Resourcing an Agroecological Urbanism

Political, Transformational and Territorial Dimensions

Chiara Tornaghi, Michiel Dehaene, Chiara Tornaghi, Michiel Dehaene

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138359673
• eBook ISBN: 9780429782367
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Social Sciences

Foregrounding an innovative and radical perspective on food planning, this book makes the case for an agroecological urbanism in which food is a key component in the reinvention of new and just social arrangements and ecological practices.

Building on state-of-the-art and participatory research on farming, urbanism, food policy and advocacy in the field of food system transformation, this book changes the way food planning has been conceptualised to date and invites the reader to fully embrace the transformative potential of an agroecological perspective. Bringing in dialogue from both the rural and urban, the producer and consumer, this book challenges conventional approaches that see them as separate spheres, whose problems can only be solved by a reconnection. Instead, it argues for moving away from a 'food-in-the-city' approach towards an 'urbanism' perspective, in which the economic and spatial processes that currently drive urbanisation will be unpacked and dissected, and new strategies for changing those processes into more equal and just ones are put forward. Drawing on the nascent field of urban political agroecology, this text brings together: i) theoretical re-conceptualisations of urbanism in relation to food planning and the emergence of new agrarian questions, ii) critical analysis of experimental methodologies and performing arts for public dialogue, reflexivity and food sovereignty research, iii) experiences of resourceful land management, including urban land use and land tenure change, and iv) theoretical and practical exploration of post-capitalist economics that bring consumers and producers together to make the case for an agroecological urbanism.

Aimed at advanced students and academics in agroecology, sustainable food planning, urban geography, urban planning and critical food studies, this book will also be of interest to professionals and activists working with food systems in both the Global North and the Global South.

1

Food as an urban question, and the foundations of a reproductive, agroecological urbanism

C.M. Deh-Tor

Introduction

In this chapter, we aim to present and discuss what we mean by the concept of “agroecological urbanism” (Deh-Tor, 2017). In the introduction to the book, we began by illustrating how encountering agroecology has changed our way of looking at sustainable food planning in a profound way. Here, while delving deeper into the ideas of an agroecological urbanism, we aim to unpack further how we envision a transformative agenda for the sustainable food planning community.

An agroecological urbanism – as a realm of professional practice – does not yet exist. Ours is a call for a dialogue between two sets of discussions and reflections that, until today, still largely operate in separate worlds and are rooted in very different communities of practice. On the one hand are the political agroecology and the food sovereignty movements; these largely represent rural communities engaged in struggles and negotiations at national and transnational levels to shape production and trade conditions of farmers. On the other hand is the urban food policy community that is mostly engaged in debates on urban and regional food strategies, strongly focussed on issues of food access and consumption, such as urban diets and food poverty, but lacks a radical stance on the ecological basis of food production, and the reproduction of life in general. As largely separate movements, they are rooted in very different sets of historical subjectivities and resonate with political positions that have been historically rendered as the conflict between the agrarian and the urban question (McMichael, 2013; Tornaghi and Halder, 2021; Tornaghi and Dehaene, 2020).

While our work is largely positioned in this gap and attempts to build bridges between these communities and movements, in this chapter, we mostly speak to the food planning community. The chapter tries to link up to the unfolding discussion on sustainable urban food planning while trying to break open its agenda: we do this in three ways. First, we aim to inscribe food planning within a different geography, moving beyond the city as a self-contained world exploring the complex geometries of planetary urbanisation (Brenner, 2014) and the many concretely existing overlaps between what used to be country and what used to be city (Parham, 2019). Second, we aim to expand and open up the thematic confines of the urban food agenda, unpacking the logics of urbanisation that still largely contribute to treating food as an afterthought, after the ‘hard’ subjects of housing, transport and energy have been taken care of. Third, we aim to challenge the disciplinary confines of traditional ways of understanding planning, embracing a view that sees planning as a field in transition, rather than a singular and monolithic disciplinary basis upon which food planning is to be built.

The chapter is organised along four sections. In section 1 we start from the way sustainable food planning has engaged with the urban food question so far, and try to map the boundaries of the terrain that the sustainable food planning agenda was able to conquer within an urban policy context. The aim is to describe its geographical boundaries, the selective character of its political agenda, the main planning approaches followed to implement this agenda, and to begin to illustrate its limits.

