Giacomo Pettenati

Urban food planning in Italian cities: a comparative analysis of the cases of Milan and Turin

ABSTRACT This contribution explores the issue of urban food planning in the Italian context in a comparative perspective, basing on the case studies of Turin and Milan, the two main cities of Northern Italy, currently engaged in processes of urban food policies development. The first part of the article outlines the general structure of these tools and describes their role of new political spaces for a public debate about food policies. The second section comparatively analyses the two case studies stressing their differences and similarities. Finally, the conclusion of the article focuses on the importance of identifying the right scales for analyzing and planning food systems.

Urban Agriculture in Urban Food Policies: Debate and Practices

Urban food strategies aim at planning and developing more sustainable, just and resilient urban and city-region food systems, both with the implementation of institutionally driven strategic plans and with the engagement of food activists and actors of the food system. Urban productive landscape is often a key field of action of such policies, that often support and foster short food supply chains and environmentally and socially sustainable urban agriculture. This contribution explores the role of landscape and urban agriculture in the debate about urban food planning and in the practice of a number of existing urban food strategies, mostly in European and Northern American cities. The core idea is that productive landscape can represent at the same time a field for actions aiming at developing a more sustainable urban food system and a useful conceptual framework for the involvement of the actors of the food system in its co-production and co-management.

Determinants of Farmers’ Participation in AFNs

In this chapter Corsi, Novelli, and Pettenati analyse the reasons that lead farmers to adopt direct selling or more generally AFNs, distinguishing between on-farm and off-farm direct sales. The issue is discussed first from a theoretical perspective. Next, empirical evidence is presented, using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Using census data, the determinants of the choice to sell directly on-farm and off-farm are analysed on the basis of farm structural characteristics, farmers’ personal characteristics, and geographical explanatory variables. Then the results of an in-depth qualitative analysis of individual motivations carried out with a focus group of local producers are presented. The results highlight the technical constraints to the adoption of the direct chains as well as the subjective motivations, both monetary and non-monetary.

Reterritorialization, Proximity, and Urban Food Planning: Research Perspectives on AFNs

From a geographical perspective, AFNs produce and sustain new relationships between places, like rural and urban areas, that are reconnected by relationships between producers and consumers. Dansero and Pettenati explore Piedmont’s AFNs from three perspectives. First, they analyze the spatial distribution of AFNs in the region, finding that they are mostly urban in nature. Second, they interpret them as potential practices of reterritorialization of food systems, opposing the general deterritorialization affecting such systems at all scales. Understanding this reterritorialization means moving beyond the idea of a simple relocalization of food networks, exploring the many dimensions of the connections between food, people, and places. Third, they use proximity as a theoretical lens for analyzing AFNs, focusing on its spatial, relational, and cognitive dimensions.

Sustainable food planning: evolving theory and practice, edited by André Viljoen and Johannes S.C. Wiskerke, Wageningen, Wageningen Academic Publishers, 2012, 600 pp., € 98 ex VAT (hardback), ISBN 978-90-8686-187-3

developing new food systems. They also discuss about the meaning of food systems, the transformative capacity of organic food and the environmental impact of the food systems. In the sixth chapter, Enticott explores the evolution of the concept of biosecurity governance and its relationship with the agricultural bioeconomy (the free and safe global circulation of products and practices) presenting a comparative analysis of bovine Tuberculosis in the UK and New Zealand. Animal welfare in European regulations and the complexity of the initiatives to improve it (such as the difficulties in implementing common policies and the experimentation of new instruments) are the objectives of the seventh chapter written by Miele and Lever. In the eighth chapter, Franklin and Morgan explore the relationship between rural and urban space and the role of local food initiatives in building a new rural-urban interface, in particular in terms of land access and farmer entrepreneurship. Sonnino and Spade in the ninth chapter remark the role of the cities as agents of change in the food system to a new sustainable paradigm. Through a comparative analysis of the literature on the two main elements of urban fond governance (Food Policy Councils and Urban Food Strategies), they identify some key innovation in the food policy agenda in terms of environmental, economic and social sustainability. In the final chapter, Marsden summarizes the main topics about the construction of the new food paradigm. Far from being a hard template to pursue, this book provides a useful framework to ‘opening up the intellectual policy and practice space to think critically through new sets of sustainability conditions’ (14) of the food system. Above all, because ‘agri-food and agri-food relations will continue to become a major fulcrum for enacting the sustainable transformation needed in a different national, local and regional settings’ (219).

Introduction to special book review issue: giving food its space. Reflections about food planning and urban food systems

Talking about food systems, mostly means talking about cities. The industrial and postindustrial city became the place of consumption, where the other stages of the food chain almost disappeared. Most urban dwellers ignore where their food comes from, how it is produced and where their food waste will go and will be processed. Until about 20 years ago, the food system had a very low visibility among urban policy makers and residents (Pothukuchi and Kaufman 2000); however, it has always been a key factor in the city metabolic flows. Correspondingly, food for a long time almost disappeared from the debate and research over urban planning, relegated to rural studies and regional planning. Today, though, food is again a key element of the material and symbolic urban landscape of the contemporary city. The new role of food in the postmodern city can be read starting from three dimensions, strictly intertwined: (1) practices, (2) policies, and (3) representations. Food became again the object of several practices (e.g. urban gardening, farmers’ markets, community based initiatives, etc.) partly as explicit reaction to the negative externalities of the conventional dominant food system (e.g. health diseases, distrust of food, spatial and social injustice, etc.) (Holt-Gimenez and Shattuck 2011) partly as new trend of the metropolitan creative class. Moving from the grassroots practices, several cities in the Global North elaborated urban food strategies, aiming to address the urban food system toward more sustainability, justice, and resilience (Morgan 2013). Both practices and policies emerge in a context where food is a crucial part of urban representations. Cities use food as a tool for positioning in the international urban competition, attracting tourists and investments and building new images and identities. Similarly, food plays a key role in defining individual identities, working as an indicator of social and cultural status and of political engagement. Moving from this context-setting framework, we chose for this reviews collection five recent books focusing on theories, practices, and policies aiming at new food geography, based on the reterritorialization of the food system. The first two offer an overview on this complex issue, collecting contributions from scholars, policymakers, and practitioners, while the following three investigate more deeply specific topics, such as food governance, food democracy, and urban agriculture.