Urban Agriculture Oriented Community Planning and Spatial Modeling in Chinese Cities

There are three main contradictions associated with urbanization: population growth and food demand, urban sprawl and production space, and production patterns and energy consumption. The pressure of urbanization has led to a mismatch between production and consumption in space and pattern. The current status and trends in urban food system planning illustrated that sustainable consumption and production were closely related to their spatial layout. The paper took a simulated sustainable food system in urban community as an example. It formulated a rational spatial planning strategy based on urban agriculture of different scales, technologies, and efficiencies, quantified productive community metrics to accommodate different scales of urban space, and wrote algorithms to develop a spatial model of a meta-cellular automaton that coupled consumer housing with productive surfaces. Finally, by comparing and optimizing the spatial patterns of multiple solutions, urban agriculture-oriented urban community planning was developed. The model was only a preliminary attempt at food system planning, but it explored the distribution patterns of housing and agriculture within a given territory in three steps: theoretical strategy-morphological simulation-planning design while meeting urban and productivity indicators. It demonstrated the feasibility of productive spaces and explored a planning strategy for urban communities that supports sustainable consumption and production.