Geographies of capital formation and rescaling: A historical‐geographical approach to the food desert problem

Although the “food desert” concept has captured the public imagination and spurred public policy efforts in many North American cities, the term has been critiqued by academics for being definitionally and methodologically vague, and for providing an incomplete picture of the complexity of food access. Rather than dismiss the study of urban, inner‐city food deserts, however, scholars can study disparities in retail food access through a historical, critical political economy lens to understand underserved retail landscapes as a product of capital formation and rescaling over time. The purpose of this article is to conduct such an analysis, using the case study of a low‐income community in Kingston, Ontario. Using historical research and qualitative interviews, the major finding of this analysis is that the physical accessibility of retail food appears to have declined over time in relation to the capitalization of the retail food sector. An imperfect relationship can be outlined over three phases of Canadian urban economic history to suggest that the food desert problem emerged largely in the transition from a decentralized, small‐scale, and neighbourhood‐embedded retail food industry to the scaled‐up, disembedded industry that now dominates the landscape. This industry‐level rescaling is contributing to a new urban politics of class and consumption through subtle, everyday activities such as food shopping.     

Urban Community Gardens as Spaces of Citizenship

A growing body of literature conceptualizes urban agriculture and community gardens as spaces of democratic citizenship and radical political practice. Urban community gardens are lauded as spaces through which residents can alleviate food insecurity and claim rights to the city. However, discussions of citizenship practice more broadly challenge the notion that citizen participation is inherently transformative or empowering, particularly in the context of neoliberal economic restructuring. This paper investigates urban community gardens as spaces of citizenship through a case study of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It examines the impacts of community gardens on citizenship practice and the effects of volunteerism on the development of community gardens. It explores how grassroots community gardens simultaneously contest and reinforce local neoliberal policies. This research contributes empirically and theoretically to scholarship on urban food movements, neoliberal urbanization, collaborative governance, and citizenship practice.     

Urban Agriculture in the Food‐Disabling City: (Re)defining Urban Food Justice,Reimagining a Politics of Empowerment

Recent literature has pointed to the role of urban agriculture in self‐empowerment and learning, and in constituting ways to achieve food justice. Building on this work the paper looks at the potential and constraints for overcoming the residual and contingent status of urban agriculture. The first part of the paper aims to expand traditional class/race/ethnicity discussions and to reflect on global, cultural, procedural, capability, distributional and socio‐environmental forms of injustice that unfold in the different stages of urban food production. The second part reflects on how to bring forward food justice and build a politics of engagement, capability and empowerment. Three interlinked strategies for action are presented: (1) enhancing the reflexivity and cohesion of the urban food movement by articulating a challenge to neoliberal urbanism; (2) converging urban and agrarian food justice struggles by shaping urban agroecology; and (3) regaining control over social reproduction by engaging with food commoning.     

他者的身体实践与城市公共空间融入研究——以“麦宿者”为例

“身体”是管窥和解读社会文化现象的重要视角。基于身体地理学,探讨他者身体与城市空间之关系,可为理解边缘群体与城市公共空间融入提供有益视角。文章以长期夜宿于麦当劳餐厅的“麦宿者”为例,探讨其身体实践与城市公共空间之相互作用,以剖析边缘群体对城市公共空间融入的过程机制。研究发现：麦宿者身体特征具有鲜明的他者性,并主要通过物质性和非物质性的身体实践来与饮食空间开展协商,通过在特定时空下的弱化他者性,来实现饮食空间的融入。文章建立了他者身体与城市公共空间相互作用的理论框架,在身体实践方面对身体地理学的相关理论进行了补充。     

Socio-economic status and religious identity in medieval Iberia: The zooarchaeological evidence

This paper synthesises faunal data from medieval archaeological sites in the Iberian Peninsula, aiming to identify zooarchaeological evidence that can improve our understanding of socio-economic status and cultural identities. The main zooarchaeological indicators for social differentiation are explored: food procurement and cuisine (taking into account different types of sites – high status, urban and rural), and different socio-political systems (Islamic and Christian regions), from a diachronic perspective.     

Takeaway food,waste, and their geographies in workplaces

This article draws on empirical research to develop an understanding of the social and cultural geography of food and its waste in the workplace. Our aim is to contribute to the wider body of literature on everyday geographies of waste and wasting in relation to food, paying attention to the complex trajectories of the disposal of the waste produced by food consumption beyond the scale of the household. On that basis, the work explores the distinct ways in which the waste produced by takeaway food consumption is managed in workplaces and examines how food consumption and wasting manifest in relation to both workplace contexts and wider sociocultural and material factors in urban China. Such matters are still under‐researched there. Specifically, we identify the different conduits through which food and food packaging become waste in workplaces. Food is transformed into waste soon after it becomes surplus, whereas food packaging becomes waste through two conduits: the conventional way of binning and the alternative way of reusing.     

