New course: Sociology of Food Provisioning and Place-based Development

The MSc course “Understanding Rural Development: Theories, Practices and Methodologies” (course code RSO-31806) has been revised and renamed into “Sociology of Food Provisioning and Place-based Development”. The course is mandatory for Master students within the track Sociology of Rural Development of the Master International Development Studies, specializing in rural sociology and a free choice course for Master students of other programmes and tracks. If you are interested in topics such as alternative food geographies, food citizenship, food democracy, urban food provisioning, sustainable place shaping, and regional branding, it may be worth participating in this course. Students who do not have a BSc degree in International Development Studies or related field of expertise may not have the assumed prerequisite knowledge to successfully participate and are therefore requested to contact the course coordinator, Han Wiskerke (han.wiskerke@wur.nl), to see if and how this gap can be addressed.

For more information about the contents, schedule, learning outcomes and educational activities, please click on this link or contact the course coordinator for more information or the latest version of the course guide.

Beyond Divides: An International Winter School and Forum on Contemporary Agri-food Issues

The Marie Curie Initial Training Network PUREFOOD project team will host a winter school and forum in Barcelona from 12-22 November 2012. The forum will be a highly collaborative and interdisciplinary event, with the joint participation of the PUREFOOD research fellows and supervisory team, a diverse group of external Ph.D. students, and respected local and international scholars and practitioners. The forum will create an atmosphere of debate, exchange, and collaboration.  The academic program will feature three distinct learning modes – expert-led discussions, peer-led paper review, and thematically integrated site visits – and will include modules oriented to some of the most prominent themes in agri-food system scholarship today.

Key themes are:

• Food security, rights and sovereignty;
• Social imperatives, ethics and justice;
• Food and alterity;
• Food policy and governance;
• State, market and society;
• Innovation;
• Tradition.

Speakers at the Winter school are:

• Dr. Patricia Allen, Director of the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, University of California, Santa Cruz, United States
• Dr. Jesús Contreras Hernández, Professor of Social Anthropology, Director of the Food and Foodways Observatory, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
• Dr. Mike Goodman, Senior Lecturer, Department of Geography, King’s College London, United Kingdom
• Dr. James Kirwan, Reader in Food Studies and Society, Countryside and Community Research Institute, University of Gloucestershire, United Kingdom
• Dr. F. Xavier Medina, Director, Department Food Systems, Culture & Society at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Academic Director at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

For more information about the Winter School click on  Beyond Divides – Program and Application Form. If you want to participate, please complete the application form and send it to Jessica Spayde (spaydejj@cardiff.ac.uk) by 3 October 2012.

New book – Sustainable Food Planning: Evolving Theory and Practice

Half the world’s population is now urbanised and cities are assuming a larger role in debates about the security and sustainability of the global food system. Hence, planning for sustainable food production and consumption is becoming an increasingly important issue for planners, policymakers, designers, farmers, suppliers, activists, business and scientists alike. The rapid growth of the food planning movement owes much to the unique multi-functional character of food systems. In the wider contexts of global climate change, resource depletion, a burgeoning world population, competing food production systems and diet-related public health concerns, new paradigms for urban and regional planning capable of supporting sustainable and equitable food systems are urgently needed. This book addresses this urgent need. By working at a range of scales and with a variety of practical and theoretical models, this book reviews and elaborates definitions of sustainable food systems, and begins to define ways of achieving them. Four different themes have been defined as entry-points into the discussion of ‘sustainable food planning’. These are (1) urban food governance, (2) integrating health, environment and society, (3) urban agriculture (4) planning and design.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 37,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 14 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

‘Agriculture in an Urbanizing Society’ Conference – new deadline for submission of abstracts

As mentioned in previous posts, an international conference entitled ‘Agriculture in an Urbanizing Society’ will be held from 1 to 4 April 2012 in Wageningen. A whole range of different topics and research findings will be presented and discussed in 20 different working groups. The deadline for submitting abstracts was originally 20 December 2011 but the conference committees, in consultation with the working group convenors, have decided to postpone this deadline by one month. So if you are interested to present and discuss your research activities (or plans) in one of the working groups, please send your abstract to the convenor of the working group before 20 January 2012. You are kindly requested to use the abstract submission form.

