Abstract
Food is the essential foundation for sustainable and healthy communities. Increasing population and urbanization, limited resources, and complexities of interactions necessitate a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the dynamics of the global trend of urbanization. The key objective of this paper is to characterize new environmental, social and economic perspectives and practices that are responsive to the rapidly urbanizing agricultural food system. We used the sustainability paradigm in the context of environmental, social, and economic sustainability to outline the three transitioning states and perspectives (unconnected/silos; interconnected/linkages; and interdependent/nested/systems) for urban agricultural food systems. We sought to ferret out the key driver/response variables and their cross-scale interactions in the urbanizing food-energy-water nexus. We used a five-step qualitative analytical method to develop a cursory conceptual model to capture the interacting variables and their responses. The complexity in the driver/response variables and their cross-scale interactions were identified. These variables were combined with outside dimensions (e.g., innovation, stakeholders, urbanization) for selected scenarios and deconstructed using spider web and causal loop models. The urbanizing socio-ecological systems, across various spatial (local to global) and temporal scales (days to millennium) as well as smaller temporal scales (days to decades) are described. The iterative multidimensionality of the model makes clear new ways of seeing sustainability issues and opens opportunities for policy solutions, resources and stakeholders to be brought to bear on the food-energy-water nexus.
Highlights
The worldwide trend of urbanization, characterized and shaped by socioeconomic behaviors is rapidly evolving and transitioning the urban space that is predicted to encompass 66% of the global population by 2050 compared to the present 54% (UNDESA, 2012; Dupont Advisory Committee, 2016; Richards et al, 2016)
Urban agriculture is an evolving and complex activity “located within and/or on the fringe of a city or metropolitan region, which grows, raises, processes and distributes a diversity of food and non-food products,using largely human and material resources, products and services found in and around that urban area, and in turn supplying human and material resources, products and services largely to that urban area” (Mougeot, 2005, 2006; Dubbeling, 2013). These interactions are governed by multiscale/multilevel driver/response variables: dynamic, interactive, and spatial, temporal, jurisdictional, institutional, management, stakeholder network and knowledge (Grimm et al, 2000; Mougeot, 2005; Cash et al, 2006; Dubbeling and Merzthal, 2006; Golden, 2013; Koopmans et al, 2017)
This paper presents a conceptualization of the urban food and nutrition system based on the theory and practices of food as the foundation for healthy and sustainable communities (Gragg et al, 2017)
Summary
The worldwide trend of urbanization, characterized and shaped by socioeconomic behaviors is rapidly evolving and transitioning the urban space that is predicted to encompass 66% of the global population by 2050 compared to the present 54% (UNDESA, 2012; Dupont Advisory Committee, 2016; Richards et al, 2016). An increasing number of countries are reaching alarming levels of water scarcity creating social, economic and environmental opportunities to increase water use efficiency, quantity, quality, availability as well as adaptive characteristics (Reardon et al, 2016; Richards et al, 2016). Another emerging challenge with urbanization is the rising energy prices and the use of agricultural feedstock for biofuels, causing additional scarcity on markets for food and feed (Conforti, 2009)
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