Alternative food and the urban institutional agenda: Challenges and insights from Pisa

Over the last decade, there has been in European cities and city-regions a multiplication of ad hoc policies aiming at transforming urban food systems. Designed as a response to global socio-environmental issues, urban food strategies (UFSs) and policies are widely perceived as democracy-enhancing, sustainable, progressive policy efforts. This paper discusses one of these efforts specifically: the strategic food plan delivered by the province of Pisa in 2011, managed and designed by the local University. The case offers numerous insights on the transfer, feasibility, conflicts and problems that can arise from the development and management of a food strategy. The article explores the city's specific situation, ranging from its peculiar administrative politics to its vibrant urban food scene. By using structured and semi-structured interviews, the empirical material reveals tensions between economic, political, cultural and social stances around food, which threaten to undermine the process of institutionalization. It also sheds light on the role of different stakeholders in the policy process, ranging from food social movements to researchers and policy-makers. In particular, it questions the supposed alignment of agendas between food social movements and UFSs and discusses the role of academics as knowledge brokers and policy advocates. By offering a reconstruction of the Pisa Food Plan's content, ambitions and vicissitudes, and exploring both the motives that led to its initial development and the manner in which the local context reacted to its launch, this case study will contribute to the debate around food strategies as appropriate and effective governance instruments, and on the export of “best practices” to different contexts.