Metropolitan Foodsheds as Spatial References for a Landscape-Based Assessment of Regional Food Supply

The Food Planning and Innovation for Sustainable Metropolitan Regions (FOODMETRES) project strives to assess the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of food chains, with regard to the spatial, logistical, and resource dimensions of growing food as well as the questions of food safety and quality as key assets for food planning and governance. Recognizing that food production and consumption are not only linked via food chains in a physical–logistic way, but above all via value chains of social acceptance, FoodMetres is designed to combine quantitative and evidence-based research principles with qualitative and discursive methods, in order to address the wider dimensions of food chains in the context of metropolitan agro-systems. One of the research assets is to assess the location and amount of agriculturally productive land within reach of urban centers, to supply metropolitan populations with regionally grown food. For this purpose, we have developed an accessibility approach that is specifically designed to examine the potential of Metropolitan Agro-Food Systems (MAS) to feed urban populations. Taking into account data on transport infrastructure and land cover as well as the protection status of land, this paper highlights the results for the test cases of Ljubljana, Berlin, London, Milano, and Rotterdam.