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1. Introduction
In the last decades, growing attention has been turned towards food supply chains as a way of understanding the implications for agriculture, employment, rural development and land use which emerge as a result of agro-industrial restructuring (Corsi et al., 2018). The dominant paradigm characterised in the supremacy of supermarket supply chains has led to a number of social, economic and environmental distortions (Goodman et al., 2013) and to an increased distance between food production and consumption that involves geographic, economic, cognitive, social and political levels (Harris, 2009; Maye and Kirwan, 2010).
In response to these problems, cities, regions, international organisations and programmes, governmental or non-governmental agencies, research groups and associations have begun to support the need to ensure that food systems are directed towards a path of sustainability (Forssell and Lankoski, 2015), and the process is constantly evolving. The birth and development of concepts such as urban food planning (Morgan, 2009), city-region food system (Forster and Escudero, 2014) and, more generally, urban food policies respond to this need. The demand for quality products from urban space is part of the broader discussion concerning the concept of new rurality. It represents a new rural strategy in response to changing geopolitical food and agricultural relations (Rytkönen and Hård, 2016), which leads, moreover, to an expansion of the role of rural space and its progressive specialisation in the production of quality foods and the use of distinctive quality labels (Aguilar Criado et al., 2014, 2016). SIAL (localised agro-food system) is another expression of the new rurality. It represents a particular form of organisation of the competitive potential expressed by the agricultural and agro-food activities of a given area. As a definition, SIAL consists of a geographically concentrated system consisting of production organisations and services (agro-food companies, commercial companies, restaurants, etc.). To this end, products, people, their institutions, their know-how, their eating behaviours are involved in SIAL (Muchnik and Sautier, 1998). The alternative food networks (AFN) are part of the broader debate concerning the re-negotiation of rural-urban agro-food relations, where rural areas, among other things, are required to “work” for cities and their suburbs. AFN, therefore, represents a possible output, an evolution of an agro-food system that requires a renewal of the human, technical...