SUSMETRO seeks to develop design proposals for integrated, sustainable and innovative systems linking up metropolitan (city-region) with inner- and peri-urban environments. Building upon the principles of resource efficiency, circular economy and impact assessment, the overall goal is to offer technical, procedural and strategic services for developing sustainable food regions.
The “reconnection” of agricultural production to urban food consumption is not just targeting at shorter food chains, but at more sustainable and more resilient strategies for increasing food security and food safety at the level of metropolitan regions. Surprisingly, the underlying philosophy is inspired by the economic model developed by von Thünen (see Figure 1 below), who established a set of rationales for linking the spatial distribution of land to the geographic distance of the consumer markets already in 1823!
Applying such food planning principles to nowadays metropolitan regions suggests that the land surrounding urban centres offer a wide range of potentials for short supply food chains with new and more varied business opportunities for local farmers and producers. Making use of Geographic Information Systems, the ‘Metropolitan Foodscape Planner’ (see our published work: Wascher & Jeurissen, 2017; Arciniegas et al., 2022) allows to project the spatial configuration of agricultural lands needed to supply urban population with food (Figure 2). The assessment allows to specify the amount of local hectare surplus and deficits for 13 food groups and can serve as an important reference for scenario development at the level of workshop and living lab activities.
Figure 1. Von Thünen’s model (1823): Translating the vision of modern metropolitan agriculture into a spatially explicit planning concept for food security requires a more dynamic approach that is based on multi-functionality, evidence-based planning principles and multi-actor governance
How is this land footprint determined?
Figure 2. Susmetro’s approach to assess and map the land footprint of a city region (Susmetro, 2024)
The Metropolitan Foodscape Planner’ (MFP 2.0) is a spatial-functional assessment that was developed as part of the EU project FoodMetres (2012-2015). MFP enables the quantification of the ecological footprint of agriculturally productive land required to sustain the annual amount of food demand of the urban population according to the diet recognized for that particular country or region. Unlike the classic ecological footprint assessment model (proposed by the Global Footprint Network), the land footprint is given in ‘local hectares’ rather than ‘global hectares’. Figure 3 shows an example of a footprint for the Ostend city region, Belgium.
Figure 3. Assessment of land footprint for the city of Ostend, Belgium (source: FoodSHIFT Food System analysis Ostend, 2024)
MFP also allows for the calculation of food demand and supply for a city regio. Figure 4 shows and example of such assessment.
Figure 4. Land footprint food consumption in Copenhagen overlaid with production zones and charts showing aggregated food group supply values in hectares within each ring.
Example cases of MFP applications
Susmetro has helped assessing and mapping the land footprint. See interactive web maps with assessments for a selection of European city regions below (FoodSHIFT 2030, 2022):
By applying the principles of ‘Evidence-Based Food System Design’ (Figure ), making use of a georeferenced-layers approach to capture the different dimensions of the social-environmental context, SUSMETRO strives to make use of state-of-the-art European and national data when assessing state, trends and changes of our food environment. Relying on a string of methodologies and tools, SUSMETRO seeks to produce results with a clear design-oriented dimension in terms of graphical displays and illustrations, as well as data collection methods that support evidence-based design and decision-making.
Figure 5: Evidence-based assessment process making use of the geo-data layer approach as a basis for scenario development and design proposals for Smart Food Districts.
Figure 11: Quantitative Food Flow for the Amsterdam (Jessica van Bossum, 2017).
Figure 12: Retail sale – consumption in household networks (source: Bureau van Dijk Amadeus – European Company Data)