Urban Food Security and Resilience

Abstract

The concept of resilience within urban food systems has gained significant academic and policy focus in recent years. This aligns with the increased global awareness of the problem of urban food insecurity, and increased focus on sub-national policies for sustainable development. COVID-19 demonstrated a series of vulnerabilities in the food system and the urban system. Academic work on urban food system resilience is wide ranging, however particular areas of focus dominate, focusing on urban agriculture, localized food systems, resilient city region food systems and the water-energy-food nexus. Renewed interest in resilience policy at the local government level has been amplified by global networks, whose framing of urban food systems resilience is embedded within the SDGs and the New Urban Agenda. Using findings from cities in five African countries, we argue for a re-framing of urban food system resilience that is inclusive of a wider set of factors shaping the form and function of the food system; that the urban system, specifically infrastructure, shapes the functioning of the food system and the ability of consumers to use the food system; and that the agency of urban food system users needs inclusion in understandings of, and efforts to increase, food systems resilience.

Introduction

Many writers have effectively captured the emergence, progression, framings and limitations of the concepts of urban resilience (see Béné et al., 2018), crisis and disaster management and resilience, both urban and more generally (Boin et al., 2010) and how, given the challenges in many developing countries and societies, including socioeconomic inequities, “negotiated resilience” may be more desirable (Ziervogel et al., 2017). The concept of resilience within urban systems has gained significant academic and policy focus in the last 10 years (see Coaffee et al., 2018; Béné et al., 2018). We suggest here that the concept of urban food systems resilience is inadequately framed and these framings miss the everyday resilience practices of African urban consumers. While emerging arguments encompass useful touchpoints and relevance, in general these lack contextualised, and specifically Southern, applicability.

The emergence of generalised urban and food systems resilience positions aligns both to the increased global awareness of the problem of food insecurity in urban areas, and to the increased focus on sub-national policy for sustainable development. There has been a particular flurry of academic interest in the wake of COVID-19 which demonstrated a series of vulnerabilities in the food system and the urban system (Moseley & Battersby, 2020) which evolve at the intersection of multiple systems, including social systems, social services systems, health systems, infrastructure systems and economic systems at an urban scale.

The population of food and nutrition insecure urban residents is growing in absolute terms in many cities in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (Crush et al., 2012; Hawkes & Fanzo, 2017; Popkin et al., 2012; Ruel et al., 2017). This figure is higher in informal and marginalized settlements (Crush & Frayne, 2010). For many decades, food and nutrition insecurity has been framed as a food provision issue, with the belief that food shortages and unavailability were the key limiting factors of food security. Yet, this framing lacks the means to effectively conceptualize food and nutrition security, which are also affected by access to, use of and stability of food.

This chapter focuses on the aspirations and limitations associated with the resilience of African urban food systems. This focus is deliberate. Firstly, a key component of the wider argument of this chapter is the importance of contextual nuance and focus, rejecting travelling concepts that are often parachuted into distant contexts (Battersby, 2012a). A further reason is that while other regions, particularly South Asia, may face similar demographic and governance shifts, African cities are poised for dramatic change. The scale and pace of African urban transition requires specific considerations of what urban food system resilience requires and how resilience manifests in context. Added to this, the demographic shifts that have taken place and are currently accelerating in sub-Saharan Africa, mean that our current understanding of the drivers of food and nutrition insecurity, policy responses, as well as threats and related crises, need review and nuance.

Africa’s demographic and emergent economic growth is primarily taking place in cities (Cirolia, 2020). When these changes are considered in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, food, nutrition and urban health issues are of critical importance. Africa’s urban transition is taking place in largely unplanned ways. Current urban development processes generally prioritize large scale infrastructure (Cirolia, 2020), decentralized governance (Pieterse et al., 2018) and elite developments (Myers, 2015; Turok, 2016), all with little or no cognizance of urban food system challenges, specifically food and nutrition insecurity (Battersby & Watson, 2018). Africa’s urban transition requires far greater attention because “the urban transition of the next few decades will be formative of future developmental opportunities on the continent” (Pieterse et al., 2018, p. 151).

The urban food system allows for a nuanced and broader approach to questions of resilience. Urban food systems and the resultant outcomes are shaped by flows of multiple physical, economic, material and social goods. These are all supported, deepened and made resilient through constantly maintained relationships. The resilience of the food system depends on flows of food, money and social networks inter alia, each of which have unique points of vulnerability and resilience. For many urban food system actors, particularly the poor in rapidly growing African cities, the ability to use the food system is shaped by the form and function of the urban system. However, it is the agency, the ability of those different food system consumers to use the urban food system in ways that suit their daily, contextual and wider community needs, that contributes in a significant way to build their resilience.

Using food as a lens (per Steel, 2008), this chapter builds on critiques from other disciplines, such as urban poverty (Friend & Moench, 2013), taking a more critical view of current urban food systems’ resilience approaches and conceptualizations, posing two questions about the intersections between the food system and the urban systems. First, we argue that in many framings of resilience, components such as agency, choice, even a diversity of options, are seldom effectively considered. Secondly, we present food security framings from FANTA (Swindale & Bilinsky, 2006)-aligned food security surveys highlighting the state of food insecurity in cities in Kenya, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe to question notions of resilience, particularly framings of resilience articulated as the ability to recover from disruption (Friend & Moench, 2013), stoicism (James, 2011) or revert to a pre-existing state of stability (Padgham et al., 2015). Our point is that many African urban food systems users are in a constant state of crisis or prolonged shock, a concept described by Béné et al. (2016, fig. 7) as a “continual state of incomplete recovery”. Does a more traditional framing of the capacity to bounce back (James, 2011) or recover assume a measure of stability, or a desired previous state that is ideal? We suggest in this chapter that different measures of resilience are required, measures that take into account the constant state of crisis, and how the extremes of these perpetual stressors are mediated, diluted and overcome, albeit temporarily, while at the same time valorizing the agency and networks present and activated in these situations.

