Fishing in the city for food—a paradigmatic case of sustainability in urban blue space This article presents fishing in the city for food (FCF) as a trenchant example of urban ecology, and the ways in which urban dwellers use, interact with, and depend on urban blue spaces. Our literature review demonstrates how FCF is studied in a diverse body of scientific publications that rarely draw on each other. As such, FCF and its relevance for sustainable and just planning of urban blue space remain relatively unknown. Using the literature review, a survey of FCF in European capitals, and examples from FCF in Stockholm, we demonstrate how attention to FCF raises pertinent and interrelated questions about access to water, food and recreation; human health; animal welfare and aquatic urban biodiversity. By 2050, 88% of the global population will be living in cities1. The global urban population is already drawing intensively on ecosystems worldwide for various basic needs such as food, water, and clean air, and other public benefits such as recreation opportunities. The projected increase in urbanisation will only increase these demands, and, in so doing, impact the sustainability of ecologies worldwide2.Urbanisation has evoked a concern for making cities more resilient and sustainable (see, e.g., sustainable development goal 11) and a rediscovery of the function and importance of ecosystems situated in urban landscapes3,4,5. A growing number of publications across various scientific disciplines have now studied how ecologies in cities are important for meeting the needs of urban populations6.However, most attention in the transdisciplinary field of urban sustainable development is devoted to the study of urban green space (for an important exception see Beatley7,8). Less visible (both literally and metaphorically) are the species and socio-ecological interactions found in—or related to—city waters, or blue space. Much remains unknown about the ecological health and sustainability of urban blue space, and the ways in which urban dwellers use, interact with and depend on its ecology and biology. Hence, it is still unclear how urban blue space contributes to and is dependent on, sustainable urban development and wellbeing9. In this paper, we focus on urban blue space and propose fishing in the city for food (FCF) as a trenchant example of the relation between urban ecologies and urban sustainability and justice.Many city waters have historically provided their inhabitants with an important source of protein in the form of fish (see e.g. Ericson Wolke10). But during the second half of the 20th-century commercial fisheries in and close to cities often disappeared due to dwindling fish stocks caused by pollution, overfishing, and habitat destruction, but also because more powerful economic sectors acquired control over urban waterfronts and waterways11,12. Alongside the marginalisation of commercial fisheries, the significance of urban waters for food provisioning seems to have also ceased. In this article we nuance the idea that urban blue space is insignificant for urban food provisioning by putting the spotlight on fishing in the city for food.We focus here specifically on fishing in the city, and as such exclude semi-urban fishing, fishing communities outside the city that are influenced by urbanisation processes, and fishers living in the city but fishing outside13. A focus on the city itself is warranted because this limited geographical area and environment accommodate a range of different functions, and different socio-economic and cultural groups, and as such can be considered a microcosm of society. FCF then is an everyday practice through which urban dwellers use and relate to (blue spaces in) their cities.FCF addresses a number of general questions and matters of concern regarding environmental sustainability and justice that are at stake in the use and governance of urban blue space. To elucidate these questions and concerns, we first present a review of the literature on FCF. From this general level, we then move to an intermediate level to illustrate the significance of FCF through an overview of the occurrence of FCF in European capitals, and lastly, we present our own observations of fishers in Stockholm city as an example of FCF. We use these three sets of results together to discuss what insights and questions a study of FCF can generate for understanding the significance of urban blue space, in the light of urban justice and sustainability.To establish what has been published about FCF, we searched in Web of Science and Google Scholar for the following keywords and phrases: urban fishing; urban angling; city fishing; fishing for food in the city; subsistence fishing; urban fishers /fishermen; city angling; city fisher; city fishing toxin; hazardous substance city/urban fishing; fishing/angling in the city). We then performed a forward and backward snowballing of the references in the papers that we found. This exercise resulted in a non-exhaustive list of 285 broadly relevant papers from academic fields such as fisheries (management), economics, history, aquatic science, risk studies, development studies, sustainability science, environmental impact assessment, urban studies, anthropology, toxicology, marine policy, sociology, leisure research, consumption studies, natural resource management, education, ecology, health, planning, rural development, and human geography. We also included grey literature, such as reports, conference proceedings, student theses, etc.From the collection of articles that we generated through this search, we selected only those that discussed (directly or indirectly) ‘fishing for food’ and ‘fishing in the city’. This means that articles about fishing for food but not in the city, or about fishing in the city but not discussing fishing for food, or about urban fish but not about fishing, or about fishers living in urban areas but fishing elsewhere, were omitted. This selection resulted in 135 articles about fishing in the city for food. We analysed the articles in this final set of publications based on topic, country of study and publication year to discern strands, trends, and geographical spread in the literature. For detailed information see Supplementary Table 1.The literature on FCF is geographically uneven. Of the total of 135 articles, 104 are about the USA. The USA literature offers valuable insights into FCF, but insights from the USA context (a high-income country with large income differences and a longstanding nationwide urban fishing programme) cannot unreflectively be used for understanding FCF globally or in other places. Other high-income countries that are included in our review with more than one entry are Canada (2 articles), the Czech Republic (2 articles) and Germany (5 articles). Further, 15 articles focus on urban fishing in upper-middle-income countries: Brazil (5 articles), South Africa (6 articles), Malaysia (1 article), Mexico (1 article), and China (2 articles). In the first