15-Minute City e Alternative Food Networks: Una ricerca tra criticità e opportunità per comprendere e ripensare lo sviluppo urbano

The present research aims at comprehending the urban context complexity and the possible solutions to promote new sustainable development for the cities. Initially, it is meant to discuss how cities grew up in modern times, addressing the centre-peripheries development model specifically; trying to understand the issues that nowadays hit the urban environment, the research addresses the projecting strategies that drive possibilities and resources distribution among different groups of citizens. Among the others, it is relevant to focus on food production as majorly responsible for the urban framework crises. Indeed, food is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions as it accounts for around 13% of cities’ total emissions. Given the critical phenomena that hit urban systems, it is relevant to figure out whether potential solutions exist; to do so, successively, the research focuses on the 15-Minute City model. The practical definition of this theory consists in projecting an urban area in which all citizens can meet almost all their needs within 15 minutes long walk or bicycle ride from their homes. The main target of the model, especially in bigger cities, regards ensuring everybody’s autonomous capacity of fulfilling self needs, regardless of the inhabited neighbourhood. Then, due to its cruciality, the research focuses on the role of food in cities and the best distributive systems to allocate it; as a result, the third chapter regards the alternative food networks. In particular, the target is put upon the comprehension of the manifold positive results that the AFNs produce. Indeed, the AFNs aim at challenging the mainstream supply chains of food, intending to promote more sustainable behaviours within consumption. Relying on the relevant literature, the AFNs seem extremely helpful to address the themes of overall sustainability and resources accessibility; nonetheless, to properly understand the potential applicability of AFNs on a wider scale, it is necessary to implement specific research that investigates the implications of the networks. For this reason, the following chapters regard the empiric research carried out in the city of Turin; the research aims at comprehending the inhabitants’ perspectives about the urban framework accessibility. In particular, through a series of semi-structured interviews, relying on the qualitative research methods, the study intends to understand how the inhabitants of Barriera di Milano and Crocetta, two neighbourhoods of Turin, deal with the area in which they inhabit and, in particular, how they perceive sustainability in food provisioning. The empiric research is helpful to obtain a more peculiar comprehension of the Turin inhabitants’ perceptions of the mentioned phenomena; relying on the collected pieces, the objective consists in intersecting the empiric and the literature data to figure out whether the information match. Such a process is essential to promote new vibrant opportunities for the urban citizens. Indeed, in presenting the outcomes of the research, many efforts are put into the construction of a series of policy suggestions that may be helpful to project a different future for the City of Turin.