Food security in an urbanising society

From home gardens to agro-parks: 

working towards resilient agrifood systems serving densely populated areas

Due to continuing rural-urban migration, over 50% of the world’s population now lives in densely populated urban areas and rely on complex agrifood systems often at risk of failure. it is important for rural production and urban markets to be integrated to assure access to adequate quantities of nutritious food while sustaining the viability of the production areas.

Agricultural production and markets from a city-region perspective

With growing urbanization, sustainable city-region agri-food systems are essential in ensuring food security. Food production, processing, distribution and consumption should increasingly be integrated into a holistic, systemic and spatial manner. 

Innovative change processes with technical, social and cultural aspects addressing the challenges of complex agrifood systems are gradually becoming integral part of rural and urban planning agendas to better facilitate rural-urban integration.

it is important to:

• be able to understand and intervene in complex rural-urban planning processes from an integrated, holistic and multi-stakeholder perspective;
• have a clear picture of the multiple aspects of the interaction between agriculture and the cities and its relation to climate change, food and nutrition security and resilience;
• be acquainted with the basic principles of the metropolitan food cluster, urban and peri-urban agriculture, urban metabolism and city-region food systems;
• have strengthened skills to analyse their own situation and design more sustainable solutions.