The past couple games I founded my Kingdom with little/no food and find myself stuck. I have a good starting location but food is JUST out of reach because of poor placement. I believe that, eventually, my cities should be able to acquire these resources via culture. Instead they are stuck as tiny outpost-towns... with resources ONE SQUARE out of reach 

Passive Culture- Like Civ 4:

Civilization 4 did culture very nicely and it worked well, I believe that a similar system could work well in Elemental. First, every town/city should gradually generate a small amount of culture. The giant leaps (like when citysize increases) would still be standard it can be expanded upon. Obviously, larger cities culture would spread faster, however, smaller nations/cities would be gradually gaining more territory.

Culture Expanded:

We could have a sort of "monument" building that adds a small amount of culture to cities and, later on, something like a theater for bigger boosts. There could also be a new character class for NPC's called the Bard or Entertainer which adds +2 to all cultures. Lastly, culture could have it's own techs ending with a repeatable 5-10% culture boost (would need balancing). With this you could add another angle into the game where some cities are very culturally magnificent with large borders or just focus that attention to the military.

Culture Effected by Terrain:

Lastly, culture spread would be slowed down by terrain and the environment. Again, city size increases would still give you a mandatory expansion (just like normal) but you could see it slowly creeping on the surroundings.

From a Civilization 4 FFH Mod:

This worked out nicely in the Civilization FFH mod or one of the modmods. I could certainly work nicely here!