Planning the Urban Food System in the Metropolitan Area in Portugal. A conceptual framework

The current global crisis and the acknowledgment that, in coming decades, the world population will be predominantly urban, brings about new necessities and demands for innovative approaches to food systems’ planning. The need urges to identify the most efficient and consistent ways to deal with problems concerning economic and energetic efficiency, environmental quality, food security, job creation and urban development. In the past few years, the international political and scientific agendas, strategies for food security in metropolitan areas, both in and out of Europe, highlight the need to re-localize productionconsumption systems through more efficient shorter supply chains, as a means to promote sustainable urban development via place-based approaches. The provision of efficient responses to environmental, economic and social concerns, emerging in a context of complex global change, needs to be tackled at a local and regional level. The study of Urban Food Systems becomes fundamental for an integrated approach to these internationally set priorities. However, this issue is yet to enter either on the Portuguese political or academic agendas. In Portugal, the structural changes that occurred on the food system in the last decades reflect an increased socioeconomic impoverishment of the countryside vis-a-vis urban areas. Consequently, there are deeper inequalities in terms of territorial cohesion. Moreover, in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA), where a third of the Portuguese population lives, the Utilized Agricultural Area represents 37% of the LMA, a figure which by itself justifies the need to adopt a strategic vision for the LMA’s food system planning. This paper will give insight to the conceptual definition of the functional region as the area where the LMA’s food system might operate, providing orientation to the land-use management and strategic planning that should be able to promote its re-localization in a sustainable way, from a place-making stance. The characterization of the current LMA food system is seen as a starting point to understand how to develop a resilient urban food system based on adequate spatial