The Urban Food Futures team is wrapping up its scoping work and shares their insights gained and critical reflections on various aspects of urban food systems in selected case study areas including Nairobi, Cape Town, and Ouagadougou.

The findings of the scoping phase shape the research questions the team seeks to explore over the next years to co-develop pathways towards more inclusive and resilient urban futures building on knowledge and visions co-created by communities in the respective research sites. 

The Urban Food Futures team recognizes that different ideas towards the future are inherently contested. Different pathways result in different distributions of benefits thus requiring a critical reflexive process between all partners, communities, and stakeholders involved in this process.

Urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) and controlled environments agriculture (CEA)

This thematic entry-point (TEP) explores the role UPA and CEA can play in building urban local food system resilience to shocks and crisis by identifying current challenges, risks, benefits, and enabling factors.

Find the poster summarizing the findings here.

Urban commons: community kitchens, saving schemes, and school feeding programmes

Previous research and scoping work of the team uncovered women to be at the forefront of unpaid care work developing community kitchens as spaces of solidarity and agency amid the detrimental socio-economic impacts of COVID-19 containment measures. This work reflects how community kitchens could open spaces for re-imagining unjust food systems and unpack power relations that shape urban planning processes.

Find the poster summarizing the findings here.

Food flows: scoping leverage points to enable food system transformation

To identify vulnerabilities and leverage points to co-design for sustainable diets, jobs, and resilience this work started by tracing how food flows through informal settlements in Cape Town and Nairobi and by documenting societal responses to shocks such as COVID-19.

Find the poster summarizing the findings from Mukuru, Naiorbi here and the poster summarizing the findings from Gugulethu, Cape Town here.

Urban food systems governance

Current governance processes in urban systems and food systems in Africa are ill-equipped to engage the dual challenge of rapid urbanisation and adverse urban food system outcomes. This entry-point proposes food sensitive planning and urban design (FSPUD) as a process of co-learning, co-governing & co-developing sites of urban food governance action.

Find the poster summarizing the findings here.