The chapter proceeds with a review of Africa’s urban transition. It then engages some of the current trends evident at the intersections between resilience, urbanization and food security. The chapter then reflects on global processes, such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the UN Habitat New Urban Agenda (NUA) agreements. These global targets and indicators of sustainability and well-being aspire to greater sustainability and resilience. A review of the state of food insecurity is presented supported by responses to that food insecurity and the strategies applied in accessing food. The chapter closes, reflecting on these aspects, their implications for policy engagements around urban food and nutrition systems’ planning. We also suggest a need for greater engagement in context, questioning generalizations and approaches that assume universal applicability of such concepts.

Urban Food Resilience and the 2nd Urban Transition

Africa is urbanizing at a rapid rate, faster than any other continent (UN-DESA, 2019). Two aligned processes are driving this demographic transition. First is a move from rural to urban areas. The general depopulation of rural areas discourse requires interrogation though, with endogenous urban growth being an equal, if not greater driver in Africa (Crankshaw & Borel-Saladin, 2019; Menashe‐Oren & Bocquier, 2021). In addition to this, Africa’s median age is 19.7 years—the youngest in the world (Saleh, 2021). The rapid growth in African and Asian cities is a component of what has been termed the second urbanization transition (Pieterse, 2008).

The global North was the site of the first general societal urbanization process and was facilitated by, and resulted in, a number of societal shifts. Agricultural innovation and resulting increases in production lowered the price of food. Lower food prices meant reduced rural employment opportunities. Abundant labour and lower food prices were vital drivers of the industrialization process, particularly in rapidly growing urban areas (Beall & Fox, 2009, p. 47; Satterthwaite, 2007). The combination of cheap food, industrialization and subsequent specialization and new forms of urban governance enabled urban development. Cities in Europe and North America became the centres of economic growth. These foundational urbanization processes are playing out in different ways in cities in the global South, with great variations across African cities. The second urban transition is taking place within a particular geopolitical and economic moment (Satterthwaite, 2007). The lack of industrial growth in African cities reflects the sharp contrast between Africa’s current urban transition and that of the first urban transition (Swilling & Annecke, 2012). Two differences have a direct bearing on the resilience of African urban populations. Firstly, the first urbanization process paid little attention to the sites of resource and wealth extraction and the longer-term consequences of that extraction, specifically the lock-ins now seen in terms of economy, resource types and ecological and climatic threats. Secondly, the general trend in the first urbanization wave was linked and mutually benefiting urbanization and industrialization. In Africa, urbanization is taking place in the context of a general post-Fordist environment (Pieterse, 2008) and in an economy where there is a restricted middle class and thin tax base (Pieterse et al., 2015), resulting in constrained economic activity. Earlier resource-based development models and systems (such as energy from coal) curtail options further as a result of issues such as climate change and the limitations placed on access to capital and resourcing to facilitate large-scale infrastructure development (Turok, 2016). One manifestation of this is informality, in housing, employment and other essential services. The largely informal profile of African cities presents a very different entry point to engage questions of resilience.

Rapidly growing African urban areas encounter multiple and, at times, mutually reinforcing development realities related to food, including food insecurity (Frayne et al., 2010), food systems transformation (Battersby & Watson, 2018), the growth of supermarkets (Peyton et al., 2015; Reardon et al., 2003) and the nutrition transition (Drewnowski & Popkin, 1997; Hawkes, 2006). When these food systems-related transitions intersect with other transitions, such as increased poverty and inequality, increased climatic variability (IPCC, 2021), global geopolitical shifts and global economic contraction, and watershed events such as pest infestations (often driven by climatic changes) and global health crises, urban areas face significant development and governance challenges.

In sum, Africa’s urban transition presents a unique challenge. But it also offers opportunities. The scale of Africa’s urbanization is unprecedented (Pieterse & Parnell, 2014; Satterthwaite, 2007). Given the state of under-development in African cities, the African city of 2030 and beyond is yet to be cast in concrete.

General descriptions of the African city, the slum city (Davis, 2006), or the auto-constructed city (Pieterse, 2013), while real, fail to effectively capture the processes, networks and dynamics of the African city. What the African city does reflect is an endless struggle. In this struggle, different forms of city-ness, networks and agency emerge, and with them different forms of resilience. Inequality and its intersection with the everyday nature of diverse African cities feeds directly into how the food system operates.

Despite what has at times been a hostile approach to cities on the African continent (see Pieterse et al., 2018), recognition of the importance of cities in Africa’s development is slowly emerging. Importantly cities are also now a key part of wider global governance arrangements such as the sustainable development goals (SDGs). Tracking global processes offers a useful lens through which to understand the emergence of specific approaches and positions, specifically urban resilience.

Evolving Global Governance Positions

There are many drivers framing what resilience might be. Attempts to articulate resilience in the urban food system, engaging processes that intersect between wider food system threats and challenges, and urban processes heightens complexity. In this chapter, we chart the wider sustainability and resilience-oriented processes and how these intersect with wider global and urban development processes. Here, we apply the challenge posed by Pieterse et al. (2018, p. 151) that

Rather than bemoaning the lack of policy impact, we suggest it is important for scholars to engage global urban policy-making, probing where and how to augment and refine what is clearly a path-breaking moment in how development on the African continent is understood and how the life in the African metropolis is perceived.

