Urban Food Systems

More than half of the world’s population now live in or around a city, with urbanisation in many parts of the world occurring more rapidly than the food system can cope with.

Cities are exciting places for people to live and work, but are also places with high levels of health and wealth inequalities. A key marker of inequality is access to safe and nutritious food.

Improving food access and nutritional health among city dwellers requires a interdisciplinary approach, looking at the complex and varied ways in which food reaches cities, how it is distributed, and how consumers make food choices.

Our projects

Food Hubs for Food Security

The Food Hubs for Food Security project is a collaboration between the University of Leeds, FoodWise Leeds, and Leeds City Council. The project aims to provide a strong evidence base for the impacts that Food Hubs bring to the communities they serve and the broader food system. The project also aims to build a convincing case for policy support and funding for Food Hubs. Support and funding can help Food Hubs expand their offering, strengthen local food systems, and increase food security and sustainability of the overall food system.

The project team worked with Food Hubs and relevant food actors across Leeds to identify the impacts of Food Hubs. Through a series of interviews, surveys and focus groups, four key positive impacts were identified: strengthen healthy, local food systems; improve wellbeing; support local economies; and enhance sustainability.

Download the Food Hubs for security, health, inclusive growth and sustainability policy brief (PDF).

An interactive online Impact Evaluation Tool was also co-developed. The tool helps Food Hubs to evaluate environmental, social, and economic impact. The tool can be used by Food Hubs to capture impacts, support their strategic development and secure funding.

Scaling up place-based, community-centered food initiatives

Place-based, community-led food initiatives can increase food security and sustainability of the food system. They include food hubs, food banks, pantries, community cafes, community supported food growing schemes, social supermarkets etc. They offer a range of activities such as food aid or surplus food redistribution, food skills training (eg food growing and cooking classes), community engagement and support (eg shared meals, signposting to other services). They support those affected by food insecurity, offer a local and more sustainable food supply chain, and deliver wider social, economic and environmental benefits.

This project has helped us better understand how to scale up (ie increase the size) or out (ie replicate in more places) place-based, community-led food initiatives to increase their positive impact to communities, environment, and local economies across the UK.

Video transcript: Scaling up place-based, community-centred food initiatives

Traditional food markets

Traditional markets such as street or indoor, formal or informal markets provide affordable food for people across the world and have done for centuries. They particularly support deprived neighbourhoods by by providing affordable food and start-up business opportunities as well as fostering social inclusion in increasingly diverse cities. However, they tend to be neglected by policies and overlooked as a key part of a more sustainable and fair food system.

We have developed a number of projects in this area, working in collaboration with industry partners, local authorities and community groups to valorise the potential of traditional markets as community and public health assets.

Read more about Markets 4 People, a project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council between 2018 and 2021 where we surveyed 1500 market users and interviewed around 50 experts to produce rigorous evidence on the social, economic and cultural value of traditional retail markets in the UK.

The carbon footprint of traditional markets

This research, funded by the Policy Support Fund through Policy Leeds, assessed the carbon footprint of foods sold within Leeds City Markets and looked to understand the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours around the sustainability of food held by traders within the Market. This helped the researchers understand the role market space plays in beliefs around sustainability and what the perceived and actual barriers are for decreasing the carbon footprint size of the foods sold in Leeds markets.

Video transcript: Understanding the sustainability practices of traditional food markets in Leeds

Health and Sustainable Market Charter

With Bradford Metropolitan District Council, we have been working to produce a Market Charter for Darley Street Market aligning this market with their Public Health and Food Strategies.

The social and economic value of St James’ Wholesale Market is a new project, funded by the 2024–25 Policy Support Fund, in collaboration with Bradford Metropolitan District Council, the West Yorkshire Combined Authority and Foodwise to map out how the regional fruit and vegetables wholesale market contributes to the food economy. This is a growing area of research for us, so please email the Global Food and Environment Institute at globalfood@leeds.ac.uk if you want to collaborate both with research in the UK or internationally.

