About

The Urban Food Flows website is an initiative by a number of urban food flows researchers who want to highlight the importance and the potential of collecting, sharing, and visualizing urban food flows data.

We believe that food flows are an important part of the socio-economic metabolism of a city, but so far, there has not yet been sufficient attention from researchers and policy makers to unpack urban food systems using metabolism tools. Some of the reasons why we believe this is valuable include:

• Unlike looking at a single food flow (such as consumption or food waste), looking at the entire urban food system allows for a much better understanding of the system as a whole, and it can greatly help in understanding data gaps when different flows don't match.
• Despite food data often being made available at a national level, there are often significant differences between the national average and food flows in a specific city. We believe that we should move away from national data and look at urban food flows to understand local impacts and patterns.
• Food systems can be transformed to link to more local and regional agricultural production if there is enough political and local willingness (unlike e.g. electronics or energy systems, which will require more time to transform).
• Our industrial, global food systems incur a large amount of food waste, and have a large environmental footprint. We want to highlight these impacts and make both residents and policy makers more aware of this.

In order to draw more attention to urban food flows, we developed this online, open source data dashboard that presents visualizations of different food systems. This work accompanies the following paper:

Data requirements for a systematic analysis of urban food flows and their sustainability outcomes, Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science (in print). L. Guibrunet, P. Hoekman, A. Bortolotti, J. Battersby-Lennard

In this paper, we show that there is great potential for more detailed food flow studies at an urban level. However, we also demonstrate that existing data is often limited and that close attention should be paid to the data quality of underlying datasets.

This platform currently shares the data collected on four cities which formed part of the initial data exercise for the aforementioned publication. None of these cities has data of sufficient quantity and quality that a complete and reliable urban food flow study can be undertaken. However, we believe that by starting to make these datasets more easily accessible and by providing others with these same tools, we might be able to give urban food flow studies more attention, hopefully leading to improvements in data quality and availability over time.

The Urban Food Flows platform can create the same set of data visualizations and comparisons for other cities, and we encourage researchers to join these efforts by contributing new datasets. Read more about contributing data here.

Our team

This platform was set up by Paul Hoekman (The Untraceable University), Louise Guibrunet (Institute of Geography, National Autonomous University of Mexico) and Andrea Bortolotti (Politecnico di Milano).