four of these countries, FCF is approached more as a livelihood security and/or justice issue, whereas in China it is discussed in relation to public health.While they feature in the first collection of 285 articles, low- and lower-income countries were generally absent when we narrowed our focus to fishing in the city for food. Most articles from low- and lower-income countries focus on fishers that live in the city but go fishing elsewhere outside the city, often with boats (e.g. Kadfak14), or semi-urban fishing communities15,16, or urban fish farming (e.g. Abayomi17). As such, these publications did not qualify to be included in our selection of articles about fishing in the city for food. Nevertheless, they discuss related and relevant issues and highlight the diversity that can be described by the term ‘urban fishing’. We suspect that the lack of articles about FCF from low- and lower-income countries does not reflect the importance or prevalence of fishing in the city for food in those countries, but rather that FCF is under-researched in these contexts, or not researched as a topic separate from fishing in general, or that this research cannot be found through common search engines for academic research.In our review of the final set of 135 articles on FCF, we distinguish two main strands (each consisting of more than 30 articles) and two minor strands (both consisting of fewer than 20 articles), which characterise the literature on FCF. The first main strand is called urban fisheries management. This strand discusses broadly characteristics of fishing in the city, and most articles are specifically about urban fisheries management. In this strand, 51 of the 57 papers are from the USA, where urban fishing programmes started as a nationwide initiative in 1969, initially to provide fishing opportunities for disadvantaged neighbourhoods specifically18. Over time this focus developed into the more general goals of providing fishing opportunities for the growing urban population; recruiting new fishers to increase licence sales that pay for fisheries management; and promoting environmental stewardship and helping urban residents to reconnect with nature19. Many of the articles in this strand are policy- and management-oriented, originating from urban fishing symposia for professionals (see, e.g., the collection in Eades et al.20). Reminiscent in scope and approach to the USA research, studies have been performed in Germany21 and the Czech Republic22. These articles share a focus on management issues such as fish stocking for urban fishing lakes23, or the educational and recreational value of urban fishing programmes24. They regularly discuss the recruitment of new anglers to urban fishing programmes25 and, to this end, present the characteristics, attitudes and preferences of fishers. The articles understand fishing practices through categorising anglers (using indicators, such as age, income, gender, or ethnicity), thereby paying less attention to fishing as a social practice shared by groups, with informal norms and routines. While most of the urban fisheries that are analysed in this strand allow harvesting of fish, the articles seldom discuss the use of fish as food. Consequently, there is little attention in this strand to the health risks that come with eating potentially contaminated fish.The second main strand focuses on the public health effects of the consumption of city fish and contains information about: the contaminants (organic pollutants such as PCBs and dioxins, and inorganic pollutants such as mercury and other heavy metals) and pathogens (such as bacteria and parasites) that fish species in urban waters can contain; the fishers’ knowledge about the health risks of eating city fish; and the effectiveness of the fish consumption advisories. From the total of 48 articles in this strand, 43 articles present research about the USA, two are from China, one is from South Africa, and one is from Germany. In contrast to the first strand that focuses on regulated spaces for urban fishing, this literature often studies non-regulated urban fishing26,27. There are some exceptions, and these articles call for more attention to be given to issues of health and contamination in urban fishing programmes28,29,30,31. In common with the first strand, many articles categorise anglers according to age, income, gender, ethnicity, etc., to better understand their risk perception and fish consumption practices32,33. A majority of articles from the USA in this second strand argue that some ethnic groups in US cities eat more contaminated fish than others, and investigate why this is so28,34. An important recommendation coming from this literature is that consumption advisories need to better adjust to ethnic groups35,36.A third, rather small, strand of 23 papers centres around environmental justice in urban fisheries and highlights how structural inequalities are manifest in unequal access to safe food and good fishing grounds. One group of USA scholars criticises the focus, characteristic of strand two, on improving consumption advisories for ethnic groups, which they argue is based on a too limited understanding of the problem. They point out that for many fishers and their families the fish caught may be an economically and culturally important part of their diet. Therefore, however well-meant and -designed the advisories may be, avoiding fish consumption is hardly an option for these fishers37,38,39. The scholars in this third strand stress the importance of protecting and cleaning urban fishing waters from pollution, as a minority and/or low-income groups will continue to depend on the resource in the foreseeable future38,39. Moreover, scholars like Shilling40 and Corburn41,42,43 argue that the ethnic groups affected by contaminated fish should be invited to co-design interventions better suited to their everyday reality than those devised by expert-driven consumption advisories. Also part of this third strand is a group of articles that describe how subsistence fishers in Brazil44, South Africa45,46,47, and 19th century USA48 have been, or are being, displaced and marginalised because of urbanisation and gentrification. The articles discuss how many cities are being designed for an urban middle class and elite46, in which fishing for food is seen as undesirable or unimportant, and as such made invisible47, marginalised or criminalised through rules and regulations45,48, or simply neglected in public policy and city planning49.The fourth and last strand is also small (7 articles), but includes rather recent studies, and concerns urban foraging, i.e., harvesting or gathering raw biological resources (fungi, plants, parts of plants, invertebrate and vertebrate animals, and fish) within urban and peri-urban settings primarily for direct consumption, decoration, crafts, barter, or
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42949-021-00043-9
Fishing in the city for food—a paradigmatic case of sustainability in urban blue space
