Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

allied to strong notions of autonomy in local food systems. In the ground-breakingInternational Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology forDevelopment, food sovereignty is defined as ‘the right of peoples and sovereign statesto democratically determine their own agricultural and food policies’ (McIntyre, et al.,2009, p. 111). More than simply about access, food sovereignty seeks to maketransparent the power relationships inherent in agricultural and food systems as aprecursor to changing these into more equitable systems.As more of the world’s population lives in cities, so questions of food security and foodsovereignty increasingly take on an urban dimension. While much debate is concernedwith how to produce enough food for a growing urban population and how to securelines of supply from rural places of production to urban places of consumption, greaterattention is now also being paid to the systems of production, processing anddistribution of food within urban areas. Recent recognition of the extent of food wastage(Institution of Mechanical Engineers, 2013) illustrates that food security should not belimited, conceptually or practically, to the nature and volume of production but extendedto matters of distribution, access and control.The production of food within urban areas is an important component of urbanagriculture, along with systems of food processing, distribution and sale. Themanagement of waste from these processes is another important element in this broadconception of urban agriculture. There is scope, therefore, for urban agriculture tomake an important contribution to strengthening urban food security. This can in turnhelp build urban resilience and promote more sustainable forms of urban life.Urban resilience has entered the lexicon of urban studies and indeed urban policy inrecent years and typically takes a broad view of the capacity of cities of respond to orrecover from external threats and shocks. Pickett et al.(2004) propose the metaphor of‘resilient cities’ as a means of linking the disciplines of ecology and planning into amore productive relationship to better understand some of the major problemsconfronting contemporary cities and indeed to propose effective solutions to them.They propose also that the ‘old paradigm’ of ecology based on an equilibrium model isreplaced by a non-equilibrium paradigm which connects structure and function in sucha way that resilience becomes the ability of a system to adjust in the face of changingconditions rather than simply returning to its previous equilibrium condition after adisturbance. In the context of urban resilience or the resilience of cities this ‘newparadigm’ is especially valuable as the uncritical pursuit of a past condition isunavoidably retrograde and almost certainly doomed to failure.In contrast, University College London’s Centre for Urban Sustainability and Resilienceadopts an engineering focussed view of resilience and describes it as:a newer concept [than sustainability] dealing with the issue of how to mitigate theeffects of environmental disasters and terrorism, incorporating seismic andvolcanic hazard, flood risk, the spread and control of disease, security andsituational awareness (UCL CUSR website: why urban sustainability andresilience?).One of the key questions posed at the outset of this review concerns the capacity ofurban agriculture to play a more prominent role in enhancing food security and henceUrban food security, urban resilience and climate change 58