To this end, we align the evolution of global urban and food systems-related development approaches to their impacts on urban food resilience framings. First, we track the evolution of global goals, then the explicitly urban processes. These are followed by a reflection and critical engagement with concepts and approaches that have evolved from, or been given meaning, as a result of these processes and their employment in urban food resilience.

Histories and evolving processes matter. Fukuda-Parr and Orr (2014) argue that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have had important “governance” (policy) and “knowledge” (norms and concepts) effects through their goals, targets and indicators. They have both shifted policy and programmatic focus and redefined the concepts and norms that shape development discourse (Battersby, 2017). It has been argued that the MDG approach and framing may have distorted the development agenda and removed focus from some critical issues (Yamin & Falb, 2012) such as food security and urban food security specifically.

Food and nutrition security was included as part of the MDG 1, under Target 1C: “Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.” Although the inclusion of food within the first MDG should have assured its prominence, World Bank Managing Director Wheeler called it the “forgotten MDG” (Fukuda-Parr & Orr, 2014, p. 152). This indicator-led development agenda has been critiqued for allowing these indicators to drive development agendas, rather than being used to measure progress towards broader development aims. And as has been argued “measurement drives diagnosis and response” (Barrett, 2010, p. 827).

The SDGs build on the foundation provided by the MDGs which they replaced in 2016. SDG Targets 2.1 and 2.2 are the only two food security targets within the SDG 2 targets, and both frame the food problem as one of scarcity (Burchi & Holzapfel, 2015, p. 17). This does not reflect the current and future realities of food insecurity in the global South. The lack of attention to urban and consumption issues within SDG 2 is exacerbated by the lack of dialogue across goals (Weitz et al., 2014).

SDG 11, which focuses on cities and communities, makes no reference to food and consumption in any way. As Jonathan Crush has argued in a public presentation, “SDG 2 imagines a world without cities, while SDG 11 imagines an urban world in which no-one eats” (Crush, 2017). The omission of food in SDG 11 was deliberate. In order to enable the inclusion of an explicitly urban goal in the SDGs, caution was required to avoid encroaching on other goals and interests. This was particularly evident with SDG2. While the inclusion of an exclusively urban goal is of great benefit, it does present certain challenges. Given scarce resources in many African cities, statistical data collection is limited (Acuto & Parnell, 2016). Programming and reporting on the SDGs are being prioritized over other data collection processes. In countries where limited data exists and data collection capacity is weak, this has consequences. Where SDG-related data collection becomes one of the only measurement processes in these countries, evidence for policy programming is constrained. If diagnosis of the realities is constrained by the limited focus of the goals, policy actions run the risk of missing key needs. Misaligned policy actions run the risk of undermining resilience. Arguably, it was left to the Habitat III and the policy position articulated in the New Urban Agenda to then enable some measure of urban food programming and policy action.

Habitat III, the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, which took place in Quito, Ecuador, in 2016 formed part of the bi-decennial cycle (1976, 1996 and 2016) of urban conferences facilitated by the UN body, led by UN-Habitat. Habitat III was one of the first United Nations’ global summits after the adoption of the Post-2015 Development Agenda. It was an opportunity to discuss important urban challenges and questions, such as how to plan and manage cities, towns and villages for sustainable development. In particular, the Habitat III conference elaborated on SDG11 to “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable” (Amann & Jurasszovich, 2017).

The Habitat III conference aimed to re-assert the global commitment to sustainable cities, through the implementation of the conference strategic outcome. The New Urban Agenda set out an urban vision encapsulated in three overarching principles and four commitments. The principles include:

• (a) Leave no one behind, by ending poverty in all its forms and dimensions.

• (b) Ensure sustainable and inclusive urban economies by leveraging the agglomeration benefits of well-planned urbanization,

• (c) Ensure environmental sustainability by promoting clean energy and sustainable use of land and resources in urban development (UN-Habitat, 2017, p. 7).

The four mechanisms envisioned for effecting the New Urban Agenda are:

• National urban policies promoting “integrated systems of cities and human settlements” in furtherance of “sustainable integrated urban development”.

• Stronger urban governance“with sound institutions and mechanisms that empower and include urban stakeholders” along with checks and balances, to promote predictability, social inclusion, economic growth, and environmental protection.

• Reinvigorated “long-term and integrated urban and territorial planning and design in order to optimize the spatial dimension of the urban form and deliver the positive outcomes of urbanization”; and

• Effective financing frameworks “to create, sustain and share the value generated by sustainable urban development in an inclusive manner” (UN-Habitat, 2017, p. 8).

Together, the MDGs, SDGs and the NUA established a platform for how sustainable urbanization and wider sustainability questions are framed and understood at the global scale. These framings intersect with other aligned more normative approaches that seek to connect different systems, envisioned as offering opportunities to enhance sustainability and resilience.

Emerging Concepts and Positions

The notion of sustainability that developed following the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, and the later Brundtland Commission that gave voice to the term sustainable development in their “Our Common Future” report (WCED, 1987) formalized earlier processes and embedded the concepts into global governance structures. Subsequently, multiple iterations of the concept sustainable development and sustainability have emerged (Swilling & Annecke, 2012). Alongside these multiple conceptualizations, various strategies and models have been suggested as tools to enact and enliven the concept of sustainable development (Dresner, 2012).

At the intersection between food and cities, varied positions are articulated. These approaches are often embedded in specific normative, ideological and value-oriented positions (see Haysom et al., 2019). Four such approaches are discussed below, selected because they align with the vision of sustainable urban food systems embedded within the New Urban Agenda, each suggesting tools through which urban food systems resilience could be enacted.

