Smart food cities on the menu? integrating urban food systems into smart city policy making

Abstract

This chapter will explore the emergence of ‘smart cities’ in order to integrate the issue of urban agri-food systems. Our aim is to contribute to ‘smart food city’ conceptualizations by extending the notion of what makes a city ‘smart’ to include market and non-market activities, with particular attention to forms of urban activism pursuing urban food systems. Approaches to democratizing smart city concepts are discussed in Australia and Germany, where neoliberal efforts in smart city transformation can complicate local-level efforts to coordinate non-market relations in food democracy.