The food system from a territorial perspective. Policy framework, planning tools and practices at global scale.

Today, the need to consider food and nutrition as fundamental elements of the planning process is becoming increasingly central to the political and scientific debate. In this regard, a proper integration between spatial planning and food planning allows us to address the current unsustainability of food systems, thus facilitating the development of transition processes towards more sustainable paradigms. This thesis wants to offer a complete picture of how over the years, food systems planning has become an indispensable component of spatial planning. In this regard, States around the world consider Food System Planning as a discipline capable of resolving the current levels of un-sustainability affecting, on the one hand, our societies and, on the other, our food systems. Starting with the role that food plays in our lives and the consequences that urbanization and globalization have on our societies and food systems, the attention shifts to the food planning process in order to investigate the concepts, methods and main tools that comprise it. For this reason, several European projects and four case studies were taken into consideration with the aim of understanding how different realities from all over the world relate together the development of urban areas and the sustainable development of food systems. The result is an analysis that shows how food and nutrition have gone from an initial concept of "commodity" to occupy a fundamental role in the development of a city or a territory. Increasingly, local governments are realizing that food systems planning has become an indispensable element of a city's urban development policies and strategies.