‘How to Feed a City'

1. Background: don't cities feed themselves already?

In 2008 we passed a threshold; for the first time in history more than half of the World's population was living in cities. In the UK the proportion is now four-fifths; almost 50 million people. Urbanisation creates distance between us and the land from which we derive the basics of life: food, water, fuel and shelter. But while the majority of us have little day to day contact with the places our natural resources come from, we are as dependent on them as we have always been. In the case of food, no matter who we are or where we live, we still need land, water, soils, and energy in order to be able to eat.
We can be sure that in the future we will pass a series of new thresholds. The demands of our cities for food will start to exceed the capacity of the systems and resources on which they currently rely. Climate change, dwindling fossil fuel supplies, water shortages, and unstable international trade are all increasingly potent realities. The problem is that we don't make plans to feed our cities as if this were the case. We tend to look no further than our immediate buying power, which until now has worked, to a degree. This project, ‘How to Feed a City', is about getting people to start planning ahead. It is about being strategic about the need to feed our predominantly urban population in an uncertain world with finite resources.

2. Our aims

• The technical aims of this project are to establish basic ground rules for examining the reliability of food systems, and to present a vision for a resilient food system. Both will be based on an analysis of how much food cities need and what resources are required to produce it.
• We aim to make our findings influential by using them to stimulate and frame discussions with experts, and national and local government. We will also create opportunities to use our findings to capture the public imagination, in order to generate political expectations and to encourage individual action.

• As a follow-on from this work we intend to initiate the development of a set of technical principles and tools that will help cities, along with other communities and institutions, to plan their own food systems.

3. The Work

The project will involve two areas of work:

3.1 Report

We will develop and present two things:

• A well-substantiated set of principles for assessing the resilience of different food systems. This will take the form of a ‘resilience test', based on: (1) Resource Parameters; the absolute limits on energy, water and space, and (2) Risk Factors; for example, exposure to trade instability, or biological systems breakdown.

• A vision for how to feed a city. This will cover diet, agricultural systems, and sourcing (where the food will come from). Our vision will be compared to the current system by: (1) Quantifying each system's ‘FoodPrint'; i.e. under each scenario how much and what types of food does the city consume, and how much land and how much energy does producing that food involve? And (2) Measuring each scenario against the Resource Parameters and Risk Factors set in the ‘Resilience Test'.

3.2 Communication

We will communicate our findings in different ways, depending on audience:

• To capture policy audiences we will (1) arrange a specialist policy seminar, (2) contact and send our report to local authorities, non-governmental organisations, key decision makers and opinion formers, (3) conduct presentations at other people's events, and (4) use our work in responses to policy consultations.

• To reach a wider public audience we will: (1) issue press releases, (2) use media contacts to promote our findings and material, and (3) create and promote web resources.

4. What is different about our approach?

A lot of people and institutions, including government, are beginning to wake up to the need to think ahead about food supply. However, our team will bring together a particular set of skills and use an approach that tackles the issue in three distinct ways:

• We will frame our question around the feeding of a city; a scale of settlement which most people can visualise, and the one most of us live in.
• We will base our approach on the assumption that our food systems are bounded. We will quantify the food we need to feed a city, and constrain our plans to meet this with calculations and analyses of resource limits.

• Our vision will be independent and pragmatic. Operating outside any of the main institutions and existing organisations we are not bound, for example, to localisation or globalisation; organic or conventional agriculture.

5. Partners

The project has a steering group with the following partners on-board:

• LandShare: Colin Tudge, Ruth West and Tom Curtis
• Growing Communities: Julie Brown
• Best Foot Foward
• Transition Towns: Rob Hopkins
• The Land and Chapter 7: Simon Fairlie.