Growing Food for Urban Community Resilience: Comparing Potentials and Challenges from Cases across Asia

For combating urban poverty and building community resilience, an area of policy and planning gaining much-needed attention is food security. Until recently, compared to other urban services, enabling food security for the urban poor through planning and development was a relatively low priority in developing Asia. However, strict lockdowns and supply chain disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic underscored the perilous state of food security for those reliant on urban informality; exposed challenges rooted in contemporary land use patterns, policies, and spatial planning approaches; and signaled potentials for reducing food insecurity by adjusting prevalent planning premises and practices. Urbanization and the modernization of urban planning have steadily but deleteriously distanced urban communities from the act of growing food. This multi-method inquiry involving field research in urban poor communities in Bangladesh, India, and Indonesia: 1) exposes and explains how food insecurity varies across contexts; and 2) explores how planning and design innovations could strengthen food security and community resilience. The threat to vulnerable communities from public health exigencies is expected to keep rising and recurring. Therefore, it calls for reconfiguring existing local institutional arrangements and relationships to enable innovative interventions that interweave planning, landscape design, and architectural wisdoms.