The Food System: New Frontiers in Planning

As though planners don't have enough to worry about, a new area of planning is on the horizon--food systems planning.

The fall conference will feature a session on this new and fascinating area of planning. Food is a basic necessity, and the food sector has an enormous impact on the local economy, accounting for as much as a quarter of all jobs, yet planners and local government have become involved in food system planning in only fragmented ways.

Jerome Kaufmann and Kami Pothukuchi, both of UW--Madison's Department of Urban and Regional Planning, will show Wisconsin planners why the food system should be on the planner's agenda.

During the past year, the Kellogg Foundation has funded the Wisconsin Food System Partnership to look comprehensively at the food system and identify connections between the food system and transportation, health, economics, and other urban systems. As part of this effort, graduate student workshops in both Madison and Milwaukee focused on various aspects of food system planning.

In Milwaukee, graduate planning students tackled the problem of distributing fresh and wholesome food in low-income urban areas. In Milwaukee and other cities, residents of low-income neighborhoods have limited access to fresh and nutritious food. Typically, large grocery chains have abandoned inner city neighborhoods, leaving residents few options. Purchasing food requires long trips by car (or even longer trips by bus) or residents may settle for the limited and more costly offerings in convenience stores in the neighborhood. Students in Milwaukee brainstormed a wide range of alternatives for making food more accessible to low-income residents.

One of these alternatives, development of an inner city public market, became the subject of a semester-long planning project. Under the supervision of Assistant Professor Welford Sanders, the second year class explored possible sites for a public market, designed a facility, and produced a organizational plan and a business plan for the facility.

In Madison, students conducted a variety of community-based studies on such topics as the economic and environmental impacts of the food system, access to food by low income residents, and community supported agriculture.

Students found that local government involvement in the food system is much more fragmented than its involvement in transportation, housing, health, and other essential goods and services. While municipal governments have specialized agencies for coordinating and planning transportation, housing, and health, no single agency has primary responsibility for food system coordination.

This general lack of involvement by planners occurs despite the impacts of the food system on physical and economic development planning. For example, food waste and food packaging are major components of the solid waste stream, yet planners have not attended to the food system in municipal solid waste planning. Clearly, planners should be more aware of the food systems in their communities.