Designing metropolitan food reserve portfolios for urban food resilience: A policy-design case from Surabaya, Indonesia

Urban food resilience is often treated as a question of agricultural production, staple stock availability, or emergency food aid. Such interpretations are useful but incomplete for dense metropolitan regions whose food security depends on household coping capacities, neighborhood retail systems, civic redistribution networks, market information, municipal logistics, and inter-regional procurement. This article develops a qualitative policy-design case study of Surabaya, Indonesia, to examine how metropolitan food reserves can be planned beyond conventional stockholding. Using a documentary archive consisting of a 2022 food-reserve focus group discussion report, presentation materials, coordination notes, food-station and food-bank models, local food-security mapping, and urban baseline records, the study codes stakeholder inputs by problem domain, actor mandate, reserve function, spatial scale, and implementation risk. The analysis shows that Surabaya’s favorable food-security classification coexists with structural dependence on external supply, limited urban agricultural land, long market chains, food-quality concerns, storage and budget risks, and fragmented reserve governance. Rather than treating sustainable home-food garden areas, women's farmer groups, family welfare and empowerment groups, city food units, food banks, food stations/municipally owned food enterprises, and inter-regional procurement as separate alternatives, the article reconstructs them as a collaborative food reserve portfolio. The contribution is conceptual and policy-design oriented: it reframes urban food reserves as a multi-scalar governance architecture composed of material stocks, social provisioning, surplus redistribution, city-region logistics, rules, data, and emergency capacities. The model is best read as a pilotable planning framework, not as evidence of program impact, and is intended to help planners translate fragmented food-security instruments into coordinated, monitorable resilience functions.