The food cycles combine models which are industrialised, distanced and concentrated to a greater or lesser extent (e.g. short / long circuits; large / small scale industry)

• Hypothesis to be tested: effects of distance (geographic, economic and cognitive) on sustainability

• An approach in terms of:– evaluation of the environmental and social effects of the cycle– comparison of alternative models for certain links in the cycle (agric.

production, cattering, waste management)

Processing fo

r urban

market

Logistics

Bundling/unbundling

Wholesale

Retail sales

Markets, shops, supermarkets

hypermarkets

CONSUMERS

Catering

Wastecollection

Waste treatment

Out of home

Athome

Agri. Prod.

AGRICULTURAL PRODUCERS

Agri. Prod.

Evaluation of environmental and social effects of urban food cycle and metabolism

• Appraisal of incoming flow area/out-going flow area (Barles & Billen)

• Employment: distribution by type of activity and sensitivity to new configurations

• Agricultural area necessary to feed the city• Relative weight of links for certain factors of

sustainability (e.g. waste, transport, etc.) with Life Cycle Assesment

Comparative analysis of models by link in the food cycle

• Agricultural production models:– Intra or peri-urban / Rural under contract / traditional model

• Logistics models:– Wholesale market / Supermarket retailing platform

• Distribution models:– Supermarkets / Producer small markets / Groceries

• Catering models:– Central kitchen / Street catering

• Waste management models:– Centralised / decentralised

Factors of sustainability of the models

• Selection of factors of sustainability relevant to each link according to the interest of city stakeholders

• Examples of factors of sustainability – Environment: GES, biodiversity, natural resources– Social: health, employment, inequalities– Economic: resistance to shocks

• Use of evaluation tools such as LCA already proven or to be tested

WP1 / T1.3.: Regulations imposed by the city

• An approach through urban stakeholders: local authorities, associations, companies firmly rooted in the city, research, etc.– Identification of values shared by the networks of

operators relating to the means of constructing sustainability (e.g. frugality / green growth)

– Identification of factors of sustainability included or emphasised in public debate.

Expected Surfood products

• Dialogue and diagnostic tools:– Models representing the urban food system: map

of operators and their influences; map of flows, employment, land required. These models can be used as supports for developing local policies.

– Tools for evaluating certain links in the food cycle.

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Surfood: laboratory cities

• Montpellier• Hanoi • Dakar • Tunis • Cali?

• Collaborative networks- Laboratory field - Experimentation of innovative solutions - Methodological exchanges

The cities highlight different questions of sustainability. Examples:

• Dakar – Which models of urban waste usage for agriculture? (more or less

centralised)– Which distribution models? (mass-market retailing / markets)

• Hanoi– Which sanitary quality management models for vegetables? (Peri-

urban / Contracts with rural inhabitants)• Rabat

– Which models of city/country relationships?• Montpellier

– Which logistics models? (MIN / mass-market retailing platform)• Cali ?