Second Nature and urban agriculture: A cultural framework for emerging food policies

Given the increasing attention of research, practice and policy to urban food strategies, the paper explores appropriate frameworks for placing these strategies' spatial aspects into cultural contexts. Within the AHRC‐funded research network Urban Transformations, we have debated current policy‐driven responses to the definition of urban food strategies and the significance both may have on spatial quality. We noticed that, whilst a new common language is developing in relation to food systems governance and planning, a cultural framework has become (and always was) equally important for the planning and design of food‐productive urban space.
Such cultural frameworks are much needed to enable the steady linking of urban food strategies to space-making processes ‐ including urban agriculture ‐ and both of them to users' desires, routines and capacities. This is especially true within education and research where qualitative approaches are indispensable if lasting change in our collective aims for food‐productive urban spaces is to be achieved. We contend that more practice‐based theory ‐ and philosophy ‐ is required to successfully initiate space‐focused urban food strategies as well as to back them up with supporting policy in the longer term.
In recent writing, the concept of Second Nature has been introduced to discuss, from different angles, the future of urban landscape in relation to the future of urban food production. This paper explores whether and how the concept of Second Nature could contribute to a cultural framework which, in turn, can support the formulation of a durable urban‐space‐focused food policy.