Abstract
This paper offers a critical assessment of the value and utility of the evolving City Region Food Systems (CRFS) approach to improve our insights into flows of resources—food, waste, people, and knowledge—from rural to peri-urban to urban and back again, and the policies and process needed to enable sustainability. This paper reflects on (1) CRFS merits compared to other approaches; (2) the operational potential of applying the CRFS approach to existing projects through case analysis; (3) how to make the CRFS approach more robust and ways to further operationalize the approach; and (4) the potential for the CRFS approach to address complex challenges including integrated governance, territorial development, metabolic flows, and climate change. The paper begins with the rationale for CRFS as both a conceptual framework and an integrative operational approach, as it helps to build increasingly coherent transformational food systems. CRFS is differentiated from existing approaches to understand the context and gaps in theory and practice. We then explore the strength of CRFS through the conceptual building blocks of ‘food systems’ and ‘city-regions’ as appropriate, or not, to address pressing complex challenges. As both a multi-stakeholder, sustainability-building approach and process, CRFS provides a collective voice for food actors across scales and could provide coherence across jurisdictions, policies, and scales, including the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Habitat III New Urban Agenda, and the Conference of the Parties (COP) 21. CRFS responds directly to calls in the literature to provide a conceptual and practical framing for policy through wide engagement across sectors that enables the co-construction of a relevant policy frame that can be enacted through sufficiently integrated policies and programs that achieve increasingly sustainable food systems.
Highlights
A radical change is needed to address the problems identified by FAO Director General da Silva in the fall of 2017 at the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact (MUFPP) meeting
While recent papers and other literature have addressed the potential and provide examples of cities working on City Region Food Systems (CRFS) [1,2,3,4,5], this paper builds on existing findings to reflect on (1) CRFS approach merits when compared to other approaches; (2) the operational potential of applying the CRFS approach to existing as well as on-going research projects; (3) the identification of gaps that need to be addressed to make the CRFS approach more robust and to further operationalize the approach [6]; and (4) the potential for the CRFS approach to address complex challenges including integrated governance, territorial development, climate change, and migration
The CRFS approach offers an integrative method with which to consider and develop policies and programs across scales including urban, peri-urban, and rural, as well as providing more integration for regional and national governance considerations. As both a multi-stakeholder, sustainability-building approach and process, CRFS provides a collective voice for food actors across scales and has the potential to provide coherence across jurisdictions and policies from local to national and international levels including the MUFPP, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the New Urban Agenda (NUA), and the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (COP21)
Summary
To set the context for these insights, CRFS is differentiated from existing approaches including alternative food networks, short food supply chains, urban-rural linkages, sustainable food systems, foodsheds, bioregions, territorial development, and integrated policy frameworks. Building from this understanding about the context and gaps in theory and practice, we explore the strengths and weaknesses of CRFS through the conceptual building blocks of ‘food systems’ and ‘city-regions’, and the capacity to address pressing complex challenges such as climate change, water availability, and poverty. As demonstrated through the analysis of case examples, CRFS responds directly to calls in the literature to provide a conceptual and practical framing through broad-based engagement across sectors that enables the co-construction of relevant integrated policy frames to achieve increasingly sustainable food systems [7]
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