Municipal Food Strategies and Integrated Approaches to Urban Agriculture: Exploring Three Cases from the Global North

Abstract

At a time when the majority of world's population live in urban areas, the role of cities in addressing food system vulnerabilities is vital. One response has been a renewed focus by local governments in the global north on a host of individual food system issues. Still lacking are comprehensive municipal food strategies that take a coordinated approach to the food system as a whole. A municipal food strategy is an official plan or road map that helps city governments integrate a full spectrum of urban food system issues within a single policy framework including food production (typically referred to as urban agriculture (UA)), food processing, food distribution, food access and food waste management. This exploratory article examines factors that may affect the capacity of local governments in three global north cities to develop and implement their respective food strategies. It goes on to ask whether food strategies may enable UA, as the part of the food system that to date has garnered the most attention in both research and practice.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge and thank Lauren Baker, Barbara Emanuel, Paula Jones, Kevin Morgan, Roberta Sonnino and Ben Reynolds for ground-breaking work on food strategies in their respective cities, and for useful and constructive feedback on an earlier version of this article. The authors also wish to thank anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions on the article. All errors or omissions are those of the authors.

Notes

This article is set within the context of urbanization in ‘Western’ cities where certain land uses (including agriculture and other food system functions) were effectively removed from cities over the latter half of the twentieth century. This separation was enabled by technological advances including refrigeration and long-distance food transport. It is important to recognize that for thousands of years cities, and entire civilizations, have risen and fallen on the basis of the resilience of their food systems, making food one of the oldest and most fundamental ‘urban’ issues. In this sense, food is not ‘arriving’ on urban agendas, but rather it is returning. See, for example, Fraser and Rimas (2010) and Steel (2009).

Cities in the global south have been formulating comprehensive responses to urban food system issues for several decades. Prominent innovators include the City of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where food policies based on the principle of food security as a right of citizenship have been implemented since 1993 (Rocha 2001). Another example is the City of Rosario, Argentina, which has been recognized for its food policy development with a United Nations Best Practice Award for its Urban Agriculture Programme which arose from the 2001 economic crisis in Argentina that in Rosario manifested in levels of poverty of 60%. The scope of this article precludes a discussion of case studies in the global south; however, the authors wish to acknowledge the significance and innovation of the true ‘early adopter’ cities which overwhelmingly are found outside of the global north.

A systems approach to food policy refers to the full ‘spectrum’ of food issues including production, processing, distribution, access, consumption and diversion of food waste. A systems approach can be contrasted with an approach that isolates individual aspects of the food system (e.g. urban food production, access to food, or management of food waste).

An FPC is an officially sanctioned voluntary body comprised of stakeholders from various segments of a state/provincial or local food system. FPCs are collaborations between citizens and government officials that give voice to food-related concerns and interests. FPCs are asked to examine the operation of a local food system and provide ideas or recommendations for how it can be improved. It is estimated that there are approximately 100 FPCs currently operating across the USA and Canada.

The authors of this article have direct experience working with food policy development and food system planning in Vancouver, Canada. Brent Mansfield is Co-Chair of the Vancouver Food Policy Council and Wendy Mendes works as a Planner for the City of Vancouver on food system issues. The authors are currently collaborating, in partnership with a number of government and non-government stakeholders, on the development of a Vancouver Food Strategy.

The US cities analysed in the study are Baltimore, Boston, Los Angeles, Louisville, Minneapolis, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco and Seattle. The Canadian city is Vancouver.

The literature on participatory budgeting was also used as a source (Cabannes 2004, 2005).

The Toronto Food Strategy has been endorsed by the Toronto Board of Health, but not yet by Toronto City Council. Toronto is unique in the context of Canadian governance in that health is a municipal responsibility instead of Provincial as is the case for other Canadian municipalities. Toronto's food policy mandate has historically been situated within Public Health, thereby giving a Toronto a unique trajectory of policy-making and implementation.