Planning sustainable cities for community food growing

For the first time, this guide brings together in one place examples of planning policies around the UK that support community food growing. It is aimed primarily at planning authorities to help them to use food growing as a way of creating healthy communities, itself a specific recommendation within the Planning Practice Guidance that goes with the National Planning Policy Framework for England, but a principle that is relevant across the UK.

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A guide to using planning policy to meet strategic objectives through community food growing.

The report sets the planning context in the four nations, and provides the background to community food growing. The bulk of the report is structured around the different issues that food growing helps to address, from sustainability to residential amenity via health and wellbeing, green infrastructure, regeneration and many other agendas. Within each section we document how food growing has been woven into planning policies to meet these priorities in local areas, and illustrate these with examples of growing projects that have also been set up to help meet that particular agenda. In some cases, such as in Brighton & Hove, the food growing spaces were set up as a direct result of planning policies, which have now led to over a third of new residential developments having integrated space for community food growing.

We end the report with recommendations, firstly to planners with practical steps, or top tips, on putting these ideas into policy and practice, then more broadly recommendations to local groups about their potential role. We then make recommendations for what national government in each of the four nations can do better to embed community food growing into local planning policies and processes.