Edible City Solutions—One Step Further to Foster Social Resilience through Enhanced Socio-Cultural Ecosystem Services in Cities

Nature-based solutions have not been able to actively involve citizens and to address successfully food security, poverty alleviation, and inequality in urban areas. The Edible City approach promises a strategic step towards the development of sustainable, livable, and healthy cities. We introduce the conceptional framework of Edible City Solutions (ECS), including different forms of urban farming combined with closed loop systems for sustainable water, nutrient, and waste management. We review scientific evidence on ECS benefits for urban regeneration and describe the status quo of ECS in Rotterdam, Andernach, Oslo, Heidelberg, and Havana as case studies. We provide an analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) to explore the capacity of ECS to enhance multifunctionality of urban landscapes with special focus on social cohesion and quality of life. Based on this we identify and discuss strategies for fostering socially relevant implementations for the case study cities and beyond.

Ina Säumel 1,2,* ,Suhana E. Reddy 1 andThomas Wachtel 1

1Integrative Research Institute for Transformation of Human-Environment Systems (IRITHESys), Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany

2Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Sciences, Faculty of Life Sciences, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Invalidenstr. 42, 10099 Berlin, Germany

*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Received: 29 December 2018 / Accepted: 2 February 2019 / Published: 14 February 2019