You will acquire an understanding of the following:
• The notion of a city-region and its flows, and how food articulates these, with a special emphasis on the chains linking all activities (production, through marketting to consumption).
• The transformative role which can be played by different actors: urban food-system planners; food-system activists; socially/environmentally conscious prosumers; people growing food within the city, whether commercially or for subsistence.
• Why the current mainstream approach can’t guarantee urban food security: issues of access and distribution, leading to widespread food poverty, while also undermining livelihoods of small farmers.
• Ideas for addressing problems which have always been endemic, but now highlighted by COVID: the need for resilience to shocks; to combat pernicious tendencies which exacerbate food poverty and injustice (thus, organic food is great for the environment and nutrition, but if it’s only available to wealthier consumers this can polarise society still further). Food as a focus for post-pandemic building back better.
• How agriculture relates to climate, both as cause of emissions, and as a potential mitigating factor.
• Key features of a physical approach to a sustainable farming alternative, often called ‘agroecology’. This draws on elements of no-till, natural systems agriculture, permaculture etc., and has the potential to launch a benign feedback loop of carbon sequestration and enhanced soil fertility.
• Why the technical solution to sustainability has historically been, and continues to be, inseparable from social struggles for emancipation from unjust property relations, for access to land, justice and the democratisation of knowledge; the contemporary significance of and ‘food sovereignty’ as a focus for these causes.
• How urban citizens can – through approaches such as Community Supported Agriculture – help revitalise small farms on a new, sustainable basis.

The module is inter-disciplinary, and typically attended by a spread of participants from different departments across UCL. Diversity is one of the module’s strengths, and you are much encouraged – in class discussions and in written work – to make links with the specific concerns of your Masters, as well as with your academic, professional and life experiences.

Delivery Methods: Online delivery.
Module Leader: Robert Biel.
Robert is a political ecologist and (nearly self-sufficient!) urban food-grower. He has worked on several research projects, including Closing the Waste-Energy-Food Loop - Applying Anaerobic Digestate to Urban Agriculture; Mapping the Current Landscape of Food Co-operatives in London and Creating a living lab for Transformative Urban Agroecology; he is the author of the open-access book Sustainable Food Systems – The Role of the City (UCL Press) http://bit.ly/2gxE7J2
Guest Lecturer: Yves Cabannes
Yves is Emeritus Professor of Development Planning at UCL. He has worked as researcher/practitioner in urban agriculture and food sovereignty, collective and communal forms of land tenure, Garden cities, local currencies, participatory planning, low-cost housing, participatory budgeting, community-based micro credit systems and appropriate technologies for local development.
Maximum class Size: 35
NOTE: This is a popular topic, and the module tends to be oversubscribed; it’s therefore strongly advised that you enroll as early as possible.

[Note on the relation of this module to DEVP0027: while the two are designed so they can be taken separately and each is coherent in itself, we also conceived them so could be taken together to give a comprehensive view of the sustainable food system of the future]