SUPURBFOOD project report of the case study Zurich: Agri-food dynamics and governance of the urban food system

Summary

Conclusion
The analysis of the Zurich city region has shown interesting developments but also several blockages (problems or challenges), opportunities and priorities.
There are an impressive number of initiatives and organisations in the city dealing with agriculture, sustainable food provisioning, and closing nutrient cycles. However an overall sustainable food strategy for the City of Zurich is missing. The three themes (i) food provisioning, (ii) multifunctional land use, and (iii) recycling of nutrients and waste are not really linked to each other.
A major difficulty is that different departments of the city administration and different elected politicians are responsible for these themes.
Nevertheless, the overall goals of the “2000-Watt-Society” and the overall sustainability goals of the city can be the starting point for a more in-depth reflection on how to develop urban food and agriculture policies and to create synergies.
The following main conclusions can be made:
- Sustainability aspects in the public procurement of food, as well as in the land use practices, need more attention in the future. There is a need to define criteria for sustainable food provisioning. Urban agriculture and gardening initiatives need different forms of support due to their contribution to social integration in the city as well as to a more sustainable consumption of food. It would be desirable to give land use security in a longer perspective to such initiatives to enable them to make more long-term investments.
- More efforts are needed to avoid and reduce food and green wastes and to reuse them in an efficient and differentiated way, which is not only economically reasonable but ecologically sound.
- More cooperation is needed between different actors of the policy, market and civil society around a sustainable food and land use policy.
- The self-responsibility and motivation of the actors should be strengthened and administrative burdens should be reduced.