By fusing land-use theory from urban and rural development, this work builds a new theory based on the urban perimeter as a functional interface important to the health of both urban and rural lands. This new theory has its antecedents in biophysical sciences where studies on structural complexity offer insight into metabolism, growth, and resilience. For example, the structural complexity of a coral reef’s surface is an important indicator of growth and resilience for the reef itself as well as the many organisms that depend upon it. This work concludes with a research and practice agenda allied with the field of ecology.

Re-localizing food distribution is expected to geographically concentrate social and economic capital toward values that are beneficial to both consumers and producers. Yet, both the theory of how communities benefit from purchasing local food and the practice of promoting local food lack foundational empiric evidence that makes spatially explicit the procurement typologies and the communities that are connected. This research pilots a method for understanding the geographic patterns of local food supply chains in relation to the social networks formed through farm tours, byproduct sales, farm-to-farm collaboration, and donations to the local food bank. This method is expected to improve both the theory and practice of re-localizing food systems, thereby helping scholars and policymakers to identify and correct for inequities while also recognizing successful practices and opportunities in situ. Findings are based on a novel dataset from Chester County, Pennsylvania encompassing 1089 connections between 117 farms and 637 locations. Farms primarily engage with one marketing typology. The most common marketing practices are wholesale distribution and direct-marketing to consumers through farmers’ markets; both market typologies have an average reach of over 50 km. Central to the social network, is a third typology characterized by sales to restaurants, collaboration amongst farms and participation with local food bank programming. Interviews with policymakers and market managers ground-truth and relate findings to state and local regulations.

To understand the creation and propagation of knowledge in planning, this research provides the first look at planning specialization development. In assessing planning’s educational response to internal expertise, federal mandates, and historic precedents, we queried the seventy-six accredited planning schools on the evolution of concentrations and certificates offered from 1950 to the present day. We identify pedagogical trends by following the arc of program creation and retirement, intersectionality, and prevalence. Drawing parallels from the most well-established subfields of social and physical planning, this paper offers recommendations for formalizing new knowledge, such as food systems planning. We conclude with the observation that continued innovation and diversity of specializations is a key to planning’s resilience at the nexus of an ever-evolving constellation of fields.

Municipal ordinances to remove farm animals from city limits played a central part in defining city planning's role in urban ecosystems, economies, and public health. This article examines the regulation of animal agriculture since the eighteenth century in four cities: Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Across the nineteenth century, municipal ordinances to remove farm animals from city limits set the tone for the planning profession, aligning it with the field of public health in creating a hygienic city. In the efforts to untangle animal agriculture from waste management, public space, and urban food supply, urban authorities employed some of the first land-use regulations in the United States, shaping new planning powers. Ordinances banning slaughterhouses, piggeries, and dairies culminated with zoning as planning became a profession. These regulations ultimately allowed planners to transform cities and their food environments by dismantling a system in which animals and their caretakers among the urban poor had played integral parts in food production, processing, and municipal waste management. Unpacking the objectives, debates, and impacts of these early regulations reveals enduring tensions and challenges as planners today seek to reweave animal agriculture into cities.

This research examines the extent to which a Farm-to-Table restaurant prompted social and ecological changes in the food system. Chefs and restaurants are uniquely positioned to both generate consumer interest in certain foods and motivate farmers to grow such products. Despite their central role in Alternative Food Networks (AFNs), the influence of restaurants on farming practices and the re-localization of food sourcing is under-explored. In this research, we used archival document review, interviews, surveys, and social network mapping to understand the mechanisms by which direct market connections between farmers and the Chez Panisse restaurant grew over time and influenced farmers’ growing practices. Founded in Berkeley by Alice Waters in 1971, Chez Panisse is frequently credited with pioneering the Farm-to-Table model and spurring the slow, local, and organic food movements. Our study suggests that Chez Panisse inspired farmers toward more sustainable agriculture practices, but the restaurant was not the only influential actor in the network. We found that local food hub managers and the restaurant’s “foragers” were key intermediaries. Our findings demonstrate that social embeddedness in AFNs is pertinent to fostering sustainable agriculture, the long-term survival of network actors, and network growth. Acronyms: AFN: Alternative Food Network; DTC: Direct-to-consumer; CSA: Community-Supported Agriculture.

Land-use control is local and highly varied. State agencies struggle to assess plan contents. Similarly, advocacy groups and planning researchers wrestle with the length of planning documents and ability to compare across plans. The goal of this research is to (1) introduce Natural Language Processing techniques that can automate qualitative coding in planning research and (2) provide policy-relevant exploratory findings. We assembled a database of 461 California city-level General Plans, extracted the text, and used topic modeling to identify areas of emphasis (clusters of co-occurring words). We find that California city general plans address more than sixty topics, including greenhouse gas mitigation and Climate Action Planning. Through spatializing results, we find that a quarter of the topics in plans are regionally specific. We also quantify the rift and convergence of planning topics. The topics focused on housing have very little overlap with other planning topics. This is likely a factor of state requirements to update and evolve the Housing Elements every five years, but not other aspects of General Plans. This finding has policy implications as housing topics evolve away from other emphasis areas such as transportation and economic development. Furthermore, the topic modeling approach reveals that many cities have had a focus on environmental justice through Health and Wellness Elements well before the state mandate in 2019. Our searchable state-level database of general plans is the first for California-and nationally. We provide a model for others that wish to comprehensively assess and compare plan contents using machine learning.

Problem research strategy and findings

Environmental justice (EJ) seeks to correct legacies of disproportionately burdening low-income and Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities with environmental hazards that contribute to health inequalities. Federal and state policies increasingly require plans to assess and incorporate EJ principles. The current lack of accessible data and plan evaluation on EJ has been a barrier to policy setting and benchmarking. We created a framework for analyzing content across a large corpus of plans by using quantitative text analysis on 461 California city general plans, also known as comprehensive plans. To verify results and identify specific policies, we conducted content analysis on a subset of seven plans. Demonstrating the broad applicability of EJ principles in planning, policies spanned all required elements of general plans: housing, circulation, land use, health, safety, open space, air quality, and noise. We found that the most headway in EJ planning has been made in cities with a majority population of color and well before the 2018 California state mandate to address EJ. Policies were primarily focused on preventing adverse exposures as opposed to correcting for legacies of inequality. Further, although all policies address vulnerable populations and places, very few specifically addressed race or racism. Thus, EJ has been largely operationalized as health equity.

Takeaway for practice

We identified 628 EJ policies focused on vulnerable populations across the seven city plans included in content analysis. The smorgasbord of policy approaches provided fodder for cities across the United States to incorporate an EJ approach to planning. Gaps in focus areas reveal room for policy innovation (e.g., emphasis on language justice, formerly incarcerated individuals, and noise ordinance policing). We invite planners and community advocates to search across California's plans for EJ policy inspiration, and to use the appendix of EJ policies cataloged in this research as a benchmark of city-level innovation.