Conference ‘Agriculture in an Urbanizing Society’ – call for abstracts (reminder)

From 1 – 4 April 2012 a conference entitled ‘Agriculture in an Urbanizing Society: International Conference on Multifunctional Agriculture and Urban-Rural Relations‘ will take place in Wageningen. Some time ago a call for abstracts was launched. This is to inform or remind you that the deadline for submitting abstracts is 20 December 2011. Abstracts can be submitted by email to the coordinating convenor of a working group (call for abstracts for all WGs can be accessed through this link). The following working groups have been approved by the Scientific Programme Committee:

• WG1 Green care
• WG2 Agri tourism: Critcal Perspectives on Dilemmas and Opportunities
• WG3 Exploring ‘civic food networks’ and their role in enabling sustainable urban food systems
• WG4 Rural education   
• WG5 Environmental services
• WG6 Economic impact at the farm level
• WG7 Business models; farm enterprise development models
• WG8 Entrepreneurial skills and competences: challenges and opportunities
• WG9 Learning for innovation – new challenges in an urbanizing world
• WG10 Regional branding; the socio-economic impact at the regional level
• WG11 Urban, peri-urban and regional planning
• WG12 Land-use transformations
• WG13 What are the challenges of future urban agriculture?
• WG14 Public food procurement
• WG15 Consumers, multifunctional agriculture and urban dynamics
• WG16 Multifunctionality, rural policy and governance
• WG17 Social exclusion and poverty in rural areas
• WG18 Migration and mobility
• WG19 Transition approaches
• WG20 Multifunctional agriculture as a coupled human-natural system

Die Produktive Stadt / Carrot City – Designing for Urban Agriculture

Carrot City is a traveling exhibit that shows how the design of buildings and cities can enable the production of food in the city. It explores the relationships between design and urban food systems as well as the impact that agricultural issues have on the design of urban spaces and buildings. The focus is on how the increasing interest in growing food within the city, supplying food locally, and food security in general, is changing urban design and built form. Carrot City showcases projects in Toronto and other Canadian and American cities, as well as relevant international examples from around the world. The exhibition contains a mix of projects that were recently completed or are currently under way, and visionary, speculative design proposals by both professional designers and students, which illustrate the potential for design that responds to food issues. The exhibit explores these issues at different scales, the city scale, the community scale, housing, rooftops and the products that make all of this possible.

Main curators of Carrot City are Mark Gorgolewski, June Komisar and Joe Nasr of Ryerson University Toronto (Canada). It has traveled to New York City, Montreal and Casablanca. Carroty City is now coming to Europe with exhibitions at the Technical University in Berlin (30 September – 30 October 2011) and the Technical University in Munich (8 – 26 November 2011). For more information about the exhibits and opening ceremonies have a look at the flyer.

Conference call – Agriculture in an Urbanizing Society (new deadlines)

In June I published a post about the upcoming conference ‘Agriculture in an Urbanizing Society: International Conference on Multifunctional Agriculture and Urban-Rural Relations’, which included a call for Working Group proposals. The deadline for submitting Working Group proposals was 1 September 2011. This post is to announce that the deadline for submitting Working Group proposals has been postponed to 15 september 2011. If you would like to convene a working group but don’t have time to write a proposal, you can also express your interest by sending me an e-mail (han.wiskerke@wur.nl). Have a look at the conference website for an overview of the working group themes that have been proposed by the scientific committee. The deadline for abstracts will also be postponed by 2 weeks to 15 December 2011.

