Urban food policies for a sustainable and just future: Concepts and tools for a renewed agenda

Abstract

In the context of pressing socio-ecological challenges, from poverty and pandemics to climate change, urban food policies are expanding across the globe. The special issue on "Urban food policies for a sustainable and just future" aims to reflect on a decade of work and identify key concepts to deepen and broaden a transformative urban food agenda. This editorial provides an overview of the twelve papers that make up this collection, demonstrating some of the breadth of approaches used to study this phenomenon in different regions of the world, informed by different epistemic traditions and exemplified by diverse case studies such as urban agriculture, street vending, public procurement, spatial planning, city networks or deep explorations of specific urban policy-making processes. Building on this work and the broader literature, in this paper we identify three core turns in the urban food governance scholarship: a shift towards systemic engagement with the food system; increased engagement with scalar complexity; and a growing focus on relational aspects of urban food governance and policy-making dynamics. However, our analysis also points out three key aspects that require further focus for the field to be transformative: a stronger conceptualisation of the urban; a clearer definition and articulation of the nature of governance and policy; and a more engaged focus on issues of power and inequities. To address these gaps, we propose a set of tools in the form of definitions and frameworks to support the unfolding of an urgently needed more just and transformative urban food agenda.