AESOP4FOOD
The Erasmus plus collaboration AESOP4Food aims to develop future leadership in sustainable food planning, to contribute to food security, food justice, and healthier environments.
The partnership builds upon the need for sustainable food planning that is argued by the International Panel of Experts in Sustainable Food Systems in their “Common Food Policy for the European Union” and a ‘Long Food Movement’. These are setting a reform for the whole food system, bringing together the various sectoral policies that affect food production, processing, distribution, and consumption, and refocusing all actions on the transition to sustainability.
Planning for sustainable food production and food provision is more than ever urging us to look for more effective, equitable, and just approaches that radically change not only the way we grow food but the very core of our living space.
AESOP4Food creates a joint interdisciplinary European learning activity on sustainable food planning for students, teachers, NGO staff, and other food planners to foster European citizenship and democratic leadership. It develops the discussion within academia and the planning professions on the need for sustainable food systems. It collects and disseminates evidence of good practice in higher education by providing an inclusive open-access course that uses digital environments and web-based collaboration available for adult learners and learners with fewer opportunities. You can find the presentations, recordings of the seminar in the first half of 2024 here.. BEsides this you can consult the reading material for each planning phase here.
The project collaborates with the PhDs and young researchers of the AESOP sustainable food planning group. Depending on the wishes and proposals of the YAP-group there will be additional online PhD / research seminars.
Rationale
Training planning actors in sustainable food issues has become a priority to meet several contemporary challenges. There is rising awareness that growing and often poorly controlled urbanization leads to urban sprawl, socio-spatial inequality, pollution, and environmental degradation associated with non-sustainable modes of production and consumption. The increased distancing—geographic (remoteness from basins), economic (increased number of intermediaries), and cognitive (ignorance of production conditions)—between cities and supply basins raises many problems: increased transport costs, energy consumption, food loss, and wastage. Finally, relationships between city and rural dwellers are becoming less tight-knit because of the many food processing, logistics, distribution, and catering operations.
Food has again become a global discussion issue because of the 2008 crisis regarding agricultural raw material prices and following numerous health crises (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, avian influenza, etc.), while cities are increasingly interested in finding ways to meet city dwellers’ expectations on improving their diet. This twofold global/local movement is reflected on a territorial level by an increase in initiatives on food relocalisation, urban agriculture, farmland protection, school canteen provisioning, etc. This plethora of innovations is still poorly structured while accounting for or including it in integrated food policies is still a recent phenomenon.
Pothukuchi and Kaufman (1999) were among the first authors to focus on the importance of the role of food in the city. According to these authors, at the time, there were at least four reasons for city representatives’ and urban planners' lack of interest in the food issue: the food system did not require special attention as it was considered to be functioning well, the food sector was not within the purview of urban planners, this sector (contrary to the transport and housing sectors) did not attract financing, and, finally, food was considered to be primarily a rural agricultural issue (not an urban and cross-sectorial one).
According to Morgan (2009), the latter argument is not admissible to justify the ‘puzzling omission’ on the part of planners regarding food. First, the multidimensional aspect of the food system means that it has a substantial impact on other sectors such as public health, social justice, energy, water, land, transport, and economic development. All these sectors are key concerns of urban representatives who have every right to deal with them. Second, considering food production as an exclusively rural activity challenges the fact that in many cities worldwide, urban agriculture has a pivotal role in food security, and in others, it inspires a rich socio-economic movement geared towards producing food in cities.
All this underlines the importance of training future practitioners to meet the many challenges of sustainable food planning. These future practitioners will have to be well-trained in navigating the multiple levels and sectors that shape food policy today. Sustainable food planning is in many contexts not a strongly institutionalised area of work and consolidated field of practice. It is rather a heterodox and emerging practice, bringing practitioners, policymakers, and academics together from different policy areas and disciplines. In the AESOP4Food course, we hope to equip people better to engage in co-constructing an emerging field of policy making and planning.
The AESOP4Food project is partially funded by the ERASMUS+ European Union grant program, under grant no. 2021-1-NL01-KA220-HED-000023116. Neither the European Commission nor the project's national funding agency is responsible for the content nor liable for any losses or damages incurred that are the result of the use of these resources.