Urban Agriculture as a Source of Food System Resilience

There is a body of evidence questioning the importance of urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA), suggesting that its role in relation to food security has been overstated (Ellis & Sumberg, 1998; Zezza & Tasciotti, 2010). Others have presented concerns over the assumptions about the UPA growers (see Battersby, 2012b). Padgham et al. (2015) have identified a variety of factors that undermine the potential of UPA. Despite this, UPA is still actively advocated and promoted by some as a powerful urban food systems’ resilience tool. This is best seen in a recent peer reviewed piece arguing in favour of UPA as a “necessary pathway towards urban resilience and global sustainability” (Langemeyer et al., 2021, p. 1). Here, it is argued that UPA reduces and offers resilience against social and ecological vulnerabilities and risk-related inequalities of urban inhabitants, including food shortages and different scenarios of global change, including climate change or pandemic events such as COVID-19. UPA is also posited by these authors as an effective tool to reduce the “intensified negative environmental (and related social) externalities caused by distant agricultural production, as well as lacking consideration of nutrient re-cycling potentials in cities (e.g., from wastewater) to replace emission intensive mineral fertilizer use” (Langemeyer et al., 2021, p. 1). Finally, the authors’ point to the multifunctionality of UPA, and with it, the “multiple benefits it provides beyond the provision of food, including social benefits and insurance values, for instance the maintenance of cultural heritage and agro-biodiversity” (Langemeyer et al., 2021, p. 1). African urban food system studies do not find empirical evidence to support such assertions, particularly for poorer urban residents (see, e.g. Crush et al., 2017; Joubert et al., 2018; Pieterse et al., 2020).

Localized Food Systems as a Source of Resilience

There have been many advocates for localized systems, some embedded in local knowledge and cultures (Norberg Hodge, 2013), embeddedness within local systems (Feenstra, 2002) and economic regeneration (Hopkins, 2011), to name a few. However, as Born and Purcell (2006, p. 196) point out “the assumption that the local is desirable does not always hold”. Born and Purcell’s statement is based on case study evidence, but also a wider normative and theoretical engagement in questions of scale. These critiques challenge some of the wider SDG-related assumptions and earlier sustainability processes, such as Local Agenda 21, now Agenda21. Agenda21 is a non-binding action plan promoting a local sustainability agenda. This emerged following the 1996 Rio Summit on Sustainable Development, and guides work of a number of urban bodies, including Local Governments for Sustainability or ICLEI, previously the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives.

City Regional Food System as a Way of Building Resilience

More recently and embedded within the overarching urban food system framing, and by implication, resilience agenda, of Habitat III, was a wider vision of cities being able to “fulfil their territorial functions across administrative boundaries and act as hubs and drivers for balanced, sustainable and integrated urban and territorial development at all levels” (UN-Habitat, 2017, p. 7). With specific reference to food and food systems governance, the City Region Food System (CRFS) aspires to “a sustainable, resilient CRFS (…) to enhance sustainability across scales and sectors” (Blay-Palmer et al., 2018, p. 3). The CRFS is argued to increase access to food generate decent jobs and income, increase the region’s resilience against shocks and lessen the dependence on distant supply sources, fostering rural-urban linkages, promotes ecosystem and natural resources management, and supports participatory governance (Blay-Palmer et al., 2018).

The Water-Energy-Food Nexus

As a concept, the wider nexus hypothesis of the water-energy-food nexus was launched at the Bonn 2011 Nexus Conference (Endo et al., 2017, p. 20). This work is also closely linked to a publication on water security, also using the nexus concept, produced by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2011 (WEF, 2011). The WEF work starts with a position that assists in clarifying how this concept frames the nexus: “Water security is the gossamer that links together the web of food, energy, climate, economic growth, and human security challenges that the world economy faces over the next two decades … the increasing volatility on food prices in 2008, 2009 and again in 2010 should be treated as early warning signs of what is to come. Arguably it is water that lies at the structural heart of these agricultural challenges” (WEF, 2011, p. 1). While the WEF presented the nexus framework from a securities’ perspective (water–energy–food security), later versions have taken on various facets with alternative components (Biggs et al., 2015). Subsequently, “there is no fixed concept of nexus (…) but the (…) nexus is internationally interpreted as a process to link ideas and actions of different stakeholders under different sectors and levels for achieving sustainable development” (Endo et al., 2017, p. 22).

These positions and concepts all intersect with and are given life in an array of urban food and resilience programmes and practices that are emerging. These are generally global but are increasingly grappling with the challenges evident in African cities. Many of these, thanks to their wider urban systems framings, engage the question of urban food systems resilience, while some are deliberately urban food focused, embedded within wider sustainability and resilience conceptualizations. The leading programmes are summarized in Box 11.1.

Box 11.1: Leading urban food systems sustainability/resilience programmes and initiatives

The Resilient Cities Network¹: Consists of member cities and Chief Resilience Officers from the 100 Resilient Cities programme (100RC), sharing a common lens for holistic urban resilience and projects in implementation. 100RC was initiated by The Rockefeller Foundation in 2013, as part of its Global Centennial Initiative.

C40 is a network of mayors of nearly 100 cities²: C40 was founded in 2005 by the then mayor of London where agreement was sought (initially from a collection of “mega-cities”—the C20) for cooperatively reducing climate pollution. Following the formation of a small group, in 2006 a further collection of mayors were invited to ensure “balance from the Global South”, creating an organization of 40 cities. Also in 2006, the Clinton Climate Initiative became the implementing partner and in 2007, then New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg hosted the second C40 Summit, and in 2010 he was elected Chair of C40.

