Mohamed Yassin spoke at  FAO/RUAF working Group on the:

Second international conference AGRICULTURE IN AN URBANIZING SOCIETY

reconnecting Agriculture and Food Chains to Social Needs

14-17 SEPTEMBER 2015 / ROME / ITALY

Our paper presentation:

Mauro Bertagnin, Alice Covatta and Mohamed Yassin

City growth, food decrease and changing places for sale and trade
SPEAKER: Mohamed Yassin

ABSTRACT. The relation between metropolis and food is essential to our ordinary life. The different ways through which nourishment reaches our table is a fundamental issue to be investigated even more if we consider that in the next forty years, 75 per cent of the world population will live in boundless urban agglomeration. Cities growth represents also a crucial factor for rethinking food as an element and a tool for urban design, basically because cities consume three quarters of the planet’s resources. If the metropolis is the place of the density and of commercial exchange in defined places, where food is sold and exchanged (shops, supermarkets, superstores) elsewhere, like in the rural area of many African countries, food is produced and traded near the place of production, generally along the closer road. This is an original anticipation of the new trend of “food at zero kilometer” that actually take place in the Western world. But a growing problem in contemporary cities is that of supply of the food that has to be imported in the metropolis from ever greater distances with large impacts on sustainability. There is now also a growing debate about the need to produce the food needed to sustain the inhabitants of the contemporary metropolis using flat roofs of skyscrapers, small green areas empty and abandoned buildings for instance through hydroponics. The paper aims to provide an analysis of the current food supply situation through the investigation of some peculiar markets and also new trials concerning food supply in some contemporary metropolis, linking the issue of food to the solution of various environmental emergencies affecting the major metropolitan areas of the planet. Markets selected and analyzed are taken form extremely different situations on one hand major urban agglomeration based on capitalistic system on the other hand rural conditions, but all of them are related to informal spatial configuration. The connotative informality is the main trait of those realities where food becomes more than an object of consumption and it transforms urban areas, cultural identity and quality of citizen lives.

Czstudio associati al  Simposio Internazionale Agritecture & Landscape - Paesaggio Agricoltura Architettura Urbanità: attraverso EXPO2015

Organizzato da Paysage Topscape con il patrocinio di EXPOMilano2015 promosso dal Consiglio Nazionale degli Architetti Pianificatori, Paesaggisti e Conservatori
25 Giugno 2015 dalle 9:00 alle 21:00 al teatro della Triennale di Milano, Viale Alemagna, Milano. Laura Zampieri, membro del comitato scientifico di Agritecture & Landscape presenta: Mohamed S. M. Yassin,  researcher in agri-food economics & policy, Ph.D. candidate in economics, ecology, landscape & territory of the University of Udine