by Edward Niedbalski and Q A Zheng
Building on groupwork at Professor Sohail Inayatullah’s Sep ’19 Bangkok workshop, we use Futures Triangle methodology to make the case and envision the future potential for highly self-sufficient urban food systems.
At Prof Sohail Inayatullah’s seminar, “Futures Thinking and Strategy Transformation”, conducted in Bangkok in September 2019, there was high interest among delegates in the future of food security, particularly as pertaining to Urban Food Systems. The Asia-Pacific Foresight Network conference earlier that week had already seen much discussion and focus on the future of global and regional food systems and the many adjacent issues which disrupted and shaped them, such as geopolitics, global and regional economic transitions, climate change, disease, and the possibilities and pitfalls arising from frenetic and frequent technological change.
According to UN figures, the global population became more than half urban in 2007 and stands at 55% today. By 2050, the UN projects that 68% of the world’s 9.7 billion people will live in cities (UN.org). More than ever, feeding the world means feeding our cities. How 6.6 billion city dwellers will feed themselves is a defining challenge – and an important opportunity. Cities pose many of the key challenges facing the global food system: food waste, malnutrition (the “double burden” of over-nutrition, rising obesity and non-communicable lifestyle diseases and micronutrient deficiencies), unsafe and unsanitary food preparation and consumption, and food storage and transportation costs, to name a few. As such, cities have the greatest potential and immediate responsibility for realizing a sustainable food future.
Our workshop table group shared a professional, academic, humanistic, and ecological interest in the future of urban food systems, and how cities may “future-proof” themselves to meet the ever-growing food needs and lifestyle-based consumer demands of city dwellers. Together, we parsed the perceived signals of the future and debated how more self-sustaining food systems might have traction in urban settings, enabling more localization of food systems governance, providing a hedge against fluctuations and disruptions in supply from more far-flung food sources, and furthering diversification of food varieties and sources. The informality and diverse perspectives at the seminar spurred candid and insightful deliberation and open discussion, allowing for insightful concepts to come to light.
The foresight methods introduced at the workshop allowed us to develop a multi-step approach to anticipating and addressing the future of food in urban environments. Examining urban food futures through the lens of the Futures Triangle was particularly useful.
| What is The Futures Triangle?
The Futures Triangle is a foresight framework developed by Prof. Inayatullah to support the exploration of futures-based research topics. It weighs and synthesizes three key elements: The ‘Weight’ of the Past—These can be understood to be the barriers to affecting and/or implementing the positive change or the things which create ‘drag’, or hold back change and/or progress towards the future. Old laws and governing structures, embedded economic and political interests that are threatened by change, demographic and deeply embedded societal structures are the most typical ‘Weights’ on change for the future. These weights can often be understood as manifestations of social resistance to the changes that the future will, might, or is perceived to potentially bring with it. The ‘Push’ of the Present—these are the current and developing/emerging issues that make change and foresight a necessary tool in mapping the future. Trends and drivers in policy, possibilities inherent in the development of new technology, laws and economic incentives are the typical mechanisms behind the Push of the Present. Pushes represent an exerted force that has the intention of creating change which will be seen in the future. The ‘Pull’ of the Future—at the apex of the triangle, this is the direction in which the future is developing, as the ‘pull’ of time inevitably moves forward; it embodies stakeholders’ needs and hopes for how the issue will develop into a specific vision of the future, and is typically envisioned as a ‘best-case’ or ‘probable’ case for the issue being examined. The Pull creates images of the future and raises questions about if there are competing images of the future, and which among them can are seen as the most preferable outcome(s). |
Applying the Futures Triangle to tomorrow’s Urban Food Systems Futures
Workshop participants honed the topic further, to interrogate how progressive urban food systems could take shape, what they could look like, and how they could develop and be implemented in urban settings.
Using the futures triangle approach, we charted the present context – the legacy that represents the ‘Weight’ on urban food systems, the urgent ‘Push’ of present challenges, and the ‘Pull’ of a vision of the way ahead for both urban and global food systems:
The Weight of the past
Since the onset of modern human civilization, social development and human social organization have been characterized by the rise of cities, sustained in their food and natural resource needs by agrarian hinterlands. As a greater physical and socio-economic distance arose between city dwellers and their food, a measure of ignorance and indifference arose among them as to how food is sourced, produced, how much food is wasted, its safety and nutritive value, and of the food system’s overall environmental impact.
Policy and regulations have mirrored this dichotomy. Agricultural policy is often not seen as relevant for cities, which may overlook the needs of rural communities. Food insecurity may be framed primarily as a failure of production, and not that of failing to improve food distribution and create more equitable urban access and affordability (De Zeeuw and Drechsel, 2015). Today’s big food enterprises have shaped regulatory regimes and political landscapes in line with their legacy products and commercial priorities. Entrenched economic and business interests are typically hostile to changes that would affect their bottom lines.
The Push of the present
These weights of the past coincide with the unprecedented pressures on the global food system in the present, with the world’s cities representing a new ‘Ground Zero’ for the challenges facing the future of food and food systems.
With hectic yet often sedentary urban lifestyles and the swelling of urban underclasses, diets have increasingly been dominated by cheap, unhealthy processed foods, laden with salt, fat, and chemical additives. Among the more affluent, meat-heavy diets have also taken their toll on health. In parallel to this, a large proportion of children in dense urban environments suffer from stunted growth due to nutrient, if not overall calorific, deficiencies. The resultant “double burden of malnutrition” identified by the World Health Organisation (WHO) now strains health systems and degrades the quality of life in urban areas.
