Sustainable futures of agro-food? İzmir's sustainable agro-food transitions in the making

Abstract The city of Izmir-Turkey has recently attracted interest for a range of actions regarding agro-food and been perceived as a pioneer in providing alternatives to the practices of the incumbent agro-food regime. This paper builds on the multi-level perspective as a heuristic device to place these actions within discussions of sustainable agro-food transitions. Findings suggest that what could be considered as individual and isolated practices that diverge from agro-food regime may be viewed as sustainable niche alternatives from a transition perspective and hailed for sowing the seeds of an urban sustainability transition in the making. It is also demonstrated that making urban sustainability transitions in stabilized regimes such as agro-food, is as predicated on contestation and struggle as it is on policy devolution to localities, suggesting that sustainable agro-food transitions cannot be studied in isolation from the domain of urban policy and without incorporating adversarial struggle into the analysis. This paper comprises five sections. The introduction is followed by a conceptual section, outlining some of the key insights provided by the MLP and its application in an analysis of sustainability transitions. Following a description of the methodology employed, the focus turns to Izmir in the fourth section, offering empirical evidence that sustainable agro-food transitions are in the making in the city, which it does by addressing the generic pressures surrounding the agro-food regime and outlining the emerging local government-driven and bottom-up responses to these pressures that diverge from and run parallel to the prevailing agro-food regime. Finally, the paper reflects on the implications of the findings for the role of cities in terms of their contribution to the struggle for a sustainable future for agro-food.