Coexistence of supply chains in a city’s food supply: a factor for resilience?

The objective of this article is to propose and test an approach to characterise a city’s supply system and analyse its resilience. Anchored in economic and network sociology, the approach has been enriched by contributions from management sciences and geomatics, which have made it possible to conceptualise a city’s supply system as a network that is both social and spatialised, structured by operators and circulating differentiated products. Tested in the city of Montpellier, a signatory of the Milan Pact, this research was based on the production of primary data from a variety of sellers and suppliers. While confirming the complementarity between short and long supply chains, the results show more broadly how the articulation of three spatialised markets favours the resilience of the city’s supply, even if it is also a source of vulnerability. Therefore, these results make an original contribution to the intersection of research on the resilience of urban supply and on coexistence in food systems, while also calling for further research.