Applications of Urban Informatics in Sustainability Planning for Food Waste Management

A lack of sustainability metrics for cities, mainly due to data constraints and inadequate awareness, hinders rational, communicative, and inclusive sustainability planning processes. Urban informatics (UI) is identified as a promising solution to these problems. This study aims to answer the central question: how could urban informatics advance data-driven and evidence-based processes for effective, equitable sustainability planning? By focusing on sustainable food waste management (FWM), the numerical analysis first tackles data constraints through UI. This study establishes the first household-level food waste inventory database (HFWID) that quantitatively characterizes food waste generation (e.g., by locations and types of food waste) at the household level. The data is further used to evaluate food waste characterization at the regional level and assess potential environmental impacts. The results highlight that various assessment metrics can lead to various policy implications; it suggests planners should engage with the public to ensure inclusive planning processes from analysis to implementation. The follow-up study, building upon HFWID, identifies influential factors of residential food waste generation that have been understudied. The findings suggest that policies that do not take socio-demographic factors into account may lead to unintended penalties; built environments, such as walkable accessibility to grocery stores, can also affect residential food waste generation. These findings urge planners to consider community characteristics, land uses, and urban form within a holistic framework for sustainable FWM. The third analysis integrates the findings from the first two studies and employs interdisciplinary methods to evaluate the sustainability of urban food recovery programs. It demonstrates that UI empowers scenario planning to better understand urban system dynamics, identify key factors of program performance, and communicate trade-offs of planning objectives. In summary, this dissertation research concludes that UI benefits sustainability planning by enriching urban research and sustainability planning data, improving analytics for effective communications, and informing collective decisions. The interdisciplinary approaches enable system-thinking to balance social, economic, and environmental objectives. Moreover, this study suggests that planning education should equip future planners to understand, implement, and advance UI applications as well as embrace cross-disciplinary learning and collaboration in dealing with urban sustainability challenges.