The concept of a food shed in the distribution literature, “like its analogue the watershed, can serve as a conceptual and methodological unit of analysis that provides a frame for action” . Food shed analysis “provides a way to assess the capacity of regions to feed themselves” through proximate location of food production, distribution and consumption . Applying this concept, Peters et al. found that 34% of New York State’s total food needs could be met within an average distance of 49 miles. The food shed, embedded in the local food systems and short food supply chain concepts, is a useful organizing principle for city planners to consider when designing effective food distribution networks, such as the example highlighted in integrating a farm into a housing development project in the South under the title of a “civic agriculture community,” facilitating proximate, affordable distribution channels. This exemplifies planning with a food shed lens by specifying areas at the neighborhood scale for semi-commercial agriculture, neighborhood CSA, residential kitchen gardens, and residential development in order to build food access and ease of distribution into the neighborhood fabric. If urban farmers aren’t able to easily distribute their produce to consumers, either through sales or other forms of distribution, questions of improving food access are jeopardized as well, revealing the inter connectedness of the food systems framework from production to distribution to consumption. Planning for improved urban food distribution includes ideas such as food hubs, agri-hood developments,vertical farm system public storage and transportation options, food aggregating facilities or organizations, mobile food distribution, or state investment in public markets .
Mobile food distribution options are modeled and shown to increase access in Buffalo, NY, in Widener et al.’s theoretical analysis . Agri-hoods have gained increasing mention in local news outlets as a real estate trend in “Development Supported Agriculture , and as many as 200 currently exist or are under construction across the country” . They facilitate distribution by colocating food producers and consumers on strategically planned sites, providing shared infrastructure resources, and making land access affordable for farmers by cross-subsidizing with real estate development. Cooper’s report on food hubs in the south, a form of aggregating supply to enable expanded market access, highlights grassroots solutions developed by and for farmers of color, yet “major challenges [remain] associated with developing and maintaining food hubs within a racial equity framework” . Here again, the Google Alerts provide useful insights from gray literature and local news outlets into recent and effective strategies for city planners, be it food hubs, mobile food distribution options, online platforms for gleaning, second harvest, crop swaps, or distributing excess produce from backyard gardens. These are also areas that stand to benefit from additional scholarly research in terms of quantifying impact on consumption, food insecurity, and nutrition, expanding evaluations of urban food systems to include non-monetary and informal distribution mechanisms. Integrating the access and distribution literature from above, we identified three themes that speak to the efficacy of urban agriculture in meeting food access goals: economic viability, policy and planning models, and civic engagement.In this section, we consider the economics of urban agriculture and the “economic marginalization” that prevents many operations from meeting all the social and environmental benefits of urban agriculture within a for-profit or capitalist-oriented production scheme.
The urban food justice and food sovereignty movements in the U.S. are limited in practice in achieving their more radical or transformative goals due to the fact that they are operating within “a broader framework of [capitalist] market neoliberalism” . The challenge has not been growing enough food per se, but rather “producing and distributing food in ways accessible and affordable for the growing urban poor” while sustaining UA operations in a capitalist, production- and profit-oriented society. Daftary-Steel, Herrera and Porter declare that an urban farm cannot simultaneously provide jobs to vulnerable individuals, provide healthy food to low-income households and generate sustainable income and/or profits from sales. Therefore, what forms of urban agriculture are economically viable in today’s political economy? Operations that provide jobs, job training and professional development but sell mostly to high-end consumers , operations that are volunteer-driven or publicly funded and operations that cross-subsidize healthy food donations with revenues generated from other services besides food production or from crowd-sourced funding . When it comes to economic viability, many urban farming operations openly acknowledge that they are dependent on grants and donations to sustain their operations, which is a double edged sword. On the one hand, as long as an organization can prove itself worthy in receiving grants and donations, it may represent economic viability and long term sustainability. On the other, if the organization is wrapped up in a charismatic individual leader or fails to receive ongoing grant injections beyond one or two initial successes, it will not achieve long-term economic viability.Examples include redistributive business models, barter and exchange networks, food aggregators, food recovery organizations, cooperatives, food hubs, and “agrihoods” . Food hubs are reframed as both tools for provision of market access and self-determination for black farm cooperatives in the South in Cooper’s report with potential to subvert historic racism and economic marginalization of black farmers.