BEYOND THE FOOD DESERT: FINDING WAYS TO SPEAK ABOUT URBAN FOOD SECURITY IN SOUTH AFRICA

Urban food security is a significant development challenge in sub‐Saharan Africa. However, the field is currently under ‐researched and under‐theorized. Urban food insecurity, where it is considered, has been viewed through a development studies lens that views food insecurity as a household‐scale problem. There has been significant focus on food deserts in developed countries as one way of engaging with such insecurity. The food deserts research views food insecurity through a social exclusion and food justice lens. This article introduces the food desert concept to provide a conceptual tool to begin to understand the spatial determinants of urban food insecurity, which are not well captured by the existing framings of food security in the region. Using data from a 2008 household food security survey conducted in Cape Town, the paper highlights gaps in the food deserts approach, most significantly its neglect of non‐market sources of food and of household decision‐making processes. The paper therefore concludes by suggesting a new approach which takes the household's assets, abilities and decision‐making as the starting point and overlays this with the market and non‐market foodscapes accessed by these households.     

北京市老城区菜市场的地方性及其机制研究

地方性研究是人文地理学的重要领域,能够揭示地方的特质特性,从而实现对空间的理解。在后现代思潮影响下,基于地方理论的研究对象开始转向人们日常生活的空间,而质性研究方法尤其适用于这一揭示空间社会意义的研究。本文选取菜市场这一典型城市空间,尝试运用质性方法对其进行地方性的建构并分析其地方性形成机制。研究认为,菜市场的地方性可归为地方空间特性、地方时间特性、地方意义三个方面;地方性的形成机制是地方物质环境、活动者、历史文化和现代性相互作用的过程。研究通过深入理解承载市民生活的空间,希望促进城市空间地方性的传承与发展。     

Concurrent assessment of urban environment and cardiometabolic risk over 10 years in a middle‐aged population‐based cohort

Inference regarding the impact of urban areas on health is limited by cross‐sectional studies assessing few dimensions and ignoring area‐level socio‐economic status. This study simultaneously assessed several dimensions of the built environment against incident cardiometabolic risk (CMR) arising over 10 years. It tested the hypothesis that, accounting for local area relative wealth, features of the built environment would not predict incident CMR. Initially, disease‐free adults in a biomedical cohort in Adelaide, Australia, provided address and clinical data over three waves of follow‐up. CMR was defined as the count of five clinical CMR factors. Built environment measures were derived for urban form, and natural, and food environments. Local area wealth was expressed using the relative location factor index. Poisson growth models accounting for within‐suburb clustering, age, sex, and education were used to estimate associations between built environment measures and increasing CMR. Fitted linear trajectories had statistically significant mean values of intercepts and slopes. CMR trajectories were associated with age, male sex, and low education. In models including measures of the food, natural, and urban form environments, per standard deviation increase, only POS count predicted incident CMR, which was more strongly predicted by relative location factor. Not accounting for local area socio‐economic status may overestimate the strength of relationships between health and the built environment. Inequity in accessible POS is robustly related to incident CMR.     

Foodscapes and the Geographies of Poverty: Sustenance,Strategy, and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood

This paper argues that food should be a more central focus of critical geographical research into urban poverty and that the concept of “foodscape” can contribute to this literature. We utilize the concept in a study of the daily practices of accessing food among low‐income residents of the Downtown Eastside neighborhood of Vancouver, BC. We highlight how food access for the urban poor involves a complex and contradictory negotiation of both sites of encounter and care and also exclusion and regulation. Focusing on foodscapes emphasizes the social, relational, and political construction of food and thus highlights not simply food provision but also questions of existing power structures and potentialities for future change. Therefore, we discuss efforts to question the existing food system in Vancouver, to resist the gentrification processes that threaten the Downtown Eastside's food resources, and to build alternative strategies for urban food justice.     

唐代農村家庭生計探略

唐代的農村家庭是一個典型的生産單位和經濟單位。本文通過對於農家的土地占有和糧食産量等資料的考證,討論當時農民家庭的基本收入、消費和生産成本,試圖給出唐代農家經濟生活的大致輪廓。作爲比較的參照系,還對於一般城市平民和低級官僚家庭生活作了簡單勾勒。     

The acceleration of transitions to urban sustainability: a case study of Brighton and Hove

Cities raise major challenges and opportunities for achieving sustainability. Much literature on urban sustainability focuses on specific aspects such as planning practices, urban policy or the diffusion of more sustainable technologies or practices. However, attempts at understanding the mechanisms of structural change towards sustainability have resulted in the emergence of an interdisciplinary field of sustainability transitions research. Transitions research has developed a phase model of transitions in which predevelopment, take-off, acceleration and stabilization phases are distinguished. However, the acceleration phase has received limited attention so far. This is a crucial gap as policy-makers are keen to accelerate transitions. This paper aims to enhance our understanding of how local actions contribute towards accelerating urban sustainability transitions. It does so by testing an acceleration mechanisms framework through exploring the collective agency of local initiatives in urban sustainability transitions. Drawing on a case study of the city of Brighton and Hove (UK), the paper finds that despite favourable local political conditions, there is a lack of evidence of acceleration apart from in individual domains such as food or mobility. Progress is found to depend on the agency of initiatives to both scale up sustainable practices and embed these practices into local governance arrangements.     