In Section 2 we turn to the social reproduction literature as a forceful entry point to rethink the urban food agenda. In particular, we illustrate how the feminist social reproduction literature (Federici, 2004; Mitchell et al., 2004; Bakker and Gill, 2003; Bezanson and Luxton, 2006) has helped us to see the variety of practices that have been residualised and sidelined in a capitalist society that has built the urban question around the question of the reproduction of capital and waged labour (Castells, 1972; Harvey, 1985) rather than bodies and ecologies.

In Section 3 we then move to agroecology as a radical starting point for a new food planning agenda. The clear positioning of political agroecology helps us to map where further articulation is needed in order to creatively imagine and build an urban society that embraces and nurtures the ecological processes that feed life (and us).

In Section 4 we conclude with a call for a heterodox planning practice and try to map some of the voices present in this edited volume within such a heterodox approach.

1. How ‘urban’ is food planning?

Over the past two decades, since the first publications calling for more attention to the food agenda, sustainable food planning has moved from “being a stranger to the planning field” (Pothukuchi and Kaufman, 2000) to become one of the issues driving the renewal of planning (Morgan, 2013). The reasons for planning communities re-engaging with food are varied and have been described by Morgan and Sonnino as part of the “new food equation” (NFE) (Morgan, 2009; Morgan and Sonnino, 2010). With this term, they refer to the interplay of five profoundly destabilising trends in the capitalist food system that revolve around food, and that could potentially lead to a food regime change (Friedmann, 1987): the sharp rise of staple food prices, increase in food insecurity, the link between food insecurity and national security, the effect of climate change on food production and the growing incidence of land conflicts. Cities, as Morgan and Sonnino (2010) remind us, are at the forefront of the NFE for ecological, demographic and political reasons.

The Food Interest Group (a subsection of the American Planning Association) and the Sustainable Food Planning Group (its counterpart within the Association of European Schools of Planning [AESOP]) can now look back at more than ten years of exchange in research and teaching activities on this topic. The emergence of the field of sustainable food planning went hand in hand with local and regional actors engaging in the drafting of urban food plans, food strategies, and, to some extent, food policies (Ilieva, 2016). Over the last decade, a growing number of cities have installed local food councils (Moragues-Faus and Sonnino, 2019); in turn, this has led to the establishment of networks of cities coming together around the urban food agenda and learning from each other, both within national (i.e., the UK Sustainable Food Cities network) and international networks (i.e., the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact).

We share the excitement for this growing attention. At the same time, however, we feel that the planning community has only started to address food as an urban matter of concern. The impact of this renewed attention to food is still rather limited and insufficiently integrated within a broad transformative urban agenda, i.e., an agenda for the city, urbanism and urbanisation more broadly. We believe that the work of planners needs expanding beyond the boundaries within which food has been treated so far and should be understood as an ‘urban question’, giving it the same weight and centrality that has historically been given to the housing question, mobility, or sanitation in urbanism. The particular gaze we adopt has roots in the literature and debates on ‘urban questions’ (typically the housing questions), and the ways in which planners’ social movements and governing authorities have negotiated issues of social reproduction and collective services in the past century. We first take stock of the ways in which the city has been conceptualised within food planning, then explore the frontiers of an expanded urban agenda.

1.1. Multiple versions of the city in urban food planning

As mentioned above, Morgan and Sonnino (2010) have pointed out that after half a century in which faith in the industrialisation of agriculture made it seem as if the issue of feeding people had been resolved, food has regained centre stage in the international arena. Wiskerke (2015) identifies five urbanisation challenges to which urban food planning has responded:

1. (1) governance capacity, especially given the new sustainability challenges;
2. (2) resource use;
3. (3) growing inequality;
4. (4) environmental pollution; and
5. (5) food provisioning for a growing urban population.

Each of these challenges has led to different ways in which the food planning community has engaged with the urban context. Building on these analyses and emerging debates, we can identify the following ways in which the city and food planning intersect.