Milan Urban Food Policy Pact (MUFPP)³: Formed in 2014 by the mayor of Milan, MUFPP is an international agreement of mayors that operates as a network of cities, providing tools and guidance for cities seeking to implement urban food actions. The MUFPP uses a Framework for Action listing 37 recommended actions, clustered in six categories, as the overarching guide to urban food systems’ engagement. For each recommended action, there are specific indicators designed to assist in monitoring progress for implementing the Pact. The six MUFPP categories or indicators are:

• The presence of an active municipal interdepartmental government body for advisory and decision-making of food policies and programmes

• An active multi-stakeholder food policy and planning structure

• A municipal urban food policy or strategy and/or action plans

• An inventory of local food initiatives and practices to guide development and expansion of municipal urban food policy and programmes

• A mechanism for assembling and analysing urban food system data to monitor/evaluate and inform municipal policy-making on urban food policies

• A food supply emergency/food resilience management plan for the municipality based on vulnerability assessment

FAO—Food for the Cities initiative⁴: In 2001 the FAO launched this multidisciplinary initiative, aimed at addressing the challenges that urbanization brings to urban and rural populations, as well as the environment, “by building more sustainable and resilient food systems”. The initiative draws on the CRFS concept as the key philosophical and operational concept informing how urban food systems are conceptualized and approached. CRFS “encompasses a complex network of actors, processes and relationships to do with food production, processing, marketing, and consumption that exist in a given geographical region that includes a more or less concentrated urban centre and its surrounding peri-urban and rural hinterland; a regional landscape across which flows of people, goods and ecosystem services are managed” (FAO, n.d.).

ICLEI—RUAF City Food Network in Africa⁵: The ICLEI-RUAF city food network (CITYFOOD) is a global network for local and regional governments with the ambition to develop a strategic approach to their city-region food systems. It aims to accelerate action on sustainable and resilient city-region food systems by combining networking with training, policy guidance and technical expertise. CITYFOOD Network is open to all local and regional governments. Over and above hosting the African City Food Month, ICLEI CITYFOOD projects include: Investing in Urban African Food Systems (FS-Invest); Understanding Innovation in Food Water Energy Nexus and Green and Blue Infrastructure (IFWEN), assisting in the Cape Town Food System Vision, developing food governance frameworks in cities such as Arusha and Antananarivo (Fisher et al., 2019), City-to-city Food System Exchange (RF) and Innovative Food System Governance.

When read as a collective, the global governance actions and the emerging concepts pertaining to urban food, and the subsequent projects, programmes and actors driving efforts to enhance urban food systems resilience, a number of key trends become evident. The first is the embedding of the urban food system within a region, evident in the framing of the NUA and local food system action, UPA and the City Region Food System. An important component is the descaling of food and food security as a general concept, something that for the most part has been seen as a rural issue, to the urban and regional scales. Additionally, these concepts actively link the urban food system to questions of sustainability and resilience.

There has, however, been little reflection on the utility of a regional focus in specific urban governance questions. How, given their distinct administrative boundaries and urban mandates, can cities engage issues that extend beyond their governance purview and legal mandates? Do concepts such as the CRFS and the Water-Energy-Food Nexus and the wider framings of food within the NUA adequately engage these scalar challenges? This is not a call for local food systems, in full recognition of Born and Purcell’s (2006) warning, but it is a central question of governance. Flows of food into a city and the reliability of these flows presents a specific resilience question, but these flows do not make up the urban food system. Such systems are far more complex and require very deliberate governance approaches to effectively engage scale, but also the multiple other systems that make up the urban system. Here, the fundamental management question of “who wakes up and worries about an issue?” needs to be asked. Can urban food resilience be achieved if multiple actors across multiple scales, working to their own mandates and principles are assumed to hold the interests of those for whom urban food systems resilience needs to be facilitated?

Such questions are compounded by the fact that traditional framings of food, aligned to agriculture, as rural (Crush & Riley, 2018) and twin track development approaches (see Frayne et al., 2010) mean that cities have limited food systems policy mandates (Battersby & Watson, 2018). Roles are often reduced to policing and controls, not strategic governance. The result is that food security and wider food system mandates are delegated to national and regional governments, along with fiscal allocations to enable programming and action. Governing urban food systems and enabling some form of urban food system resilience therefore takes place in the context of an absent mandate, undermining strategic action and deep engagement and effective urban policies that might enable resilience (see Fig. 11.1).

Fig. 11.1

(Source Authors’ own representation)

Urban food insecurity within a wider set of intersecting urban processes and vulnerabilities despite absent governance action

Additionally, given the international profile of these global governance and programmatic initiatives seeking to enhance urban resilience, is there adequate African specificity in the targets, metrics and even overarching assumptions that underpin these initiatives? Measurement proxies and programming interventions are in effect generic copies of assumed pathways to sustainability and some form of resilience. Absent in these are locally specific needs and issues.

The next section draws on a selection of African food systems studies to attempt to answer these questions and challenge some of the apparent assumptions that drive such processes. These case studies also speak specifically to the challenges of food insecurity and Africa’s urban transition.

