Assessing the resilience capacities of Urban Food Systems: A multi-dimensional framework to enhance urban governance

Abstract

Food system aspects ranging from food security, infrastructure robustness, and policy to degree of equitability, sustainability, and resilience have, until recently, been mainly addressed at the national scale, and conveyed as rural issues. Contrarily, the Covid-19 pandemic, geopolitical conflicts, and increase in the frequency and intensity of climate-related disasters, combined with rampant urbanization and population growth, have bolstered the recognition of the importance of Urban Food Systems (UFSs), and the need to strengthen their desirable resilience capacities. In turn, numerous urban food strategies have emerged throughout the Global North and South, from Rotterdam’s Strategic Food Plan and Leeds’s Food Strategy, to Nairobi’s City County Food System Strategy, Lusaka’s Food for the Cities project, and the international Milan Urban Food Policy Pact (MUFPP) which has 260 signatory cities. However, a holistic UFS resilience assessment framework which supports the comprehensive evaluation of UFS’s production, processing, distribution/access, consumption, and waste/valorization components, is required to track progress, accurately allocate funding, and support strategic planning. Accordingly, this research, driven by a complex adaptive systems approach to resilience, employed transdisciplinary methods to produce a multi-dimensional UFS resilience assessment framework that includes 78 indicators, divided into 5 categories, including: Material and Environmental Resources, Society and Wellbeing, Economy, Built Environment and Infrastructure, and Governance and Institutions. Moreover, to illustrate how the proposed indicators contribute to UFS resilience, their correlation with 16 resilience criteria, including elements such as robustness, diversity, independence, coordination capacity, and equity, was analyzed, and illustrated in 5 matrices, corresponding to the framework categories. Subsequently, the proposed UFS resilience assessment framework enables governing bodies to not only assess the system’s ability to plan for, absorb and adapt to disturbances, and ‘bounce forward’, but due to the UFS being a manifestation of the interactions between political, social, economic, ecological, and technical domains, such also provides insight into the strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities of a broad range of urban subsystems.