Assessing the sustainability of urban food systems for collective uses: case study of a French city

International audienceThe task of feeding cities is a challenge that nowadays all governments face, which involves the coordination of multiple producers, distributors, logistics operators and traders of perishable foods. With the increasing population in cities, more food and better freight transport systems are required. This takes a particular importance in cities and urban zones, since the growing population needs to be fed, but freight transport is often seen as creating nuisances such as congestion or pollution, among others. In this context, several cities started to think on how improve the city’s food supply system by combining proximity producers’ supply with advanced city logistics systems in order to decrease transport nuisances and improve the quality and sustainability of the food system.One of the possible actions is that of deploying proximity food hubs with a consequent urban food distribution system to supply the different urban zones of a city. However, this type of system is starting to be conceived and there is need of assessing the impacts of such alternative before thinking on its deployment possibilities. For this reason, this paper aims to propose a framework to assess different food delivery alternatives in the urban context focusing on a Food hub deployment and its impacts on urban development as a solution of urban consolidation center (UCC).The objective of this study is to enable municipalities to assess the consequences of food logistics flows centralization on an UCC-based food hub. Regarding the context of the research, the study focuses on a Food hub deployment to share the supplies for administrative restaurants of a city, following the sustainable food strategy of a French municipality. This municipality decided to show the example in terms of sustainable food supply and aims to increase the part of organic and local food for the administrative restaurants under its coordination. To do this, a specific food system needs to be conceived and assessed. To assess the suitability of such systems, it will be necessary to model both the demand and the logistics supply, to define the main indicators of sustainability and their estimation methods, then to construct the scenarios to assess and finally make the corresponding analyses