The Side Event “Sustainable Food System for European Cities” was organized by the City of Milan, chair of the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, and the consortium of the European project FIT4FOOD2030. The event was designed to be a workshop about cities experiences in the field of food system transformation.
The European Commision invited the FIT4FOOD2030 project and the Milan Pact to organize the Side Event in order to further explore the potential role of cities inside FOOD2030 priorities, this policy framework is addressing food system issues and must reinforce the action at the different institutional scales.
The aim of this report is to present an overview of place based solutions implemented by cities under the framework of the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact and the fruitful debate developed among the Side Event participants: European Commission officers, researchers and city officers.
During the discussion participants were invited to work with the main tools useful to define the elements of success of food policy actions and to assess the content of these actions. The tools were defined by FIT4FOOD2030 consortium as a set of criteria with which assess cities cases and they were linked to the 37 recommended actions of the MUFPP.

The report is organized in four chapters. The first contains the debate on the role of cities as creative hubs of innovation among EC, Milan Pact, FIT4FOOD2030, Cariplo Foundation and Cardiff University. The results of a breaking ice activity, called Human Food Bingo, follows.
The third chapter is the core of the report, that looks into eight best cases from European cities, assessed by participant through criteria of FIT4FOOD2030. The fourth conclusive chapter explains how the role of cities was inserted in the declaration, in the expert report and in the call for action as a bridge theme with the High Level Event.