Agro-cities, Agri-cultures, productive grounds: How food cycles shape our land and urban society

Understanding how the current daily consume habits widely affect the level of food production, distribution and consumption is inherently linked to the structural limitations of our urban society. The extensions of actual food systems compared to urbanization trends are strictly related but not geographically comparable, thus cities and hinterlands results to be (dis)connected over vast distances through flows of goods, people, energy, biota, money, knowledge, and information. In this sense, in order to discuss the geography of urban food supply and particularly to describe the linkages between food-producing and food-consuming regions at different scales, in the early 20th century, the foodshed concept has become widespread. In the framework of the European Project Creative Food Cycles (CFC 2018-20), the paper suggests potential areas for cross‐disciplinary synergies around the concept of Urban Food Strategies, understood as an operative spatial planning tool to study and shape the governance of socio-spatial transformations related to food. Specifically, the study explores the application of a quanto-qualitiative approach to regional foodshed applied methodology which combines: (1) agricultural productivity index, by estimating local self-sufficiency according to a specific population demand; (2) food flows analysis (input/ output) by mapping main food processing areas compared with urban hotspots of distribution and consumption.