Key to this and other food policy reports in the gray literature is elevating voices and fostering dialogue led by communities of color.While food, and urban agriculture, used to be “strangers to the planning field” or “puzzling omissions” from American Planning Association resources prior to the early 2000s , there has been an increase in academic work in the past 10 years dealing with urban food systems planning. In this section we consider the policy landscape of various city and state efforts to incentivize and create space for urban agriculture. Policy is needed to lower costs for low income consumers and urban farmers seeking land, provide strategic location of distribution sites, and encourage year-round produce supply, often enabled by greenhouse systems in urban farms. Are current policy incentives enough to create expanded food access and community food security from urban farms? Horst et al. would argue no; rather, an explicit commitment to food justice and an “equity lens” is needed for policymakers and planners to create UA spaces that benefit low income and minority communities equally if not more than already advantaged groups. Due to the current landscape of “disparities in representation,vertical indoor farming leadership and funding, and insecure land tenure,” unless these problems are explicitly addressed, “even the most well intentioned initiatives will perpetuate or even reinforce the injustices that practitioners and supporters aim to address” . This sentiment is echoed in Morales’ chapter in Cultivating Food Justice, which calls for “applied research to discover and advance policy objectives related to the antiracist and economic objectives espoused by the Growing Food and Justice Initiative” . This suggests that only by foregrounding issues of race and economic inequality can cities create UA spaces that address food insecurity. In asking the question “Can cities become self-reliant in food?” Grewal and Grewal find that, in a best-case scenario, the City of Cleveland can achieve almost 100% self-reliance in fresh produce needs, poultry and eggs, and honey, but only with huge amounts of planning support . Blum-evitts puts forth a foodshed assessment tool to allow planners to assess local farm capacity in relation to local food needs . Theoretical work such as this is important to advance ideas of what is possible and motivate efforts to make change, although it must constantly stay in dialogue with what is happening in practice and expand beyond a productivist focus on local food systems. Urban farms are, after all, producing a lot more than food, and “increasing food production in cities does not guarantee that people experiencing food insecurity will access that food” . UA is re-valued along a broader spectrum of “products” or outputs in Figure 12 below.Creating urban agriculture incentive zones is one possible approach to policy and planning, likely to benefit the propertied class via tax breaks . Policies such as California’s AB 551, the Urban Agriculture Incentive Zone act, have come under criticism for not going far enough to build a just food system, relying on private rather than public spaces to support UA. It is unclear whether incentive zones will be widely adopted by cities and counties in California, and whether they will meaningfully address food access or food sovereignty, especially when the length of time required to devote a piece of land to urban agriculture is only 5 years.
In cases where tax incentives are used to promote urban agriculture, primary beneficiaries of the policy are often the privileged class of property owners rather than low-income households or non-property-owning urban farmers. Cities with some sort of food policy regulating, allowing for or promoting urban agriculture include the City of Baltimore , City of Somerville, Detroit, Portland, Madison, Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego, Austin, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Milwaukee, Boston, and Chicago12. Many policies allow for commercial sales of urban-produced food within the city as “approved sources” ; allow for value-added processing and sale of urban produced foods in people’s home kitchens ; create tax incentives for property owners to convert land into urban farms ; amend zoning regulations ; or set up urban beekeeping pilot projects . The Baltimore example is especially noteworthy for its long-term planning approach to structuring urban agriculture into the landscape of the city, with considerations for equity in place. However, legalizing the ability to grow food in cities is not enough to promote equity and justice, nor resolve all the legal conundrums related to compliance with the terms of legislation . Creating incentive zones for certain types of UA practices is not the same as creating supportive policies to allow and encourage the existence of the diverse array of practices and practitioners that constitute UA. Especially in cities with growing population and housing pressures , particular attention must be paid in policy making to avoid advancing gentrification and displacement. This is less of a concern in cities without such housing pressures , but development is always a threat that must be considered when siting urban farms on private land. A promising policy direction pioneered by the City of Seattle is to dedicate public lands in low income neighborhoods to UA, which Seattle does through its P-Patch program. Other policy recommendations gleaned from the literature include: creation of a citywide UA task force with citizen representatives; efforts to tie in local “good food” policies with city Climate Action Plans to promote UA and alternative food waste management alongside climate benefits13; devote public lands to urban farms and gardens in perpetuity; “retrofit” affordable housing developments with community gardens ; provide public storage, transport, and aggregation options for urban farmers; and convert corner stores into neighborhood groceries offering fresh produce from local farms. Many of these efforts have potential to address many city priorities at once, for example: food access, nutrition and fitness, transportation, community development and crime reduction . Providing land access for low-income and minority farmers is an important step towards ensuring a food supply that is culturally appropriate, desirable, and marketable to food insecure urban communities. By publicly confronting land insecurity and tenure arrangements, policymakers can directly respond to research on UA’s uneven development .Smaller numbers of citizens are becoming involved in advocating for UA policies and improved zoning regulations that support food access goals, holding cities accountable to UA projects. Through direct participation, citizens are already voting with their feet in favor of UA initiatives . Existing literature states, “‘participants in a community garden continually express a heightened sense of self-esteem gained from sharing knowledge and skills with each other.’ Such community connections can, in some cases, lead towards participation at the larger [policy] level” . By expanding civic engagement into the local policy realm, it is more likely that sites designated, set aside, or incentivized for urban agriculture development will be strategically located, address food insecurity and food justice concerns, and provide long-term access for UA . Civic engagement can take many forms, including participating in neighborhood organizations, contacting elected officials and city councilmembers to communicate multiple values of UA, aligning UA with existing city plans/ordinances, or participating in food policy councils. Citizen volunteers are participating in building community economies, often non-capitalist and non-exploitative in nature .