The city as a distinctive level of governance: the rise of urban food councils and alternative food networks

While in the post-war period food was dealt with largely at the national and supranational level (through trade agreements and price control policies, including subsidies, for example), in the past 30 years, the city has re-emerged as a distinct level of governance for the food system. Moragues-Faus and Sonnino (2019) describe the rise of food policy councils since the establishment of the first council in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1982. The experience of this growing number of cities has led to the emergence of city-to-city exchanges and city-to-city learning, and is now also available as a rich resource for the empirical analysis of urban food governance (Baker and de Zeeuw, 2015). Food planning in this context is looked at as a specific subject of local and metropolitan governance. The intersections with the urban planning literature are many. Food planning has been analysed as a form of multilevel governance, calling for horizontal and vertical policy integration (Ilieva, 2016). It has been analysed as spaces of hybrid governance and social innovation (Manganelli and Moulaert, 2019), as a new form of regional metropolitan governance, etc. (Wascher et al., 2015). While these new policy arrangements have been celebrated by many, they have also been questioned as symptomatic of a techno-managerial and post-political form of climate governance (Kenis and Lievens, 2014; Swyngedouw, 2010).

The city as a multiscalar territorial entity: reterritorialisation and the rural-urban continuum

The relative neglect of food in the history of urban planning until the mid-1980s is partly explained through the historical physical and mental separation of town and country. Food has been treated as a question of agriculture and constructed as belonging to non-urban territories (Sonnino, 2009; Cabannes and Marocchino, 2018). Many voices have pointed to the region as the preferred geographical entity to rebuild urban-rural linkages (Kneafsey, 2010; Cohen, 2010; Forster and Getz Escudero, 2014; Wiskerke, 2009, 2015). Research has shown great differences in the structure and make-up of the geographical area upon which cities rely (Zasada et al., 2019). However, the concept of urban agriculture has reconnected actors on both sides of the urban-rural divide (Viljoen, 2005) and has actively explored opportunities to integrate food production within the urban context. Designers and planners reimagined the possibilities of reconnecting open spaces along the urban transect (Duany, 2012) into Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (Viljoen, 2005; Bohn and Viljoen 2010) and discovered the specific opportunities presented by the peri-urban interface (Sieverts, 2003; Parham, 2019).

The city as a contested terrain: urban food movements and the struggle for food justice

While urban food movements across the globe have typically organised around questions of urban hunger and food insecurity, a more organised response to the corporate food regime has united many of these movements around a food justice perspective, striving for equal access to food in cities (Wekerle, 2004; Alkon and Agyeman, 2011). These movements have typically tied into community garden initiatives or community supported agriculture; they have also challenged the enclosure of resources and reclaimed public land as a collective food growing resource (Lyons et al., 2013; Tornaghi, 2012; Certomà and Tornaghi, 2015; Tornaghi and Certomà, 2019). While the food justice movement is typically rooted in race-, gender- and class-based struggles for equality, in their rights-based orientation they are potentially aligned with the more globally oriented and agrarian-based food sovereignty movement. Many urban movements, however, encounter the limits of a neoliberal context (Clendenning et al., 2016). Urban food planning, in general, remains...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface from the Chair of AESOP Sustainable Food Planning Group
• Introduction: Embracing political agroecology, transforming sustainable food planning
• 1 Food as an urban question, and the foundations of a reproductive, agroecological urbanism
• 2 Sharing the harvest: Transformative artful and activist methodologies for urban agroecology
• 3 Commons and commoning for a just agroecological transition: The importance of de-colonising and de-commodifying our food systems
• 4 Urban agrarian alliance building in peri-urban Rome: The pivotal role of land access in food system reconfiguration
• 5 Urban agroforestry as a strategy for aligning agroecology with resilience planning initiatives
• 6 Soils, industrialised cities and contaminants: Challenges for an agroecological urbanism
• 7 The potential of bio-intensive market gardening models for a transformative urban agriculture: Adapting SPIN Farming to Brussels
• 8 The transformative potential of agroecological farmers: An analysis of participatory food system strategies in Nicaragua and England
• 9 Conjugating social and solidarity economies in Chiapas, Mexico: Redesigning food systems for economic, social, and ecological virtuous circles
• 10 Peasant counter-hegemony towards post-capitalist food sovereignty: Facing rural and urban precarity
• Conclusions: The programmatic dimension of an agroecological urbanism
• Index