Perspectives Fracture Lines: On Urban Metabolism, Ethics, and Feeding the Cities of the Future By James Dickson-Hoyle
Doc Searls on Flickr Haze over Downtown Los Angeles.
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he city has increasingly been recognised as having significant importance for climate mitigation. Over 54% of the world’s population are now living in cities, and greater that 60% are expected to live in urban centres by 2050, with most of this growth coming in low and middleincome countries.1 The particular challenges posed by cities, and the opportunities they hold, will be central to attempts to overcome the current societal addictions driving climate change and ecological degradation. One of the central challenges for future cities will be ethically and sustainably feeding the estimated 6.25 billion urban residents in 2050. Current industrial food systems, driven by a productionist paradigm, will need radical transformations. The focus on yield and economic
profitability, at the expense or exclusion of ecological and social impacts, is at odds with growing recognition of the necessity of building sustainable and resilient cities. Additionally, the long and complex supply chains underpinning food production make decision-making and ethical consumption decisions increasingly difficult for urban residents.2 This paper, utilising a socio-ecological systems analysis and drawing on the Urban Metabolism (UM) literature, will argue that to build urban resilience, a transformation of current food systems is necessary. Solutions to the current challenges will require systems thinking that crosses the urban/rural divide, and a move towards more inclusive, transparent, and shorter supply chains to enable cities to meet the challenges of the coming decades. This paper
will also propose that future urban resilience research must expand to include a normative dimension to tackle the ethical and environmental justice concerns particular to current food systems, and to prevent new approaches reinforcing the structural inequalities driving many of the social and ecological challenges being faced by the world’s cities.
Urban Resilience Concepts and Definitions
Since the Brundtland Report in 1987,3 sustainability and sustainable development have been catch-all concepts in the public policy literature surrounding climate change.4 More recently, Resilience Theory and the concept of ‘urban resilience’ have experienced an upsurge in governance and planning frameworks around the www.thesolutionsjournal.com | Fall 2019 | Solutions | 11