Modelling Sustainable Urban Food Systems

Cities are complex, adaptive socioecological systems, a kind of living organism, which embodies a long history of urban planning goals. Today, in light of peak oil, climate change, complex urbanisation and population pressures, these goals are increasingly about improving urban sustainability. Urban sustainability is about maintaining and regulating the essential services it provides, such as access to food, without future risks to those services. This project involves two key aspects, the first is about creating spatial indicators of urban food systems that will highlight the spatial pattern of food security, revealing where it needs attention. The second part of the project is to develop a model that will propose a better urban food system to enhance food security.

Urban sustainability has many definitions and many measures, which are universally global indicators of a city’s performance. These indicators provide a descriptive summary of sustainability for the city as a whole, few of which are used in practice, and none indicate where change needs to occur within a city in order to improve urban sustainability. Existing spatial indicators provide information about zones of a city, or country-sized areas and which relate to selected aspects of urban sustainability, e.g. air pollution, quality of life, accessibility to services and transport. Very little research has been undertaken to measure and model food security, and there are no indicators of urban food security that incorporate space and time, or reveal the spatial distribution of deficits within a city. Nor has there been research that has produced models of more secure food systems.

Key knowledge and skills necessary for this project include GIS and Remote Sensing skills (e.g. ArcGIS), programming skills, and knowledge in some of the following domains that relates to food or urban sustainability: Systems Ecology/ Sustainability/ Environmental Science/ Agriculture.

Please don't contact me unless you have at least some GIS skills and a GPA average to >= 85%. If you meet these requirements, then please email me your CV, grade transcripts and a short paragraph outlining your interest in this project.