Delivering a Healthy and Sustainable Food Economy in Letchworth Garden City

While the Garden City movement has had a major influence on urban planning, Howard’s emphasis on integrating town and country in food terms has often been overlooked as a core feature. Today, the urban agenda tends to include food systems to support a place-based approach to food. To link the Garden City legacy with today's urban food agenda, this doctoral research uses a case study of the world’s first Garden City, Letchworth, in England. The study delves into the Garden City guidelines applied today to examine interplays between the unique local governance and its spatial and social environment for a sustainable food economy. The research uses mixed methods to link the local food economy with the socio-cultural practices on site. Food mapping as a groundwork process is combined with an ethnographical approach, including fieldwork and interviews with key stakeholders. This overall approach outlines a characterisation of food spaces while providing insights into the socio-political factors influencing them. The food mapping, first, shows that the shape of the town encompasses areas and setups that are characteristic of the garden city blueprint. As a result, today Letchworth offers a spatial infrastructure for local food procurement, albeit dormant in places. The second theme investigates Howard’s economic principle of public land ownership and land-value capture implemented in Letchworth. This precept, combined with the third administrative aspect, outlines a unique governance framework for food-purpose strategic decisions regarding the stewardship, use, and protection of the land for the local community's benefit. Lastly, if some residents report on a foodscape that could encourage sustainable practices, specific hurdles in implementing them on a daily basis suggest tensions between sustainable food catchment, individual practices, and the town's offers or potentialities. The garden city model, as applied in Letchworth, demonstrates how edible landscape, land stewardship, and community empowerment are three critical levers to underpin placemaking that support food governance and create resilient food cities. In that sense, the project contributes to the explorations of the urban food systems by highlighting how a place-based approach is critical to support sustainable food systems.