Read more about the St James’ Wholesale market’s impact and potential in the West Yorkshire food economy project in the ‘Local and regional research projects’ section of the Policy Support Fund page.

Leeds resilience to climate change

Dr Paola Sakai is leading work with stakeholders across the Leeds City Region. They are developing a series of workshops to lay the foundations for action towards enabling a climate resilience food system that promotes health, sustainability and food security. They have developed a number of scenarios for the future of the Leeds food system, which are laid out in a brief following the first Leeds Food System Scenarios Workshop. A second workshop Leeds Food System Pathway identified the key priorities for action, which were laid out in a policy brief delivered to the Climate Emergency Advisory Committee. This has led to an exciting endeavour that is producing food in vertical farms and glasshouses using geothermal energy from mines.

Food procurement

Led by Dr Eleonora Morganti and funded by the N8, the project focuses on the impact of both Brexit and climate change on food supply chains at a city level. This project is developed by academics and experts working on local supply chains, public procurement legal frameworks and sustainable food partnerships. The universities of Leeds and Lancaster are working together to map the context of city level procurement in both cities, focusing in key anchor institutions, such as schools and hospitals.

Addressing micronutrient deficiencies associated with the double burden of childhood malnutrition in China, a combined food system framework

Professor Yun Yun Gong led a three-year Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research (BBSRC) funded project that assessed the increasing double burden of malnutrition (DBM) including under- and over-nutrition, and the micronutrient deficiencies in children from economically diverse regions in China. They identified barriers and drivers for promoting effective uptake and scaling-up of existing food system-based interventions.

The project was delivered through a close partnership with the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention's National Institute of Nutrition and Health, the China National Health Development Research Centre, and, outside China, the National Institute of Nutrition in Vietnam and The International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) South East Asia Region.

FAMISHED (Interactions between food waste, surplus and hunger)

This project was funded by the N8 AgriFood Resilience Programme and led by Dr Effie Papargyropoulou from the Sustainability Research Institute. FAMISHED aimed to critique the ‘win-win’ narrative around food surplus redistribution and food poverty alleviation, and propose alternatives that work towards tackling both the immediate urgent needs and long term priorities that address the root causes of food poverty and systematic food waste generation.

This project brought together interdisciplinary academic expertise across the universities of Leeds, Sheffield, and Newcastle, and co-produces knowledge with a network of stakeholders from the retail, government and the third sector.

Our leading researchers

Dr Sara González is Professor in Critical Human Geography in the School of Geography. She is interested in critically analysing the political and economic transformation of cities, neoliberal urban policies, gentrification and contestation. She has a particular interest in traditional food markets and how they play an important community role for people in low incomes and more generally how food interplays with processes of urban development.

Dr Effie Papargyropoulou is Associate Professor in Sustainable Food Networks. Her research focuses on two main themes: food systems, food waste management and food consumption; and low carbon cities, decarbonisation of human activities and climate change mitigation. Her research is transdisciplinary by engaging with academic and non-academic stakeholders, and interdisciplinary by combining approaches from various fields.

Our collaborations

The issues of urban inequality are international in scope and the Urban Food Systems programme is developing collaborations with industry, research institutions, policy-makers and charities worldwide.

Regionally, we are working with Leeds City Council and Foodwise Leeds (formerly Leeds Food Partnership) to understand the Leeds Food system.

The University of Leeds has been designated as a World Health Organisation (WHO) Collaborating Centre in Nutritional Epidemiology, the first of its kind in the world. The Nutritional Epidemiology Group at the School of Food Science and Nutrition assist WHO in developing nutrition policies.

We are also working with the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN).

The African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA) Centre of Excellence (ACoE) in Food Security was awarded to the University of Pretoria in 2018. The award aims to facilitate a network of researchers in exploring solutions to food security challenges in Africa.

Contact

For enquiries about Urban Food Systems, please email the Global Food and Environment Institute at globalfood@leeds.ac.uk.