Urban Agriculture Oriented Community Planning and Spatial Modeling in Chinese Cities

There are three main contradictions associated with urbanization: population growth and food demand, urban sprawl and production space, and production patterns and energy consumption. The pressure of urbanization has led to a mismatch between production and consumption in space and pattern. The current status and trends in urban food system planning illustrated that sustainable consumption and production were closely related to their spatial layout. The paper took a simulated sustainable food system in urban community as an example. It formulated a rational spatial planning strategy based on urban agriculture of different scales, technologies, and efficiencies, quantified productive community metrics to accommodate different scales of urban space, and wrote algorithms to develop a spatial model of a meta-cellular automaton that coupled consumer housing with productive surfaces. Finally, by comparing and optimizing the spatial patterns of multiple solutions, urban agriculture-oriented urban community planning was developed. The model was only a preliminary attempt at food system planning, but it explored the distribution patterns of housing and agriculture within a given territory in three steps: theoretical strategy-morphological simulation-planning design while meeting urban and productivity indicators. It demonstrated the feasibility of productive spaces and explored a planning strategy for urban communities that supports sustainable consumption and production.

Collaboration and diverse stakeholder participation in food system planning: a case study from Central New York

The Onondaga County Agriculture Council was created in 2012 to promote and support the county's farms, improve the connections between the county's urban core of Syracuse and the surrounding agricultural areas, and to develop policy to support agricultural production and food system development. In short, the purpose of the Council is to strengthen the Onondaga County food system. This goal, however, is ambiguous and Council members recognized a limited understanding of the current structure and function of the Central New York (CNY) food system. As such, the Council provided support for FoodPlanCNY, a project designed to identify food system assets and opportunities to strengthen the economic opportunities, public health outcomes and environmental sustainability of the CNY food system. This paper reports preliminary findings from this initial effort to engage participatory food system planning in CNY.

Planning for food sovereignty in Canada? A comparative case study of two rural communities

In Canada, most local-governance level food system planning research has been conducted in larger, often urban communities. However, producers in small rural communities conduct the majority of Canada’s agricultural activities. Using case-study research, this paper documents how the rural communities of Saint-Camille (Québec) and Salt Spring Island (British Columbia) engage in food system planning. By investigating the background, key achievements, barriers and good practices, the case studies inform a comparative analysis of governance planning processes and community led project development. The results suggest an overlap between the community food system planning and the food sovereignty frameworks, a space discerned as food sovereignty planning.