Heavy food consumption, particularly of proteins, high amounts of waste, and carbon miles (‘food miles’) from globe-straddling city food supply chains mean that the food system now accounts for 37% of global carbon emissions according to the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, further stressing the food system, and propagating a vicious cycle of excess emissions and increased production, resource depletion, and environmental degradation.
Instability in global and regional food systems has also had notable impact on politics and social harmony in several parts of the world, as shown in the “Arab Spring” of 2008, which was in large part sparked by urban unrest due to food shortages caused by drought, which dramatically affected urban food prices in the region (Scientific American, 2013). Another example of a more recent and relevant social movement is the rise of the “Extinction Rebellion”, whose proponents advocate a radical reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases and other extreme measures to de-carbonize the economy.
Compounding the sense of urgency for radical food system change are the rampant forces of economic nationalism and “de-globalization”, and the trend towards “re-shoring” of production amidst rising international and regional trade barriers. Surging geopolitical competition has increased pressures, vulnerabilities and risks to world-straddling supply chains. Social and political will is rising as to the need to buttress food sources and resources that are close-at-hand as a means of strategic risk management. This will allow for a refocusing on local development of food chains and regional resource supply chains to emerge, which will hopefully serve as the basis for sustainable food systems in both urban and rural contexts and settings.
To add, subsequent to the seminar, another key Push comes from the upsurge in animal and zoonotic disease, such as the upsurge in African Swine Fever, and more recently from late 2019 to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (
The Pull of the future
In the face of today’s urgent pressures, and weighed down by past legacies, urban food systems are at an inflection point. Emerging new technologies in urban food production have arisen, and although they have yet to fully be implemented nor been proven cost and resource-effective compared to conventional methods, their potential for positive future implementation in urban environments enables the conception of new possibilities across food value and supply chains. The potential impact of emerging food technologies such as vertical farms, lab-grown proteins, and aquaponic systems shows how a range of actors are propelling our food system forward to harness/transcend present crises and constraints. The need is for a compelling futures vision of a sustainable, sufficient, resilient, and humane food system, which can rally all stakeholders towards a common cause, empowering them to enact it.
The Pull of the future for urban food systems is towards creating healthy city food circles. Forward-thinking city planning and design concepts would hope that by mid-century, progressive cities worldwide will have circular food systems, characterized by their highly efficient, food self-sufficient, eco-sustainably, and hyper-productivity, with (near-) zero physical waste and ‘light’ carbon footprint. They will be net solvers of– not contributors to– climate change and will be secure, resilient, and adaptable in the face of shocks and strains to international and planetary food and natural resource systems. With urban and peri-urban food systems, typically defined as the zone extending approximately 20km beyond city limits. The hope is that localized urban food systems will be able to meet most of their local populations’ needs (FAO, 1997, 2011). Dependence of urban centers on far-flung supply chains, remote broadacre farming and extractive fisheries would be attenuated, enabling the eco-positive re-wilding of much of the earth, and a simultaneous refocusing on localized food production for rural communities.
Tomorrow’s cities will embrace the future’s vision of ‘food as medicine’, and food as the basis for the population’s health and wellness. The vision of personalized nutrition will hopefully become a reality for all, not just the wealthiest. All will have tech-enabled access to advice and solutions to tailor-make each meal for optimizing health, gustation, psychic wellness, and cognitive/physical productivity. A “Star Trek”-like food replicator will be ubiquitous in this food future and will deliver precise, waste-not meals.
Most crucially, tomorrow’s city dwellers will be “woke” to the nature and value of food, celebrating awareness of how food is produced and consumed and holding themselves, local enterprises, and governments accountable for creating and maintaining a healthful, circular, city-focused food system. Households and neighborhoods would themselves grow and make a significant part of what they consume, as part of a local sharing economy that also strengthens community bonds. Tomorrow’s food style would not be the dystopian or alienated consumption of grim energy bars, but part of vibrant urban food culture, integral to a meaningful and engaging urban living experience.
Will tomorrow’s cities feed themselves?
Our group’s deliberations crystallized for us how besieged and untenable today’s food system is, weighed down by a problematic legacy and beset by growing challenges that are also the urgency and impetus to enact positive change.
As humankind becomes overwhelmingly urban, cities will need to take more control of their food security, and of its impact on our planetary destiny. The futures triangle framework well-illuminated for us this yet-to-be unrealized landscape, and created a compelling vision of a way towards it.
Having charted this landscape, a subsequent article will describe a roadmap of paths towards the future for urban food systems, inflected by scenarios of a wider global transformation.
About the Authors:
Edward Niedbalski is a Master’s degree student at The Graduate Institute of Futures Studies at Tamkang University. His research is in the area of agriculture and local and global food system futures.
Q A Zheng is a futurist based in Southeast Asia
Citations and References:
U.N. Urbanization Statistics. https://www.un.org/development/desa/publications/2018-revision-of-world-urbanization-prospects.html
Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture’. 1997. http://www.fao.org/unfao/bodies/COag/cOAG15/X0076e.htm
‘The Place of Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture in National Food Security Programmes. 2011.
Tomorrow’s Food Skills https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-11-21/tomorrows-food-skills/”
Climate Change and Rising Food Prices Heightened Arab Spring https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-and-rising-food-prices-heightened-arab-spring/
WHO Website – Nutrition, Double Burden of Malnutrition https://www.who.int/nutrition/double-burden-malnutrition/en/
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): Special Report on Climate Change and Land, 2019 https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/chapter/summary-for-policymakers/
Cities and Agriculture: Developing Resilient Urban Food Systems, De Zeeuw & Drechsel, 2015
