Bringing together urban systems and food systems theory and research is overdue: understanding the relationships between food and nutrition infrastructures along a continuum of contested and hybrid access
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Date
2023
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Agriculture and Human Values
Abstract
Urban dwellers’ food and nutritional wellbeing are both dependent on infrastructure and can be indicative of wider wellbeing
in urban contexts and societal health. This paper focuses on the multiple relationships that exist between food and infrastruc ture to provide a thorough theoretical and empirical grounding to urgent work on urban food security and nutrition in the
context of rapid urban and nutrition transitions in the South. We argue that urban systems and food systems thinking have not
been well aligned, but that such alignment is not only timely and overdue but also fruitful for both thematic areas of research
and policy. We draw in particular on work within wider urban political economy and political ecology that can be classifed
as part of the ‘infrastructural turn’ that is infuential with urban studies but little acknowledged within food studies. Drawing
on these literatures helps us to better understand the interrelationships between people, things and ideas that make up both
infrastructure and food systems. Policy, planning and research relating to both food and urban systems cannot aford to ignore
such interlinkages, though much policy still operates on the neat assumptions of progressive connectivity to ‘the grid’ and
formal food retail. Instead we argue how in many urban governance systems, a variety of hybrid mechanisms—on and of
the grid, public and private formal and informal—better represent how urban residents, particularly the most marginalised,
meet their everyday food and infrastructural needs along a continuum of gridded and of-grid access.
Description
Research Article
Keywords
Food, Malnutrition, Infrastructure