Understanding Resilience in the African Urban Food System

Urban food resilience spans different scales. While the impacts of regional disruptions to food supply, for whatever reasons, might impact the resilience of a localized food system, this chapter explicitly focuses on the strategies, and urban food systems processes evident in select African cities to attempt to answer earlier questions. This engagement works from a number of positions that require clarification, as these views inform our arguments. Firstly, the household food system status, specifically the state of food and nutrition security, is an indicator of the state of the food system in a specific urban context. Using food and nutrition security as an indicator of potential resilience is also strategic. This focus is part of a realization that households face significant resilience challenges and that the general state of food insecurity is declining globally (see, e.g. Fanzo in this volume). The focus on food security, or food insecurity, also assumes a pre-existing state of distress and as such, we avoid engaging in the ability to “bounce back” or stoicism of society, but rather, strategies to enable a measure of shorter-term stability, and longer-term sustainability as tools to secure improved or stable food systems outcomes. The primary imperative is to ensure a measure of food access, and then adequate and appropriate utilization of food. These processes are enabled through effective policy and programming. Central to ensuring food access is individual and community agency. It is for this reason that we utilize the recent FAO High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) expanded definition of food security, one that includes availability, accessibility, utilization and stability, but also, sustainability and agency as determinants of food security (HLPE, 2020).

We draw on the HLPE definition of a food system, which makes the connection between food security, the food system and the wider set of systems in which food operates. The HLPE (2014, p. 12) defines a food system as “a system that gathers all the elements (environment, people, inputs, processes, infrastructures, institutions, etc.) and activities that relate to the production, processing, distribution, preparation and consumption of food, and the outputs of these activities, including socioeconomic and environmental outcomes”.

Importantly, the articulation of food security and the food system, and how this might impact the urban scale, is necessary because “previous work on food security has conventionally focused at either the household scale or at aggregate food production, with far less focus on the food system itself and its intersection with cities” (Battersby & Watson, 2018, p. 3). These connections are important because food security and food systems are influenced by governance decisions made in the absence of consideration of their potential food security impact (Battersby & Watson, 2018, p. 1).

Using evaluations based on the food security measurement approaches developed by the United States Agency for International Development’s Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance programme (FANTA) (Coates et al., 2007). Table 11.1 provides an indication of the state of food security across a collection of both primary and secondary African cities.

Table 11.1 Food security and dietary diversity scores for selected Southern cities—periods 2015–2018

Table 11.1 reflects both the contextual variation across different African cities and the extreme state of food insecurity in studies targeting poorer communities only. Household dietary diversity scores (HDDS) (Swindale & Bilinsky, 2006) presented in Table 11.1 reflect a significant dietary challenge. As a general rule, HDDS scores of less than six are seen as a proxy indicator for potential risks of under nutrition. Across many cities, the average scores are less than or equal to six. Amounts reflected in Table 11.1 are from pre-pandemic research between 2015 and 2018 and as such, scores are undoubtedly worse in 2022 following the impacts of COVID-19.

The varied levels in the 12 HDDS food groups consumed from a Cape Town study provide insights into different dietary profiles across income terciles (Fig. 11.2). A similar profile was evident across the different cities assessed. Figure 11.2 also highlights an increase in grains, and less fruits, vegetables, proteins and pulses in the diets of the lowest income tercile. This raises questions about whose food system resilience requires policy support and targeting at the urban scale. Given the developmental and public health challenges associated with constrained diets, do resilience enhancing programmes need to focus on the overall food system resilience or adopt a deliberate pro-poor approach?

Fig. 11.2

(Source Haysom et al. [2017]—from 2013 data)

Household food types by HDDS food groups across all income groups in Cape Town, South Africa (High: n = 200; Middle: n = 504; Low: n = 1800)

The results shown in Table 11.1 and Fig. 11.2 are drawn from conventional surveys and their tools, such as the FANTA. It is suggested here that these food security and food access metrics are still largely informed by the food availability and food access dimensions of the four dimensions interpretation of the earlier FAO (1996) definition of food security. Such measures have value in terms of understanding the state of food insecurity in both urban and rural households. However, they are less appropriate to offer greater detail on the profile and functioning of that food system. Second, they fail to capture some of the more multi-dimensional poverty challenges faced by those households under review. For policy and programming understanding, the state of food insecurity is essential but having greater clarity on how the specific food system is being used by different elements of society would add great utility.

Using data again drawn from Cape Town, Fig. 11.3 offers a sense of the diversity of food sources used to access food and highlights the variations across the same income terciles detailed in Fig. 11.2. Figure 11.3 suggests that while all income categories may use supermarkets, other food retail outlets are used frequently, with the informal economy being a key source of food access for low-income communities. Local Spaza shops (a South African term for a small informal corner-type store located in a neighbourhood) and street vendors are a key source of food access for poor households.

Fig. 11.3

(Source Haysom et al. [2017])

Food access profiles in Cape Town, South Africa (n = 2,503)

The frequency of use of informal food access points requires greater engagement (see Fig. 11.3). The fact that local corner stores are used as frequently as “at least five days a week” or “at least once a week” raises questions about proximity, spend profiles and other household needs, such as infrastructure. These frequency profiles are very different to the purchasing patterns of the upper income terciles, where weekly and monthly shopping dominate, indicating different food use and purchasing profiles. The reasons for such variations in use frequency and typology (nature of the retail outlet) of access differ in different contexts.

What the food access use and typology variation shows are varied everyday strategies applied by households in cities. This requires an engagement with the multi-dimensional nature of poverty (MDP). This is essential given that the second urban transition is not driving economic growth and not absorbing labour (Satterthwaite, 2007). While this does not directly capture food security, it is a means through which the intersections between food choice, the food system and the urban system can be better understood. The example used below in Fig. 11.4 draws on a form of MDP, the Lived Poverty Index (Mattes, 2008), which reflects a categorical scale indicating the frequency over the past year in which households went without food, fuel to cook food and clean water (Haysom & Fuseini, 2019). Here, multiple deprivations are evident.

