Sustainable Places Research Institute

AESOP (Cardiff) 3rd Sustainable Food Planning Thematic Group Meeting, 28th-29th
October 2011

Fashioning a sustainable food system is one of the most compelling challenges of the 21st century. Because of its multi-functional character, food is an ideal medium through which to design sustainable places, be they urban , rural or peri-urban places. For all these reasons, food planning is now bringing people together from a diverse range of backgrounds, including planners, policy-makers, politicians, designers, health professionals, environmentalists, farmers, food businesses, and civil society activists among many others.

Given the global spectre of climate change and resource depletion, a burgeoning world population and the co-existence of obesity and chronic hunger, the 3rd AESOP Themative Group Meeting on Sustainable Food Planning aims to address one central question: are there new paradigms for urban and rural planning capable of supporting and developing sustainable and equitable food systems? This meeting will promote cross disciplinary discussions between active researchers and practitioners in response to this question, and related issues articulated during the first two Sustainable Food Planning Meetings held in 2009 in Almere and Brighton 2010.

Working at a range of scales and with a variety of practical and theoretical models, we will review and elaborate definitions of sustainable food systems, and begin to define ways of achieving them. To this end 4 different themes have been defined as entry-points into the discussion of ‘sustainable food planning’. These are (1) Urban Agriculture, (2) Urban-Rural Linkages, (3) Community Food Systems and (4) Urban Food Strategies.

Urban Agriculture (convenor Andre Viljoen)
Urban-Rural Linkages (convenors Terry Marsden and Arthur Getz)
Community Food Systems Food (convenors Roberta Sonnino and Alex Franklin)
Urban Food Strategies (convenors Kevin Morgan and Tom Andrews)

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