Child-centered food systems: reorienting food systems towards healthy diets for children

Current food systems are failing to guide children towards healthy diets. This paper presents a tool to identify the actions needed to reorient food systems to become more child-centred from a nutrition perspective. To connect the dots between children's lives, their food environments and food supply systems, the tool takes a child-centred, food systems approach. Comprising six methodological steps, the tool starts by measuring and understanding children's realities and then working back up into the system to identify how food environments and supply systems could make relevant foods more or less available, affordable, appealing and aspirational in the contexts of children's lives. The paper spells out the mix of methods needed to make this assessment, gives examples of the data and studies already available and type of insights they provide, and discusses the methodological challenges and gaps. It presents a worked example that shows how following these steps in sequence enables the identification of a package of actions that can act coherently to reorient food systems in the way most likely to have impact on child malnutrition

Transit-Oriented Development Technical Assistance: Second Summary Report

Public transportation plays a critical role in providing safe and reliable mobility, as well as creating increased land value and economic opportunities in surrounding communities. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Transit Administration (FTA) launched the Transit-Oriented Development Technical Assistance Initiative in 2015 to provide technical assistance activities leading to improved access to public transportation, new economic opportunities, pathways to employment, and support for transit-oriented development (TOD) within transportation corridors and around public transportation stations, with a focus on economic development through innovative financing

Smart Growth and State Territoriality

This paper draws on neo-Weberian traditions of social theory to consider smart growth as a territorial programme of the multiscaled state. Responding to recent efforts by scholars within interdisciplinary urban studies to re-engage with neo- Weberian concepts around urban growth and institutional politics, the discussion interprets the implementation of the smart growth doctrine in US metropolitan areas --for example Seattle-Tacoma, the city-region specifically explored here--as the \u27intercurrence\u27 of various state-ordering arrangements. A conceptual focus on intercurrence, a term derived directly from the work of Orren and Skowronek forges stronger links between planning studies and state theory and thus offers a new way to map political geographies of smart growth