Theories and Foundations: Ethics, Urban Agriculture, and Planning

Early work in planning for food systems emphasized practice and approaches based on common planning methods over a robust theoretical framework. This may have been a strategic choice, but it is worth re-examining. In this section of five chapters, we develop rationales for why and examples of how theory might be applied to make practice better. The section draws out implied theoretical connections in the first wave of food systems scholarship in planning and begins to outline current food systems planning thought that is explicitly theoretical and pushes scholarship in new directions. One challenge to scholars in food systems planning is to be more critical about how and where their work is situated and the implications of different types of action; we do not want food systems planning to recreate past planning errors. How can such scholarship directly consider justice, empowerment, control, and epistemologies that drive action? And, how might ethical considerations be related to food systems scholarship? This section seeks to demonstrate that theory and ethics can be motivators for advancing the field intellectually and practically.