Food security and urban sustainability of alternative food models: Multicriteria analysis based on Sustainable Development Goals and Sustainable Urban Planning

This paper presents a theoretical assessment of alternative food models performance in implementing Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to improve urban food security. It addresses the three most widely related models in the food systems' literature: The Territorialized Food System, the City-Region Food System (CRFS), and the emerging Smart Urban Food System (SUFS). Nested in the sustainable urban planning field, it assumes that a correlation exists between the urban proximity of the alternative food models and their performance in integrating the Sustainable Development Goals. The valuation is based on a multi-criteria analysis which crosses two approaches: a normative one by Sustainable Development Goals and an operational one by sustainable urban planning. The proposed method is intended to be holistic and systemic unlike existing agricultural sustainability assessment methods. Scores are interpreted by rates of adequacy of sustainable urban planning targets to the Sustainable Development Goals and of appropriation of the latter by the urban ecosystem domains. Results show different profiles of models, suggesting a functional complementarity between them. However, the Smart Urban Food System would be the best performing model with rates higher than the global minimum sustainability threshold. It is followed by the City-Region Food System, confirming then our initial hypothesis. Results discussion points out the limits of the evaluation in terms of the approach objectivity, contextualization of the analysis and applicability constraints of the Smart Urban Food System. Finally, the study opens a research perspective on the operational Smart Urban Food System modeling, for which this work is the first step.