Sandrine Simon
Sandrine Simon holds a PhD in Ecological Economics and is currently a PhD candidate in Education with the project financed by FCT (UI/BD/150716/2020): “Participatory governance towards urban sustainability. Food systems and territorial education in Lisbon”. She is a member of the ReLeCo Socio-Artistic Studies for Decoloniality and Sustainability.
Advisor: Carlos Smaniotto Costa
Áreas de interesse académico e científico Areas of academic and scientific interest
- Ecological Economics
- Systems approaches
- Human-ecological interactions
- Participatory governance
- Resilient cities
- Water management
- Alternative development paths
Abstract
In 2023, in the journal Nature, Rockström et al. were alerting us to the fact that “the stability and resilience of the Earth system and human well being are inseparably linked and yet their interdependencies are generally under-recognised”. Approaches to economic systems and socio-ecological ones urgently need to be integrated if our societies are to become less destructive and more sustainable. This is true regarding our economic systems but also regarding how we manage our cities; these are extremely dependent on external resources, very polluting and forever growing. Here, we investigate how the city can attempt to meet a basic human need – food. We show how the activities encompassed into the city’s food system belong to an urban ecosystem of which Urban Agriculture is a key component since its activities contribute to all of the ecosystem’s environmental functions. We explain the links between UA, food security, urban sustainability and resilience and how integrating UA into a new urban participatory governance system could help to make cities more sustainable and to ‘scale up’ circularity principles to the metropolitan food system level – hence breaking the city-countryside dichotomy.