It is clear from the preceding chapters that contemporary urban food sharing includes a vibrant body of initiatives operating across the globe and providing many opportunities to bring people together around food, whether that is collectively mapping spaces to grow food or working collaboratively to redistribute food and its derivatives. These initiatives are diverse in form, function and governance. They include for-profit initiatives that embrace commercial, market transactions to provide novel and shared experiences in relation to growing, cooking or eating together. Many of these initiatives focus on improving inefficiencies relating to the under-utilisation of resources, including skills (for example, providing opportunities for home cooks to make use of their culinary knowledge), or to improve access to facilities that would otherwise be beyond the reach of individuals or small start-up enterprises (for example, shared commercial kitchens). Food-sharing initiatives also include more informal, even sometimes deliberately unorganised, initiatives that create opportunities to develop new urban food commons. Such diversity made the foundational exercise of mapping and building a database of ICT-mediated food-sharing initiatives highly productive in creating a clearer picture of why, where, what and how food sharing occurs (Davies et al, 2017a; 2017b). Certainly the diverse collection of food-sharing initiatives that appears across many urban areas around the world provides an important counterbalance to the media preoccupation with a few high-profile, for-profit sharing companies that are using ICT to link up those with idle capacity and those who wish to avail themselves of it (Davies et al, 2017c). Rather than simply reacting to the media noise around platform-based sharing economies, the database underpinning the material presented in this book provides a springboard from which the broad base of sharing can be examined.

This concluding chapter reflects on the key findings detailed in this book. It considers first the overarching issues within food sharing of practice, planning and policy. This is followed by an outline research agenda for examining food sharing in contemporary contexts that identifies mapping and tracking, assessing, comparing and planning as key to progressing our understanding of food sharing in contemporary contexts, while the need for greater attention to theoretical approaches is also noted.