A place for food?

The Independent Review for the National Food Strategy, entitled The Plan, had a substantial gap: it needs to give more attention to how food interconnects with places (cities, suburbs, towns, villages, hamlets) and how to organise this interplay effectively for individual and societal benefit. In our third Policy Insight, Susan Parham, director of the University of Hertfordshire’s Urbanism Unit, argues that policymakers should be more aware of the place and planning aspects of food and could use the National Food Strategy to specifically improve urban and rural food resilience. There is a chance to make specific, place-based interventions that can improve health, sociability and conviviality through a food focus. The food system should be conceptualised as spatial in nature, which would enable the design of human-scaled neighbourhoods with localised, food-friendly conditions. The Policy Insight identifies existing examples of where food is central to place-making, and proposes that The Plan should include an Urban Land Use Framework.