Fig. 11.4

(Source Haysom and Fuseini [2019, p. 17])

Combined Lived Poverty Index results for key indicators in three African cities in response to the question “how often in the past year did you go without …” (Epworth, Zimbabwe n = 483; Kitwe, Zambia n = 871; Kisumu, Kenya n = 841)

As Kennedy et al. (2004) have pointed out, infrastructure is a key consideration to understand food and nutrition security. While the general focus on the links between food access and nutritional intake and water and sanitation has received attention (Young et al., 2021), links to the means to prepare food, household appliances and other factors that influence choice have been less considered. These questions are absent from traditional food and nutrition security assessments.

Household and community scale decisions, and the different forms of agency that inform the decisions, align with the process of iteration, projectivity and practical evaluation (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). Such processes shift in response to wider urban disruptions and constraints, and would inform actions taken to enhance resilience, as Emirbayer and Mische point out:

structural contexts of action are themselves temporal as well as relational fields—multiple, overlapping ways of ordering time toward which social actors can assume different simultaneous agentic orientations. Since social actors are embedded within many such temporalities at once, they can be said to be oriented toward the past, the future, and the present at any given moment, although they may be primarily oriented toward one or another of these within any one emergent situation. (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, pp. 963–964)

The household dynamics observed in Fig. 11.4 have an additive effect and intersect with the food retail options chosen and the nature of that food retail in many African cities. Informal vendors are able to adapt and respond to infrastructure deficiencies in ways that the formal sector cannot. In many instances, the informal sector takes on the role of the refrigerator, of the stove and of the storage cupboard for poor households living in precarious types of dwelling, across the continuum from self-built formal to largely informal dwellings. The adaptive approaches applied by informal food vendors enables a measure of food access, through bulk breaking and pre preparation of key foods.

These days, because wood is scarce and other cooking fuel is so expensive, we cook a lot of these beans and then we place these in small packets and freeze them … otherwise no-one here would eat beans anymore; the tinned beans from the shops are also too expensive. Dry beans are not expensive, other costs [energy] are high and this takes beans from diets. Informal food trader, Epworth, Harare, 2016

The quote from the vendor in Epworth demonstrates the processes and practices that are emerging. Dry beans have traditionally been a key component of many diets across Africa, but these take time to prepare and, as a result, require energy. Infrastructural deficiencies are also faced by food vendors.

Such examples point to the fact that negative food system outcomes are at times driven by factors external to the food system. In the urban context, the functioning and distributional aspects of urban infrastructure, plays a central role in how food secure urban residents might be and influence the strategies to enhance food access. The same applies when considering urban informal economy actors.

Figure 11.5 reflects the responses from vendors in the city of Kisumu, in Kenya, where the top three costs are directly related to infrastructure. The cost of transport is linked to both the temporary nature of these stores making them difficult to secure, but also the risks associated with unreliable (but costly) energy. Here, vendors strategically choose to stock small amounts and re-stock daily. This drives up prices as bulk purchasing benefits fall away, and costs associated with transport impact food prices. This is again reflected in the high costs associated with spoilage. Refrigeration is not listed as one of the highest cost items, but this is due to the low frequency of respondents who chose to make use of refrigeration.

Fig. 11.5

(Source Opiyo et al. [2018])

Kisumu food trader costs after stock purchase costs (multiple response option; n = 1,839)

The high levels of food insecurity, linked to high levels of multi-dimensional poverty, represent the reality in most African cities. Households make use of a diverse food system to make the best of the limited resources that they have. Equally, as the MDP analysis shows, other costs eat into food budgets. Dietary diversity is low. Staple foods dominate diets, and nutrition-providing foods are largely absent. Informal food vendors respond to the challenges faced by households but they themselves are subject to similar resource constraints. The poor state of infrastructure means that vendors change the foods that they stock to both respond to the households’ resource constraints, but also to ensure minimal losses for their own businesses as a result of such infrastructure deficits. These intersecting challenges are being responded to in dynamic and resourceful ways by both vendors and households.

Discussion and Conclusion

The vignettes used here provide insights into both the household food and nutrition challenges, as well as some wider food systems challenges. They also offer insights into the specific challenges that emerge when the urban food system intersects with the wider urban system. A resilient food system needs to be framed as a system shaped by flows of multiple physical, economic and social goods. These systems are underpinned and supported by social and economic relationships, flows of food, money and social networks, each of which having unique points of vulnerability and resilience.

Households and communities are faced with high levels of food stress (be this food insecurity, reduced diets, even hunger) and wider stressors that impact and constrain food choices, such as energy costs, time poverty, costs related to earning an income and general poverty. As a result, households strategically use the diversity of the urban food system, and the opportunities provided by the urban system, to mediate food system and food security stress. Diversity of flows exist across a series of systemic connections. Examples include economic flows (access to credit networks) and remittance flows in accessing food (both by traders and consumers) and alternative capital circulation (stokvels,⁶ buying clubs, etc.). The urban poor navigate these multiple systems (formal and informal retail, social networks, alternative capital circulation). Households apply a diversity of access and utilization strategies. These flows are further supported by other access strategies such as social networks and material flows and materiality of flows. These terms (material and materiality) are used deliberately to elevate discussions from a single grid view, a material flow, offering ways of considering an object, service or resource and the material relations and agency, as well as the interplay between agency with the material realities of everyday life and broader political and socioeconomic structures (see Bennett et al., 2010).

We argue that it is these networks, social, material, political and institutional, coupled with the diversity of the urban food systems, and that of the urban system, spanning the economic continuum, from deeply informal to formal, that enable urban food systems resilience. This type of resilience forms part of everyday activities and practices.

