The governance of a smart city food system: The 2015 Milan World Expo

Abstract

Abstract Studying the governance of a smart city food system, this paper offers a critical synthesis of the literature on the governance of smart cities and goes on to use the insights it offers as a basis to examine the claim made about the food system emerging from the 2015 World Expo in Milan. In particular, the claim made about the infrastructure developments underlying this urban and regional innovation as doing nothing less than building a smart city food system from the ground up. In going some way to qualify this claim, the paper suggests that while such a statement does reflect much of what is currently understood about the infrastructure developments underlying this urban and regional innovation, the claim made about the World Expo building a smart city food system from the ground up, offers more of an insight into the state-of-the-art on the governance of smart cities than it does into the critical nature of the food system surfacing from the Expo in Milan. The paper suggests the reason for the partial synthesis of smart cities as food systems, rest with the claims made about the Expo in Milan failing to recognise the: (1) need for the governance of smart cities not to be in strictly technical, but wider social, cultural and environmental terms; (2) requirement for the infrastructure developments underpinning this urban and regional innovation to also support the sustainable growth of food systems; (3) pressure there is to re-direct the participatory governance agenda of smart cities towards urban policies whose management of natural resources is wise in meeting the human expectation of and social need for food and requirement there is for the municipal strategies and capacity-building exercises underpinning food systems, to be systematic in cultivating an environment able to support the inclusive growth of them across regions; (4) call for the resilience of any such sustainable and inclusive growth to constitute a material condition of the infrastructure developments underlying this urban and regional innovation and surfacing as a smart food system in the City of Milan.