Smart Food Governance, Sustainability Transitions and City-Regions. Presentation given by Damian Maye at The Governance of the Smart Cities Food Agenda conference on 28 September at LabExpo Milan. More information on Damian can be found http://www.ccri.ac.uk/maye/

1. Smart cities food governance:
technopolitics, innovation theory
and city-regionalism
Dr. Damian Maye
Countryside and Community Research Institute
University of Gloucestershire, UK
Governance of the smart cities food agenda: the Milan World Expo Challenge
EXPO, 28th September 2015, Milan
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2. GLAMUR (www.glamur.eu)
• integrate scientific knowledge about food
chain impacts with knowledge about
practice to increase sustainability of FSC.
SUPURBFOOD (www.supurbfood.eu)
• Three activities:
– Closing waste, water & nutrient cycles
– Shortening food chains
– Multi-functional land use
FOODMETRES (www.foodmetres.eu)
– Metropolitan footprint assessment tools
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3. What makes a city ‘smart’?
• Two related understandings (Kitchin, 2014):
– The increasing extent to which cities are
composed of ‘everyware’;
– The development of a knowledge economy within
a city-region.
• Underlying neoliberal ethos
• Prioritisation of data capture and
analysis to underpin policy dev.
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4. Big data and smart urbanism
• Emergence of real-
time analytics (Kitchin
et al., 2015);
• ‘City dashboards’
• Frame the city as
‘visualised facts’
• Reshape how we view
and manage cities
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5. ‘Smart agriculture’
• Precision agriculture revolution
• Agri-Tech strategy in the UK, for e.g.
• Framing: sustainable intensification
• Examples: Big data; robotic farming; drones
(unmanned aerial systems); ‘internet of
things’ technologies; vertical farming
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6. Smart cities and technopolitics
• Politics of big urban data, an overly technocratic
governance, corporatisation of governance and a
technological lock-in… (Kitchin, 2014)
• Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and ‘techno-politics’
(Freidberg, 2014).
• Need to democratise knowledge; reflect values
and perceptions as legitimate knowledge claims.
• Post-normal science (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1993)
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7. Urban food systems
• Cities operate beyond the productive capacity of
their hinterland (Steel, 2008).
• Food provisioning in a city is a hybrid food system
• Urban food system pressures (Wiskerke, 2015):
– Population growth, urbanisation, changing diets,
scarcity and depletion of resources, climate
change and public health concerns.
• Need to re-examine the sustainability and
resilience of urban food systems.
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8. Defining innovation
• Technological innovations
• Social innovations
• Incremental innovations
• Radical innovations
• (Urban) sustainability transitions
(Wittmayer et al., 2014)

9. Social practices at the
local / ‘firm’ level
• Multi-Level Perspective: interactions at different
levels (vertical lens).
• Social innovation practices at the local level
(horizontal lens).
• ‘Systems of practice’ (e.g. cycling - Wilson, 2012)
(soft changes; changes to associated systems;
context is central).
• ‘Sustainable innovation journeys’ as practices
(Langendahl et al, 2014); ‘alignments of interest’.
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10. Transformative capacity
• Transformation: what type and level of
change is happening?
• Transformative capacity: ‘intrinsic
benefits’; ‘diffusion benefits’ (Seyfang and
Smith, 2007; Seyfang and Haxeltine, 2012).
• Practice approach provides horizontal
appreciation of transformation/alignments.
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11. • Many LF projects are urban/peri-urban.
• LF supporting community-based projects
• Mobilising SFSC concept at community scale
• Many LF projects are not about food (i.e.
more than just the veg); pretext & vector for
social agency (Kirwan et al., 2013)
• Need to capture/involve grassroots social
innovations in resilience governance
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12. Resilient urban food systems
Wiskerke (2015):
• City-region perspective: enables integrated
approach; contextual specificity
• Connect flows: circular model of
metabolism; high and low-tech systems
• Create synergies: spatial synergies; food is
a vector to link urban policy objectives
• Food system planning: plan for resilience
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13. City-region perspective
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14. Summary
• Be wary of technopolitics; inclusion of a
wide range of perspectives to overcome
‘hypocognition’ (Lakeoff, 2004).
• Innovation: smart cities – techno
innovation; also social / civic practices, soft
changes and links to associated systems.
• Governance of resilient urban food
systems: city-region perspective.
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Thank you for your attention
dmaye@glos.ac.uk
www.ccri.ac.uk