Social Value and Urban Sustainability in Food Markets

Abstract

Urban food markets can promote sustainable development through the generation of social value in the spaces where they are located and contribute to sustainability on a global scale. To measure this, indicators are required to evaluate and monitor these markets. Studies in this regard are scarce and often developed according to top-down schemes. This study seeks to remedy this relative deficiency and aims to design specific social sustainability metrics for these organizations from a bottom-up perspective. The Integrated Social Value model is used. This social accounting system is considered appropriate in this study due to the phenomenological approach on which it is based and is applied to a service cooperative located in the Canary Islands. The main contribution of this work is that new social sustainability indicators are obtained and applied to the analysis of an entity, and they are relevant and understandable to stakeholders. This would provide, in future developments, a system of sustainability indicators for similar organizations in Spain.

Tourists’ Fascination with Urban Food Markets: The Successful Case of Time Out Market Lisbon

“…Food markets have been key forces in the structural and economic development of western European cities even since the classical Mediterranean civilizations [11]. Contemporary urban food markets are a recent manifestation of the ancient Greek agoras or Roman forums [12,13]. Since the end of the last century, across Europe, these markets, once vibrant and essential for supplying cities and their inhabitants, have come to be seen as an outdated and obsolete form of retail, having lost their former relevance [14].…”

Is It Possible to Monetarily Quantify the Emotional Value Transferred by Companies and Organizations? An Emotional Accounting Proposal

“…Although the work is theoretical, it is underpinned by a large number of cases analyzed in recent years by the social accounting for sustainability (SAS) research group, recognized by International Centre of Research and Information on the Public, Social and Cooperative Economy (CIRIEC), some of which are published in leading journals, general papers (Retolaza et al, 2016 ; Retolaza and San-Jose, 2021 ), on its application in the social economy in general (Lazcano et al, 2019 ; Lazkano and Beraza, 2019 ; Etxanobe, 2020 ; Lazkano et al, 2020 ), on its usefulness to measure hospital efficiency (San-Jose et al, 2019 ), about sport clubs (Mendizabal et al, 2020 ; Mendizabal and Garcia-Merino, 2021 ), applied to ecclesiastical organizations (Retolaza et al, 2020 ), to universities and education (Ayuso et al, 2020 ; Arimany-Serrat and Tarrats-Pons, 2021 ; Barba-Sánchez et al, 2021a ), its benefit for technology parks (Blázquez et al, 2020 ; Torres-Pruñonosa et al, 2020 ), associations of fishers (Guzmán-Pérez et al, 2018 ), tourism (Guzmán-Pérez et al, 2021 ), public tenders (Bernal et al, 2019 ), and agri-food companies (Barba-Sánchez et al, 2021b ). These studies identify the importance of emotional value and propose its inclusion in social accounting, which has so far been partially addressed by few studies (Ruiz-Roqueñi, 2020 ; Tirado-Valencia et al, 2021 ).…”