Recovery from the pandemic: Planning the reterritorialisation of agricultural activities

This chapter discusses planning the reterritorialisation of agricultural activities as an avenue of the Covid-19 pandemic recovery. Reterritorialisation indicates local food being targeted to local inhabitants instead of the global market. We argue that the pandemic has accelerated the reterritorialisation process. Supply chain actors actively...

The Common Foodscape: Improving the liveability of the city through urban agriculture

Food is a vital part of our lives and throughout history it has shaped our cities. However, our current agricultural practices exhaust our natural environment and are threatened by climate change. Next to that, the design of our food system is highly susceptible to global instabilities. With the population only increasing and more people living...

Reterritorialisation of agricultural activities in land-use and food planning: Comparing the Netherlands and France

The reterritorialisation of agricultural activities (RAA) consists of reinforcing local food production and its diversification activities oriented toward local consumers. RAA helps shape the local food system, which is an increasingly studied topic in the planning field. However, institutional impacts on planning approaches for RAA remain...

Made in the MRA: How the Metropolitan Region of Amsterdam could source a quarter of its food from the region by 2030

This master's thesis explores four future scenarios for short food supply chains in the Metropolitan Region of Amsterdam in 2030 and their potential spatial impact. Agricultural land in the Netherlands has been decreasing in recent decades, especially within the Metropolitan Region of Amsterdam. This trend is likely to continue in the coming...

Scaling Local Bottom-Up Innovations through Value Co-Creation

Bottom-up initiatives of active citizens are increasingly demonstrating sustainable practices within local ecosystems. Local urban farming, sustainable agri-food systems, circular supply chains, and community fablabs are exemplary ways of tackling global challenges on a local level. Although promising in accelerating towards future-proof...

Vertical Farming in the Netherlands: Towards a Circular Food System: A Business Ecosystem Perspective

The world’s current food system is unsustainable and considering the increasing human population, there is a demand for innovations in the circular food production. Simultaneously, food security be­ comes a topic of interest as greenhouse gasses cause more extreme weather conditions. Vertical farming potentially plays a vital role in the food...

Synergising Architecture: Integrating Food System Processes with Urban Functions Towards Liveable and Sustainable Agri-Food Business Parks in Westland

Food has played an important role in shaping our metropolitan regions, such as Westland in South Holland, The Netherlands. The industrialisation and globalisation of agriculture in Westland has prioritised economy and efficiency, creating issues of liveability and sustainability. The market-driven expansion of the agri-food industry has...

DownScale-Up!: Downscaling global agri-food flows with an upscaled regional system

The Netherlands exported in 2017 for 91,7 billion euros and exported for even more: 62,6 billion euros(CBS, 2018). This shows the big agri-food fl ows in which the Netherlands is involved. Sadly, these global fl ows have a big impact on economic, social and environmental sustainability worldwide. For example, transport causes many emissions,...

Bigels and multi-component organogels: An overview from rheological perspective

Background: Polymeric gels, an important class of soft matter systems, are widely used for commercial applications particularly in food products (i.e., saturated fat replacement). The efficiency of the product for a particular application can be directly linked to its rheological signature. However, the rheological imprint of these structured...

Global water and energy losses from consumer avoidable food waste

Food products require significant amounts of energy and water throughout their lifecycle, yet humanity wastes 1.3e9 tons of food on a yearly basis. A large part of this waste occurs during the consumption (post-retail) phase of the food system as avoidable food waste, the discarded edible (parts of) food products. In this study, we explore the...

Every purchase counts: Creating awareness by involving consumers in the impact of their food choices

The Dutch food system nowadays is more efficient than ever and is able to feed many. However, this globalized and industrialized food system cannot be sustained in the next eras, because of its high contribution to biodiversity loss, the emission of greenhouse gasses and the fast decrease of soil health. System change is needed to move our food...

From resource draining to maintaining

The area of Amstel III will drastically change by 2040 into a lively urban district. This change allows for the rethinking of the urban metabolism of the area, to shorten the material cycles and by better utilization of resources. Through estimation and calculations on potential flows related to energy, water, and organic material the potential...

The Other Side of the Table: The Countryside's Role in the Brandenburg-Berlin Food System

This thesis has two main subject areas: 1) Peripheries/rural areas, more specifically those that have been in decline for a long time. Their problems have recently gained another level of urgency with the territorially-bound emergence of populism in European democracies. The specific expression this typology takes within the region state of...

Circular Urban Agriculture in The Hague: Where We Are and Where We Could Go

Cities account for approximately 75% of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. This, along with the fact that cities also account for 75% of natural resource consumption and 50% of global waste production, makes urbanization a world-wide issue (Sukhdev, Vol, Brandt, & Yeoman, 2017). Additionally, the widely-practiced urban linear economic structure...

Food Island: Creating a Resilient Food System for the AMA

Governments and private and non-profit organisations from international to local levels have acknowledged the idea that more sustainable systems are required to reduce our ecological footprint (WWF, 2016, Jonkhoff, 2012). The food system is a very important aspect within our lives, socially as well as economically but it is also one of the most...

Alternative approaches to food: Community supported agriculture in urban China

One of the most remarkable features of China's development path is its large-scale and fast-paced urbanization. As cities already accommodate more than half of China's population, new challenges to urban food systems have emerged concurrently. Concerns over environmental degradation and food safety have provoked growing dissatisfaction with...

City pig farm: A design-based-research on urban livestock farming

Over the last centuries, the global food system has managed to provide a growing global population with more and better food. Yet, the system is criticised for its negative effects, like increasing food miles, monocultures, a lack of transparency and poor animal welfare. The recent trend to farm more food in an around cities (urban and peri...

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