Between ambitions and actions: how citizens navigate the entrepreneurial process of co-producing sustainable urban food futures

Koen Gaast (), Jan Eelco Jansma () and Sigrid Wertheim-Heck ()
Additional contact information
Koen Gaast: Aeres University of Applied Sciences
Jan Eelco Jansma: Aeres University of Applied Sciences
Sigrid Wertheim-Heck: Aeres University of Applied Sciences

Agriculture and Human Values, 2023, vol. 40, issue 3, No 33, 1287-1302

Abstract: Abstract Cities increasingly envision sustainable future food systems. The realization of such futures is often understood from a planning perspective, leaving the role of entrepreneurship out of scope. The city of Almere in the Netherlands provides a telling example. In the neighborhood Almere Oosterwold, residents must use 50% of their plot for urban agriculture. The municipality formulated an ambition that over time, 10% off all food consumed in Almere must be produced in Oosterwold. In this study, we assume the development of urban agriculture in Oosterwold is an entrepreneurial process, i.e. a creative (re)organization that is ongoing and intervenes in daily life. To understand how this entrepreneurial process helps to realize sustainable food futures, this paper explores what futures for urban agriculture residents of Oosterwold prefer and deem possible and how these futures are organized in the present. We use futuring to explore possible and preferable images of the future, and to backcast those images to the present day. Our findings show residents have different perspectives of the future. Furthermore, they are capable in formulating specific actions to obtain the futures they prefer, but have trouble committing to the actions themselves. We argue this is the result of a temporal dissonance, a myopia where residents have trouble looking beyond their own situation. It shows imagined futures must fit with the lived experiences of citizens in order to be realized. We conclude that urban food futures need planning and entrepreneurship to be realized since they are complementary social processes.

Keywords: Food; Sustainable; Futuring; Entrepreneurship; Urban agriculture; Almere (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10460-023-10425-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:agrhuv:v:40:y:2023:i:3:d:10.1007_s10460-023-10425-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10460

DOI: 10.1007/s10460-023-10425-7

Access Statistics for this article

Agriculture and Human Values is currently edited by Harvey S. James Jr.

More articles in Agriculture and Human Values from Springer, The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().