Sustainable Food Planning

Coping with the adaptive changes necessary as a result of climate change and resource depletion becomes one of the main challenges facing the world in the second decade of the 21st Century. Sustainability science has grown rapidly as an engaging interdisciplinary field in which to scientifically address these issues. This conference wishes to focus on the problem of sustainable place- making; that is how integrated thinking can be developed and applied in different places and spaces so as to adapt systems of production and consumption and bring about transformative change.

Current structural processes of globalisation, financialisation, economic competitiveness and technological development are creating constraints and major challenges for sustainability and social cohesion. Many of these processes have tended to reduce the significance and diversity of place. Also, in many scientific disciplines place-based thinking and applications have given way to more generic models of understanding and application. Society faces emerging and interconnected sustainability challenges linked to financial instability, ’peak oil’, food security, climate change, drought, loss of biodiversity and other eco-system services, and demographic changes including migration.  At the same time we are witnessing the growth of potentially transformatory ‘place-based’ initiatives associated within, for example, the key resources sectors of energy, food, mobilities, health and household goods and services. Territorial and place-based approaches are also becoming more important in policy debates and innovation strategies concerning regions such as Europe and at the city-region levels.  The importance of redefining and recognising diversified territorial assets and new types of social and regional cooperation and collaboration has been recognised by such bodies as the EU and the OECD in considering economic and innovation strategies. These concerns now need to embrace questions about the spatial economy and how this re-links with ecological and socio-cultural and community processes of evolution and development.

The conference wishes to bring together leading scholars and active researchers around the theme of sustainable place making, providing a platform for critical debate and progress about the theoretical/ conceptual and practice and policy implications of adopting place-making approaches.

Within the themes below, papers are invited which address:

(i)         Areas of theoretical and conceptual progress in understanding the comparative complexities of place-based adaptive change;

(ii)        Methodological advances in understanding and assessing integrated place-based solutions at different spatial scales;

(iii)       The implications for innovations in policy and practice and for adaptive governance frameworks.

 Themes

1)         Sustainable and connected communities

2)         Ecosystems and ecosystem services

3)         Implications of mobilities, flows and migrations for the creation of sustainable places

4)         Re-placing risk governance: alternative ways of governing places

 Abstracts proposals for papers or posters should be submitted by 31^st July 2012 to: sustainableplaces@cardiff.ac.uk