Conference Call – Agriculture in an Urbanizing Society

A major demographic milestone occurred in May 2007. For the first time in the history of mankind the earth’s population became more urban than rural. This process of urbanization will continue in an accelerated pace in the forthcoming decades: the growth of the world population from 6 billion people in 2000 to 9 billion people in 2050 will mainly occur in urban areas. By 2050 the urban population will approximately be twice the size of the rural population.

However, this does not mean that urban areas are or will become of greater importance than rural areas. On the contrary, the urban and the rural have always heavily relied on each other and will do so even more in an era characterized by rapid urban population growth. Cities will continue to need resources such as food, fibre, clean water, nature, biodiversity, and recreational space, as well as the people and communities that produce and provide these urban necessities and desires. Hence, key questions for the next decades are how, where and by whom these urban necessities and desires will be produced and provided and if and how this can be done in manner that is considered to be socially, economically and ecologically sustainable and ethically sound.

In recent years the concept of multifunctional agriculture has emerged as an important reference in debates on the future of agriculture and the countryside and its relations with the wider and predominantly urban society. This is an expression of the fact that agriculture is not only valued for its contribution to food and fibre production and the economic development of the agro-industry, but needs to be assessed according to a much wider range of social, environmental, economic and ethical concerns. At farm level multifunctional agriculture is characterized by a variety of entrepreneurial strategies and activities, such as processing and direct marketing of food products, energy production, care for elderly and disabled people, and tourism. But multifunctional agriculture is also expressed at higher scales, such as the regional level (e.g. collective nature and landscape management schemes and regional branding) and the national level (e.g. policymaking and implementation).

Due to the multiplicity of activities, the multi-scalar character of multifunctionality and the geographical contextuality of expressions of multifunctional agriculture, research on multifunctional agriculture and changing urban-rural relations is highly fragmented, disciplinarily as well as geographically. Hence, this conference aims to advance the scientific state of the art in research on multifunctional agriculture and urban-rural relations by bringing together scholars of different disciplines (sociology, economics, spatial planning, land use planning, regional planning, urban planning, crop sciences, animal sciences, soil sciences, architecture, etc…) from all parts of the world.

Working group themes
The conference facilities allow for a maximum of 21 parallel working group sessions. The scientific committee has proposed 21 working group themes (see http://www.agricultureinanurbanizingsociety.com/UK/Working+group+themes/)   and is inviting prospective working group convenors to submit a short (max 500 words) call text for the theme they would like to convene. Proposals for a working group call text can be send to the chair of the scientific committee by email (han.wiskerke@wur.nl) before the 1^st of September 2011. The deadline for submission of abstracts will be 1^st of December 2011. Abstracts will have to be submitted to the convenors.

More information

Please check the conference website for more information.

PUREFOOD Research Vacancy ‘Comparative analysis of urban food strategies’

The vacancy for a position as Early Stage Researcher (ESR) for the project  ’Comparative analysis of urban food strategies in European cities’ within the PUREFOOD research and training network has been re-opened. More information about PUREFOOD can be found below and on the PUREFOOD website (which is still under construction).

Job description

For this PUREFOOD project ‘Comparative analysis of urban food strategies in European cities’ we are looking for an Early Stage Researcher who is interested in the topics of urban food provisioning and the relations between food and policy domains as public health, education, environment, et cetera from a sociological, political science and/or planning perspective. The research will focus on how food policies are articulated and motivated in different European cities and what  the consequences are for their implementation. This focus is inspired by the fact that more and more city governments are taking up food as a key policy area to enhance human and environmental urban health. The challenges of policy articulation and implementation are big. The articulation of food policy has so far been reliant on individual politicians and on a political level vulnerable to electoral shifts. Institutionalization of food policy in city governments has just started and different patterns of institutionalization are emerging with particular pitfalls and successes. This study will explore the preconditions, political processes, strategy articulation and implementations of urban food strategies in different European cities in comparative perspective to enhance the understanding of the conditions for successful urban food policy implementation.