Based on urgent needs for food security compounded by a changing climate which impacts and is impacted by agricultural land-use and food distribution practices, we explore the processes of action in implementing agroecological food systems. We identified the following characteristics for an agroecological food system: 1. Minimizing use of external inputs, 2. Extent of internal resource recycling, 3. Resilience, 4. Multifunctionality, 5. Building on complexity and incorporating greater systems integration, 6. Contextuality, 7. Equity and, 8. Nourishment. We focus on the city-region food systems context, concluding with practical drivers for realizing more agroecological food systems in city-region contexts. Agroecological food systems are widely diverse, shaped by context, and achieved through multi-actor planning in rural, peri-urban and urban areas. Application of agroecological food systems in rural–urban contexts emphasize the necessity of diversification, zoning rural–urban landscapes, planning for seasonality in a food systems context, and producing at scale. Rural–urban food systems are a relevant and challenging entry point that provides opportunities for learning how food systems can be shaped for significant positive change. Social organization, community building, common learning, and knowledge creation are crucial for agroecological contextualized food systems, as are the supports from appropriate governing and institutional structures.

By uniting literature from farmland preservation, growth management, food systems, economics, bioengineering, and environmental studies, this article provides an overview and valuation of the services that farms provide for urban areas. This article first analyzes the mission statements of 130 nationally accredited land trusts to ascertain the criteria used in preserving farmland. Land trusts present uniform preference for parcels that provide ecosystem services, wildlife habitat, viewsheds, local heritage, and agricultural productivity. The list of benefits provided by land trusts was compared to a literature review drawing from farmland amenity, agritourism, farmland preservation, and ecosystems studies to reveal the range of market values for the various benefits of farmland. The market value of farmland services varies from −$37,541 to 124,000 per acre depending on the method of analysis and location of the farm. This research has strong implications for land-use planning, economic opportunities, and ecosystems infrastructure in peri-urban areas.

Environmental justice (EJ) seeks to correct legacies of disproportionately burdening low-income and Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities with environmental hazards that contri...

This research offers the first use of graph theory mathematics in social network analysis to explore relationships built through an alternative food network. The local food system is visualized using geo-social data from 110 farms and 224 markets around Baltimore County, Maryland, with 699 connections between them. Network behavior is explored through policy document review and interviews. The findings revealed a small-world architecture, with system resiliency built-in by diversified marketing practices at central nodes. This robust network design helps to explain the long-term survival of local food systems despite the meteoric rise of global industrial food supply chains. Modern alternative food networks are an example of a movement that seeks to reorient economic power structures in response to a variety of food system-related issues not limited to consumer health but including environmental impacts. Uncovering the underlying network architecture of this sustainability-oriented social movement helps reveal how it weaves systemic change more broadly. The methods used in this study demonstrate how social values, social networks, markets, and governance systems embed to transform both physical landscapes and human bodies. Network actors crafted informal policy reports, which were directly incorporated in state and local official land-use and economic planning documents. Community governance over land-use policy suggests a powerful mechanism for further localizing food systems.

Urban planning practitioners and academics generally view food system planning as a recent area of study, originating little more than a decade ago. Yet, food planning has a long and multifaceted history. Though not theorized as food system planning in most of the secondary literature in planning history, it is not hard to find when we look, even at some of the most familiar, seminal plans and scholarship in planning history. In this article, we trace the broad continuities and major changes in North American food planning, focusing on physical planning, regional economic development, and community economic development from the age of colonization to the present. The planners of early American cities necessarily organized urban environments and metropolitan infrastructure around agriculture, and some helped to build an international food economy. Since the nineteenth century, professional planners and their grassroots counterparts have struggled to manage the challenges posed by the industrial food system and society, in which the place of agriculture in the city is more ambiguous and contested.