Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

In both the developed and developing world, urban planners have for many yearstreated agricultural activities as something at least to be regulated and in some casesto be positively discouraged in urban and even suburban areas. As Morgan (2009: p.344) notes:Paradoxically, urban planners in Africa have been part of the problem of foodinsecurity because, until recently, they saw it as their professional duty to rid thecity of urban agriculture. The rationale for ridding the city of urban farmers andstreet food vendors varied from country to country, but it was often animated by acombination of sound concerns about public health and less than sound notionsof urban modernity.We might note also that in many cities in the developed world, urban agriculture issometimes seen as incompatible with contemporary visions of the desirable city,although this is now changing in many contemporary debates about the nature ofsustainable, liveable and resilient cities in the face of global challenges such as peakoil and climate change.Morgan (2009: p. 341) suggests therefore that:...for the foreseeable future, food planning looks set to become an important andlegitimate part of the planning agenda in developed and developing countriesalike.However, as Howe (2003: p. 255) notes, ‘[scholarly] research has tended to bypass orperhaps even ignore food that is grown within urban areas and the land-use policyimplications of such activities.’ In his survey of metropolitan planning authorities in theUK, Howe found that almost half of the responding planners described their awarenessof issues of food production in urban areas to be low, while the ways in which theseissues were incorporated into land use plans focussed typically on the environmental,rather than the social or economic aspects, of urban agriculture. This suggests thewide range of activities that exist under the broad heading of urban agriculture tend tobe seen, by the planning system at least, as a somewhat marginal activity rather thansitting ‘...right at the heart of debates concerning the sustainable city and those relatedto urban containment versus expansionism’ (Howe, 2003: p. 257).Of course debates about the relationship between planning and food security are notnew. Peter Self’s influential book, Cities in Flood (1957) devoted a chapter to ‘foodversus homes’ and to a critique of British planning policy at that time which sought topreserve agricultural land seemingly at any cost, in the name of food security. While‘atomic war’ rather than climate change was the greatest existential threat of the time,he drew on recent war time experience to imagine that in times of emergency andthreatened starvation, ‘...every inch of garden would be tilled, playing fields would beploughed up, road verges would be cultivated. But under conditions in which fooddistribution - to put it mildly- might be interrupted, families would perhaps prefer to havea little fresh food on their doorstep than to rely on getting it from some ‘optimum’ placeof production ’ (Self, 1957:114115). He noted also the intimate connections betweenplanning and food, captured in post-war Labour government’s declaration that ‘tosafeguard agricultural land to the greatest possible extent is one of the Department’s(of Town and Country Planning) main objects and on taking office, the ConservativeGovernment still more emphatically gave the same aims as the principle reason forcontinuing planning controls’ (p. 107, emphasis added).In Queensland, the first State Planning Policy to be published in 2012 relates to the‘protection of Queensland’s Strategic Cropping Land’, although for the purposes of thisreview it is worth noting that this policy does not apply to any strategic cropping land inan urban area or within the urban footprint.Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change 95