ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Navigating Regional Challenges: Food Systems as a Catalyst for Spatial Planning Innovation - The Food Transition Strategy and FoodLink Network in the Metropolitan Area of Lisbon

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral SS 10 | Shaping Regional Futures Toward Sustainable Transitions: Community Involvment In Visioning and Implementation

Speakers

Prof. Cristina Cavaco (CIAUD, Lisbon School of Architecture, Universidade de Lisboa)Dr Rosário Oliveira (Institute of Social Sciences, Universidade de Lisboa)

Description

In an anthropogenic era marked by recurring environmental and socioeconomic crises and heightened unpredictability, planning regional futures for a sustainable transition has become an increasingly pressing and complex challenge.
In Portugal, however, regional planning has historically been overlooked within the national spatial planning system and public policies. This is largely due to the fact that, while statutory planning within a traditional state framework rooted in nested territorial administrative units and formal tiers of government, regionalization has neither been pursued nor has a regional level of government been established. As a result, regional and supra-municipal policies depend either on central government decision-making or on the voluntary cooperation of local authorities in policymaking and decision. This highlights a significant gap between how power is territorially exercised and the pressing territorial challenges that are emerging, such as climate change adaptation, food production and supply, housing, and socio-territorial inequalities.
To address these challenges, the Metropolitan Area of Lisbon has, in recent years, become a key platform for developing several strategy-oriented soft planning initiatives grounded in multi-level governance arrangements, inter-municipal cooperation, and the active engagement of diverse territorial actors. Despite the difficulties of implementing territorial approaches at a regional scale, these strategies underscore the emergence of a new supra-municipal spatial reasoning aimed at fostering the metropolitan area as a transformative space for collaborative visioning and decision-making.
The Food Transition Strategy in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (FTS-LMA) exemplifies such initiatives. Encompassing all 18 municipalities of the LMA, it seeks to integrate diverse policies to establish a sustainable and resilient food system at a metropolitan level. This strategy is developed and supported by FoodLink – the Network for Food Transition in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area – a bottom-up collaborative network that acts as an interface for identifying solutions to plan an integrated and intersectoral food system within the regional context of the LMA. Through its Action Plan, the FTS-LMA articulates a shared vision, guidelines, and objectives to be followed by the entities involved.
In this paper, we aim to examine how the transformative agenda of food systems can drive positive transitions in current spatial planning practices. As a voluntary policy instrument and an example of soft planning practice, the FTS-LMA offers an opportunity to foster the emergence of new planning spaces while advancing innovation in planning at the regional level. We seek to explore how this initiative, with its place-based, territorially sensitive, and integrated approach, can lay the groundwork for supporting collaborative visioning and regional design approaches at the metropolitan scale, while also contributing to reinforcing traditional state-led planning frameworks.