Catherine Brinkley

Evaluating the Benefits of Peri-Urban Agriculture

By uniting literature from farmland preservation, growth management, food systems, economics, bioengineering, and environmental studies, this article provides an overview and valuation of the services that farms provide for urban areas. This article first analyzes the mission statements of 130 nationally accredited land trusts to ascertain the criteria used in preserving farmland. Land trusts present uniform preference for parcels that provide ecosystem services, wildlife habitat, viewsheds, local heritage, and agricultural productivity. The list of benefits provided by land trusts was compared to a literature review drawing from farmland amenity, agritourism, farmland preservation, and ecosystems studies to reveal the range of market values for the various benefits of farmland. The market value of farmland services varies from −

Avenues into Food Planning: A Review of Scholarly Food System Research.

37,541 to 124,000 per acre depending on the method of analysis and location of the farm. This research has strong implications for land-use planning, economic opportunities, and ecosystems infrastructure in peri-urban areas.

From Farm to Nuisance Animal Agriculture and the Rise of Planning Regulation

This review summarizes several avenues of planning inquiry into food systems research, revealing gaps in the literature, allied fields of study and mismatches between scholarly disciplines and the food system life cycle. Planners and scholars in associated fields have identified and defined problems in the food system as ‘wicked’ problems, complex environmental issues that require systemic solutions at the community scale. While food justice scholars have contextualized problem areas, planning scholars have made a broad case for planning involvement in solving these wicked problems while ensuring that the functional and beneficial parts of the food system continue to thrive. This review maps the entry points of scholarly interest in food systems and plannings contributions to its study, charting a research agenda for the future.

It Takes a Community to Raise the Prevalence of a Zoonotic Pathogen

Municipal ordinances to remove farm animals from city limits played a central part in defining city planning’s role in urban ecosystems, economies, and public health. This article examines the regulation of animal agriculture since the eighteenth century in four cities: Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Across the nineteenth century, municipal ordinances to remove farm animals from city limits set the tone for the planning profession, aligning it with the field of public health in creating a hygienic city. In the efforts to untangle animal agriculture from waste management, public space, and urban food supply, urban authorities employed some of the first land-use regulations in the United States, shaping new planning powers. Ordinances banning slaughterhouses, piggeries, and dairies culminated with zoning as planning became a profession. These regulations ultimately allowed planners to transform cities and their food environments by dismantling a system in which animals and their caretakers among the urban poor had played integral parts in food production, processing, and municipal waste management. Unpacking the objectives, debates, and impacts of these early regulations reveals enduring tensions and challenges as planners today seek to reweave animal agriculture into cities.

Decoupled: successful planning policies in countries that have reduced per capita greenhouse gas emissions with continued economic growth

By definition, zoonotic pathogens are not strict host-species specialists in that they infect humans and at least one nonhuman reservoir species. The majority of zoonotic pathogens infect and are amplified by multiple vertebrate species in nature, each of which has a quantitatively different impact on the distribution and abundance of the pathogen and thus on disease risk. Unfortunately, when new zoonotic pathogens emerge, the dominant response by public health scientists is to search for a few, or even the single, most important reservoirs and to ignore other species that might strongly influence transmission. This focus on the single “primary” reservoir host species can delay biological understanding, and potentially public health interventions as species important in either amplifying or regulating the pathogen are overlooked. Investigating the evolutionary and ecological strategy of newly discovered or emerging pathogens within the community of potential and actual host species will be fruitful to both biological understanding and public health.

Exploring the concept of agroecological food systems in a city-region context

This paper highlights planning interventions in countries that have implemented successful greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction policies while continuing to increase per capita GDP. Screening and reviewing all countries in the world, with this research I have identified nine countries that have steadily decoupled per capita carbon emissions from GDP. GHG emission profiles and pertinent policies from national case studies demonstrate the built environment sectors most responsive (waste, residential, land-use change, and forestry) and least responsive (transportation) to GHG reduction policies without import substitution. A comparison amongst case-study countries and theoretical models indicates the best opportunities for targeting GHG reductions.

Fringe Benefits: Adding Rugosity to the Urban Interface in Theory and Practice

ABSTRACT Based on urgent needs for food security compounded by a changing climate which impacts and is impacted by agricultural land-use and food distribution practices, we explore the processes of action in implementing agroecological food systems. We identified the following characteristics for an agroecological food system: 1. Minimizing use of external inputs, 2. Extent of internal resource recycling, 3. Resilience, 4. Multifunctionality, 5. Building on complexity and incorporating greater systems integration, 6. Contextuality, 7. Equity and, 8. Nourishment. We focus on the city-region food systems context, concluding with practical drivers for realizing more agroecological food systems in city-region contexts. Agroecological food systems are widely diverse, shaped by context, and achieved through multi-actor planning in rural, peri-urban and urban areas. Application of agroecological food systems in rural–urban contexts emphasize the necessity of diversification, zoning rural–urban landscapes, planning for seasonality in a food systems context, and producing at scale. Rural–urban food systems are a relevant and challenging entry point that provides opportunities for learning how food systems can be shaped for significant positive change. Social organization, community building, common learning, and knowledge creation are crucial for agroecological contextualized food systems, as are the supports from appropriate governing and institutional structures.

The Ebb and Flow of Planning Specializations

By fusing land-use theory from urban and rural development, this work builds a new theory based on the urban perimeter as a functional interface important to the health of both urban and rural lands. This new theory has its antecedents in biophysical sciences where studies on structural complexity offer insight into metabolism, growth, and resilience. For example, the structural complexity of a coral reef’s surface is an important indicator of growth and resilience for the reef itself as well as the many organisms that depend upon it. This work concludes with a research and practice agenda allied with the field of ecology.

Tradition of healthy food access in low-income neighborhoods: Price and variety of curbside produce vending compared to conventional retailers.

To understand the creation and propagation of knowledge in planning, this research provides the first look at planning specialization development. In assessing planning’s educational response to internal expertise, federal mandates, and historic precedents, we queried the seventy-six accredited planning schools on the evolution of concentrations and certificates offered from 1950 to the present day. We identify pedagogical trends by following the arc of program creation and retirement, intersectionality, and prevalence. Drawing parallels from the most well-established subfields of social and physical planning, this paper offers recommendations for formalizing new knowledge, such as food systems planning. We conclude with the observation that continued innovation and diversity of specializations is a key to planning’s resilience at the nexus of an ever-evolving constellation of fields.