Food production on the urban–rural fringe is under pressure due to competing land uses. We discuss the potential to improve resilience for urban–rural regions by enhancing food production as part of multifunctional land use. Through studies of peri-urban land in the regions of Gothenburg (Sweden), Copenhagen (Denmark) and Gent (Belgium), recent developments are analysed. Arable farming has been declining since 2000 in all three areas due to urban expansion and recreational land use changes. In city plans, networks of protected areas and green spaces and their importance for human wellbeing have been acknowledged. Policies for farmland preservation in peri-urban settings exist, but strategies for local food production are not expressed in present planning documents. Among the diversity of peri-urban agricultural activities, peri-urban food production is a developing issue. However, the competing forms of land use and the continuing high dependence of urban food on global food systems and related resource flows reduces peri-urban food production and improvements in urban food security. The positive effects of local food production need to be supported by governance aiming to improve the urban–rural relationship. The paper discusses the resilience potential of connecting urban–rural regions and re-coupling agriculture to regional food production.

Strategies and action plans for sustainable food provisioning and urban food security are in progress in many urban regions both in the global North and South. A number of urgent challenges need to be confronted such as increasing uncertainty and unpredictability related to stronger dependence on a global market for food import, ongoing political unrest and environmental conflicts, increasing resource scarcity and climate warming making food production hazardous. There is an increased vulnerability with respect to food security for human societies, both in developing and developed countries. The food security dimension of access to healthy food is related to equality and poverty and is relevant for cities in the North via the segregation challenges. The food system issue is well-suited for assessing sustainable development since food provisioning is both a multiscale and cross-sectorial issue and thus addresses more than the three dimensions of social, economic and environmental sustainability. How is the planning for sustainable food strategies in urban regions in Europe concordant with the United Nations Global Sustainable Development Goals and with the transition towards sustainable futures? This paper deliberates on using the food system issues for sustainability transition, drawing on the forthcoming 2018 IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) work on pathways for sustainable futures and a recent survey of existing urban food system strategies. Against this background, some reflections are given relevant for the ongoing work on a local urban food strategy for the city of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Global food insecurity levels remain stubbornly high. One of the surest ways to grasp the scale and consequence of global inequality is through a food systems lens. In a predominantly urban world, urban food systems present a useful lens to engage a wide variety of urban (and global) challenges—so called ‘wicked problems.’ This paper describes a collaborative research project between four urban food system research units, two European and two African. The project purpose was to seek out solutions to what lay between, across and within the different approaches applied in the understanding of each city’s food system challenges. Contextual differences and immediate (perceived) needs resulted in very different views on the nature of the challenge and the solutions required. Value positions of individuals and their disciplinary “enclaves” presented further boundaries. The paper argues that finding consensus provides false solutions. Rather the identification of novel approaches to such wicked problems is contingent of these differences being brought to the fore, being part of the conversation, as devices through which common positions can be discovered, where spaces are created for the realisation of new perspectives, but also, where difference is celebrated as opposed to censored.

The alpine gentian, Gentiana nivalis, is an obligate annual. Because of its complete population turnover every year, it is likely to be more responsive to environmental shifts than are perennials, and also likely to undergo more rapid genetic change in response to selection pressure. The detected morphological differentiation between habitats was related to different proportions of spring- and autumn-germinating individuals with a larger proportion of winter annuals in the subalpine habitats. The spring-germinating annuals that have shorter time for development and have a shorter stature can still develop at the alpine sites where competition is weaker. The subalpine habitats are all semi-natural, shaped by livestock grazing and human activities related to summer farming. Declining human impact is leading to successional changes in the mountain landscape. The future of G. nivalis in the light of current trends in landscape development and climate change is discussed.