The wonderful thing about food is that you get three votes a day. Every one of them has the potential to change the world.
Nature Friendly Food Network
The Urban Agriculture Consortium (UAC) builds collaborations to co-create the conditions for regenerative urban and peri-urban farming and food growing to thrive in the UK, as part of an integrated, resilient, & just food system.
Why Urban-centric?
Urban (and peri-urban) settings present a unique set of constraints, opportunities, challenges, problems and solutions when it comes to transitioning our food system away from the present destructive industrial model, towards a just, inclusive, regenerative and localised one. The process of urbanisation has disconnected people from the source and value of good food, giving rise to many personal and planetary problems.
So when we reimagine urban centres and their peri-urban hinterlands as landscapes interwoven with small scale, regenerative and diverse food growing everywhere, as generators of abundance, food equality, innovation, livelihoods, local economic resilience and beauty we can start to see that it is possible to heal this dislocation and its effects; healing our own bodies, our communities, the habitats of our companion species’, and the planet.
This decade is widely considered to be our last window of opportunity to slow the collapse of the ecosystem integrity on which all life depends through a global movement for ecosystem restoration. Mainstreaming agroecology – an agriculture based on healing and optimising natural systems, provides perhaps our biggest hope for success. This transition will be driven by demand for good food in urban settlements, and enabled by supportive policy and financial commitments at a local, regional and national level. This is why UAC is focussing its efforts on urban and not rural zones
About this Project. go to https://www.urbanagriculture.org.uk/
Latest
Year-1 evaluation UAC one year in – Evaluation, collaboration, vision.
The UAC is coordinated by Jeremy Iles and Maddy Longhurst of Green Future Associates and supported by our wonderful core oversight group (COG). Our COG partners are Suzy Russel of the CSA Network, Andy Goldring of the Permaculture Association, Gareth Roberts of Regather and Sheffood (Sheffield), Nick Wier of the Open Food Network, Gary Mitchell of Open Newtown and the Food Policy Alliance Cymru (FPAC) and Chris Blythe (independent).
If you would like to know more, please email jeremy@greenfuture.org.uk