Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

that we should just burn everything you know, and just keep going I just thinkthat, if we build more resilient localised systems, more diverse systems, the morediverse, the more local, the more resilient, the better. If I have a garden here andit gets wiped out by climate change, my hope is that, there are five or ten gardensin other urban areas that will miss that and they can plant another crop orwhatever. I mean sure it is nice to eat the food that we want to eat, but if it comesdown to a food scarcity situation we are going to eat what we are given [microfarmer,Gold Coast].Similarly, a backyard gardener from Melbourne expressed his vision of an expandingnetwork of climate-adapted and resilient food forests through urban backyards, andoutwards into suburban parks:What I’ve realised is that the next step beyond an individual’s isolated food forestis to have many of these linked up. To have a sense of community where peopleshare their produce. They all grow different produce, and share it betweenthemselves. That evens out any sort of fluctuations in species, weather, climateconditions and everything else. It creates a more resilient production system.[Backyard gardener and permaculturalist, Melbourne]6 Urban agriculture and urban resilienceIndividual understanding of resilience in the urban context was summed up by‘adaptability’, ‘flexibility’, ‘preparedness’, ‘confidence’, and ‘increased skills’. Communitygroups spoke of ‘social resilience’ and ‘connectedness’, expressed through ‘sharingand doing’, ‘networking’, ‘re-skilling’ and ‘enhancing capabilities’.When you create space for people to come together, amazing things canhappen…Council could encourage neighbours to steward a street… This has realpotential [Not affiliated, Melbourne].A local government officer expanded:Resilience for me is the ability to decentralise systems – I see resilience as anevolution in action, creating opportunities for people to be actively engaging in apractice, growing food say, in a very localised sense that allows them to evolvethe most appropriate systems for their particular needs, and their particular time.And I think it’s something that needs to be inspired, because people will naturallydo it. I see that as resiliency around food – people growing their own food locally,in their own neighbourhood, are like little life-rafts, little support networks, that areforming around growing and producing food; but more importantly, getting out oftheir houses, and co-living, sharing the burdens of life in a city, and life in general,in a neighbourhood. This is something that I know existed before - it hasn’texisted in my lifetime, or at least in my experience, but it’s something that I seeas true resilience. When times become difficult, people, rather than go internally,come out [local government employee, Melbourne].Researchers tended to understand resilience from the perspective of social-ecologicalsystems thinking. Brian Lake, research scientist and chair of the Resilience Alliance,defines resilience in terms of ‘the capacity of a system to undergo change and stillUrban food security, urban resilience and climate change 131