As Africa urbanises and the focus of poverty shifts to urban centres, there is an imperative to address poverty in African cities. This is particularly the case in smaller cities, which are often the most rapidly urbanising, but the least able to cope with this growth. This book argues that an examination of the food system and food security provides a valuable lens to interrogate urban poverty. Chapters examine the linkages between poverty, urban food systems and local governance with a focus on case studies from three smaller or secondary cities in Africa: Kisumu (Kenya), Kitwe (Zambia) and Epworth (Zimbabwe). The book makes a wider contribution to debates on urban studies and urban governance in Africa through analysis of the causes and consequences of the paucity of urban-scale data for decision makers, and by presenting potential methodological innovations to address this paucity. As the global development agenda is increasingly focusing on urban issues, most notably the urban goal of the new Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda, the work is timely. The Open Access version of this book, available at: http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315191195, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This report presents insights and emerging lessons on food systems governance from the experience of nine cities that have developed urban food interventions – Baltimore, Belo Horizonte, Lima, Medellín, Nairobi, Quito, Seoul, Shanghai and Toronto – and draws on diverse sources of secondary information regarding the experiences of other cities throughout the world. It highlights entry points for the governance of urban food systems issues; common procedural and content-related considerations when addressing those issues; predominant governance models; and operational opportunities for future investment. Successful examples can encourage other local governments to adapt new approaches and innovate within their own context. Every city will need to navigate the political economy to customize their choices and interventions to local circumstances, priority problems and economic opportunities.

Countries across Africa are rapidly transitioning from rural to urban societies. The UN projects that 60% of people living in Africa will be in urban areas by 2050, with the urban population on the continent tripling over the next 50 years. The challenge of building inclusive and sustainable cities in the context of rapid urbanization is arguably the critical development issue of the 21st Century and creating food secure cities is key to promoting health, prosperity, equity, and ecological sustainability. The expansion of Africa’s urban population is taking place largely in secondary cities: these are broadly defined as cities with fewer than half a million people that are not national political or economic centres. The implications of secondary urbanization have recently been described by the Cities Alliance as “a real knowledge gap”, requiring much additional research not least because it poses new intellectual challenges for academic researchers and governance challenges for policy-makers. International researchers coming from multiple points of view including food studies, urban studies, and sustainability studies, are starting to heed the call for further research into the implications for food security of rapidly growing secondary cities in Africa. This book will combine this research and feature comparable case studies, intersecting trends, and shed light on broad concepts including governance, sustainability, health, economic development, and inclusivity. This is an open access book.

The integration of food into urban planning is a crucial and emerging topic. Urban planners, alongside the local and regional authorities that have traditionally been less engaged in food-related issues, are now asked to take a central and active part in understanding how food is produced, processed, packaged, transported, marketed, consumed, disposed of and recycled in our cities. While there is a growing body of literature on the topic, the issue of planning cities in such a way they will increase food security and nutrition, not only for the affluent sections of society but primarily for the poor, is much less discussed, and much less informed by practices. This volume, a collaboration between the Bartlett Development Planning Unit at UCL and the Food Agricultural Organisation, aims to fill this gap by putting more than 20 city-based experiences in perspective, including studies from Toronto, New York City, Portland and Providence in North America; Milan in Europe and Cape Town in Africa; Belo Horizonte and Lima in South America; and, in Asia, Bangkok and Tokyo. By studying and comparing cities of different sizes, from both the Global North and South, in developed and developing regions, the contributors collectively argue for the importance and circulation of global knowledge rooted in local food planning practices, programmes and policies.

Urban population growth is extremely rapid across Africa and this book places urban food and nutrition security firmly on the development and policy agenda. It shows that current efforts to address food poverty in Africa that focus entirely on small-scale farmers, to the exclusion of broader socio-economic and infrastructural approaches, are misplaced and will remain largely ineffective in ameliorating food and nutrition insecurity for the majority of Africans. Using original data from the African Food Security Urban Network’s (AFSUN) extensive database it is demonstrated that the primary food security challenge for urban households is access to food. Already linked into global food systems and value chains, Africa’s supply of food is not necessarily in jeopardy. Rather, the widespread poverty and informal urban fabric that characterizes Africa’s emerging cities impinge directly on households’ capacity to access food that is readily available. Through the analysis of empirical data collected from 6,500 households in eleven cities in nine countries in Southern Africa, the authors identify the complexity of factors and dynamics that create the circumstances of widespread food and nutrition insecurity under which urban citizens live. They also provide useful policy approaches to address these conditions that currently thwart the latent development potential of Africa’s expanding urban population.

The Routledge Handbook of Urban Food Governance is the first collection to reflect on and compile the currently dispersed histories, concepts and practices involved in the increasingly popular field of urban food governance. Unpacking the power of urban food governance and its capacity to affect lives through the transformation of cities and the global food system, the Handbook is structured into five parts. The first part focuses on histories of urban food governance to trace the historical roots of current dynamics and provide an impetus for the critical lens on urban food governance threaded through the Handbook. The second part presents a broad overview of the different frames, theories and concepts that have informed urban food governance scholarship. Drawing on the previous parts, part three engages with the practice of urban food governance by analysing plans, policies and programmes implemented in different contexts. Part four presents current knowledge on how urban food governance involves different agencies that operate across scales and sectors. The final part asks key figures in this field what the future holds for urban food governance in the midst of pressing societal and environmental challenges. Containing chapters written by emerging and established scholars, as well as practitioners, the Handbook provides a state of the art, global and diverse examination of the role of cities in delivering sustainable and secure food outcomes, as well as providing refreshed theoretical and practical tools to understand and transform urban food governance to enact more sustainable and just futures. The Routledge Handbook of Urban Food Governance will be essential reading for students, scholars, practitioners and policymakers interested in food governance, urban studies, sustainable food and agriculture, and sustainable living more broadly.

The ways in which the rapid urbanization of the Global South is transforming food systems and food supply chains, and the food security of urban populations is an often neglected topic. This international group of authors addresses this profound transformation from a variety of different perspectives and disciplinary lenses, providing an important corrective to the dominant view that food insecurity is a rural problem requiring increases in agricultural production.