In 2025 the West of England Combined Authority (WECA) will be electing a new Mayor. There is as yet no work being done around city-region food resilience within WECA (as far as we are aware), but with a new Mayor this, we hope, will take a significant leap forward. The Bristol Fringe Farming project (2021-23) laid out some key recommendations and helped to show that Bristol can’t talk about food resilience without taking about it’s peri-urban land and wider greenbelt which lies outside it’s administrative boundary. Food resilience for the West of England is one of the key strategic areas WECA should be addressing with practitioners across the region.
Our Greenbelt 2.0 pilot (2023) and subsequent conversations with Bath & N E Somerset about revising their Greenbelt policy, plus our Agrifood for Net Zero funded project Pathways for an Agroecological Urbanism which has a Bristol city region focus, demonstrate that UAC is committed to supporting WECA (including North Somerset) to find a meaningful, collaborative way in to this work which will help accelerate the agroecological transition.
In 2022, Maddy partnered with Petronella Tyson, a social impact and land-use planning practitioner to draft a paper for the West of England Mayoral candidates called ‘Resourcing Food System Transition in the West of England’. This went to Dan Norris (Labour) but we didn’t hear back. It asked him to support, with funds, time and other resources, the creation of a vision and practical infrastructure to orientate the region towards a self-perpetuating, healthy agroecological future.
The West of England Combined Authority (WECA) has, to date, been a rather opaque entity with a mandate from central government to deliver economic growth. In the Spatial strategy, food is not considered to be an important land-use issue.
This change in the politics of WECA presents an exciting opportunity to explore an inclusive, coherent, place-based response to our climate, ecological and nutritional crises, through agroecological systems. As food connects and sustains us all, by working on this pressing agenda, we hope to create collaborations which can help WECA find a deeper purpose (beyond business as usual) aligned with the needs of our time and of future generations.
With the help of cllr Jerome Thomas (Green) we will be hosting an opening event in October 2021 to bring together those with the passion, means and experience to move this work forward.
If you would like to be involved in this or find out more, please get in touch via the Contact page.