The intersections between food choices and infrastructure deficits are inadequately understood. Households are having to make critical strategic choices every day. In the absence of infrastructural justice—equitable access to reliable and affordable infrastructure—in many of Africa’s urban areas, the choices that are made, we argue, are not driven by ignorance, disregard for health outcomes, as some nutrition literature might argue (Abuya et al., 2012; Igumbor et al., 2012), or laziness, even fecklessness (see Tihelková, 2015). These choices are highly strategic but do involve having to make challenging trade-offs between immediate needs and the consequences of those choices, a form of negotiated resilience (Ziervogel et al., 2017). Households’ choices align directly with and counter deficits in Africa’s urban systems, and the wider dynamics associated with Africa’s urban transition. Here, households make use of multiple grids, physical, social, material and relational. This “griddedness”, an overlay of options, as opposed to a hierarchy of options, provides a diversity of options and enables a measure of resilience which is at best not fully understood, at worst disregarded in the wider framings and programmes gathering momentum in the current urban food thematics.

Given these forms of resilience and their intricate connections to the urban and other systems, our work suggests that the existing city regional framing employed by a number of global actors needs to be cognizant of these nuanced and yet highly vulnerable systems of networks, contingency, negotiation, compromise, deep knowledge and “hustle”. Principally, these programmes with a predominantly urban food-specific framing of resilience overlook the intersections with the urban system. Equally, general urban programmes miss the nuance of the urban food system as used and relied on by the urban poor in African cities.

Further, our work suggests that there is a need to situate policy recommendations within a more contextually informed framework. When food security and related policies are still viewed by most African governments as a national mandate, policy directives and fiscal flows to enable operational actions generally prohibit the establishment of municipal interdepartmental government bodies for advisory and decision-making of food policies and programmes. Where agency is constrained as a result of colonial histories and extreme inequalities, the urban poor, those actively seeking to enhance their own food system resilience, are excluded from active multi-stakeholder food policy and planning structures. The few processes that exist are not open to all, often dominated by political leaders at the urban scale and remain a collection of connected elites. As per the above governance structuring, the likelihood of local government’s having an urban food policy or strategy and/or action plans is slight, but possible. For a local governance structure to effectively programme and drive real change fiscal resources are required. Having access to such resources for urban food actions is highly unlikely. Given the data paucity in African cities (see Acuto & Parnell, 2016), and the high levels of informal food system activities that are not always recognized, developing an inventory of local food initiatives and practices to guide development and expansion of municipal urban food policy and programmes would be difficult. Equally, having a mechanism for assembling and analysing urban food system data to monitor/evaluate and inform municipal policy making on urban food policies is unlikely. As a result, the general approach of city governments is to defer to case studies or studies from other cities as proxy indicators. The absence of a common urban food systems view, or political mobilization, would make the viability of any food supply emergency/food resilience management plan for the municipality based on vulnerability assessment very challenging.

Given these limitations, the concepts and arguments used to lobby for urban food systems resilience should be subjected to great critique. Urban agriculture projects offer little real food systems resilience. When an expanded view of urban resilience is taken, as argued here, adding further areas for negotiation and network building, such as facilitating access to land, securing tenure and accessing water all make resilience even more complex, thus potentially even undermining the initial objective.

The limited potential to scale out and expand such urban agriculture programmes also means that it reduces innovation, allowing city governments a sense of “doing something”, but in reality, only assists a few. More problematically, the UPA focus on sites or projects constrains any attempt to engage the wider systemic issues, those that local actors are building networks to mitigate. Local is important. However, our view is that local should not be viewed as confined to a discrete bounded area. Local governance of the food system serves the discussed forms of resilience best when there is a detailed understanding of the benefits and risks in specific contexts provided by the diverse social, material, economic and wider food system flows. Local is important in terms of how resilience actions and responses can be enabled through these flows.

Importantly, given the centrality of urban systems in enabling urban food systems resilience, key enablers of urban food systems resilience are local government and local governance. While multiscale governance of the food system is essential, the current focus on territorial food systems as the primary mode of engagement serves to obscure the vitally important work of local government in addressing food systems issues that fall within their borders and within their mandates.

Based on these arguments, we see urban food systems resilience as a system in which urban households (1) can have access to and support from a diverse food system, have diverse food access options and a diversity of alternatives that align with their lived realities (accessibility, utilization); (2) can make food-related decisions and choices within an infrastructurally just urban system (utilization, stability); and (3) in which system users are seen as active agents in shaping theirs and wider food system resilience (agency and stability and sustainability).

Required is greater engagement with the urban system, approaches that engage across multiple infrastructure grids and systems. These are highly complex systems and cannot be understood in silos. Arguably, the complexity of the system offers a measure of “negotiated resilience” (as per Ziervogel et al., 2017). This resilience forms part of a collection of urban practices enlivened to secure a measure of resilience. The outcomes of such processes do not necessarily align with the framings of resilience proposed in international programmes and initiatives such as those discussed here. Existing governance structures and regimes are ill-equipped to engage in and surf the complexity of these intersecting systems, essential processes if resilience is to be facilitated. The absence of a distinct urban food mandate makes this even more challenging. Further, when urban food is equated to production and increased supply, linked to rural regions, the ability to enhance food security and urban food resilience through a focus on deliberate urban processes and mandates, such as energy, transport, water provision and economic activity is lost.

New forms of governance are required, together with new forms of measurement. Also required is the validation of local knowledge and the diversity of resilience actions. These should be integrated into new forms and understandings of African cities and African urban food systems resilience.