FoodPLand

Throughout history, fertile soils have often been a starting point for the foundations of settlements. But these fertile soils are now becoming scarcer as cities expand. Currently, around half of the world's population live in cities. For ensuring food security, fertile soils in urban and peri-urban areas need to be protected from conversion to built-up. The central hypothesis of the project is that (1) governments are mandated to implement policies which integrate food security on the urban agenda. However, for selecting the best integration strategies, a good understanding of (2) ongoing local land use transformations and (3) amplitude of land use displacement is needed. Such assessments would determine the (4) capacity for food provision of urban regions, findings which serve for designing tailored urban planning strategies. These four interlinked dimensions set the ground for the overall aim of the project: develop approaches for integrating food security into urban policies.