ABSTRACT
Food affects the economic, environmental, and social wellbeing of every place, yet food choices and the issues that surround them are rarely part of the urban planner’s agenda.
– Arly Cassidy and Bowen Patterson, The Planner’s Guide to the Urban Food System
Food, as a manmade artifact, and planning, as the endeavor to purposefully manage change, are two of the most distinctive markers of our human ingenuity and have always coevolved. The invention of agriculture enabled us to plan our food supply and likely led to the creation of the first cities, cities enabled us to better collaborate and led to the creation of a sophisticated, globalized agrifood industry, which, in turn, catalyzed the creation of new urban forms – metropolises, post-metropolises, and mega-city-regions. The twentieth-century transition of both food and urban development to highly engineered and standardized commodities, while boosting cities’ profits and efficiency, was traded off for social equity and public and environmental health. This became evident at the turn of the 1960s, when Jane Jacobs’s seminal critique of urban planning in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking Silent Spring (1962), documenting the detrimental effects of industrial agriculture on the environment, exhibited the “hidden” costs of the kind of agrifood and the urban planning systems we had so successfully developed. The idea that these two problems may, or even should be, tackled in tandem and can share some of their solutions, however, was still hard if not impossible to imagine.