Public space and memories of migration: erasing diversity through urban redevelopment in France

This article examines the meaning of public space and impact of heritage-led urban redevelopment in a diverse neighbourhood in Montpellier, France. It traces the relocation of a North African market from a central city plaza in favour of French antiques, and the resulting contestation over what constitutes local heritage, who has the capacity to determine how public space is used, and the seeming erasure of migrant identities and memories from an important community site. The paper considers how urban areas are re-imagined through a change in the materiality of public space, and outlines the role of outdoor markets in defining the social function of such spaces. The paper examines the intertwining of physical erasure (urban redevelopment and the removal of a diverse food market) and cultural erasure (the loss of certain community memories), and how these processes speak to broader debates about French national identity, cultural heritage, and the meanings attached to public spaces.     

Disparity Despite Diversity: Social Injustice in New York City's Urban Agriculture System

Many studies have documented the benefits of urban agriculture, including increased food access, job creation, educational opportunities, and green space. A focus on its social benefits has fed an association of urban agriculture with social justice, yet there is a distinction between alleviating symptoms of injustice (such as disparate access to food or environmental amenities) and disrupting structures that underlie them. Despite its positive impacts, urban agriculture systems may reinforce inequities that practitioners and supporters aim to address. This paper reports findings from a 2‐year study of urban agriculture in New York City, which found race‐ and class‐based disparities among practitioners citywide. Using the lens of critical race theory, it argues that a failure to examine urban agriculture's role in either supporting or dismantling unjust structures may perpetuate an inequitable system. The paper concludes with recommendations for urban agriculture supporters and scholars to help advance social justice at structural levels.     

Urban Food Systems and the Poor in Developing Countries

In many cities in developing countries, hunger and malnutrition are common amongst the poor, even when food is relatively abundant. Over the past two decades, a considerable literature has accumulated on the problems associated with rapid urbanization in developing countries – a literature that for the most part has neglected the important dimension of urban food systems and how these link production and consumption networks at local, regional and global levels. Similarly, whilst there is a newly burgeoning literature on global food systems, the contextual role of the urbanization process is rarely addressed. This paper attempts to fuse these two major areas of geographical investigation to highlight the issues that need to be addressed in future research programmes so that improved diets become accessible to all urban dwellers.     

Interpreting Urban Food Supply and Distribution Systems from Faunal Assemblages: An Example from Colonial Massachusetts

Animal bone assemblages from four historical sites in eastern Massachusetts are analysed in a comparative framework to interpret aspects of urban food systems. Characteristics of the urban environment and the nature of food supply and exchange systems are interpreted from taxonomic representation, body part representation, butchery patterns, and age and seasonal slaughtering patterns. These analyses show that specialized husbandry to supply urban markets was limited during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that many aspects of urban food distribution systems followed traditional rural patterns. A model that explores the relation between patterning of bone collections and characteristics of urban areas is applicable to other studies of urban assemblages. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Foundations of Urbanisation: Port Vila Town and Pango Village,Vanuatu

Urbanisation in contemporary Melanesia must be understood by examining not only rural to urban migration, but also the ways in which communities adjacent to town have appropriated and participated in urban living. This paper considers the engagement between the village of Pango and the town of Port Vila. This relationship can be understood by mapping the history of Pango prior to the development of Port Vila, and through its subsequent history. This paper considers natural disasters, revolution, migration, depopulation, education wage employment, colonial administration and post-Independence transformations, and the way they are interpreted, remembered and expressed. Pango's status as a peri-urban village affects the way Pangoans invoke the past and interpret the present.     

Mongol inhospitality, or how to do more with less? Gift giving in William of Rubruck’s Itinerarium

This article examines the journey to the Mongol court by the Franciscan William of Rubruck and his unsuccessful attempts to negotiate his way through the Mongol hierarchy with gifts of food. Using William of Rubruck’s account of his journey, the Itinerarium, this article analyses the utility of gifts of food across different cultural contexts. Rubruck ultimately gained status among the Mongols through his ‘gift of self’, demonstrating how social standing can be negotiated through finding the appropriate cultural grammar for gift giving. Pervasive western medieval views on gift giving were not uncontested: alternate views of what constituted a gift existed within the broader thirteenth-century world.     

从传统农庄到现代城市社区转型的曲折历程——“无保调查”中保定市薛刘营村城市化进程考察

河北省保定市薛刘营村是中国农村经济史上持续80余年著名的"无保调查"中具有特殊意义的研究对象。这个紧邻城市的传统农庄,在新中国成立初期被纳入城市郊区,20世纪90年代末纳入市区,而今即将转变为一个新型城市社区。该村城市化经历了从顺畅起步而后受阻,到快速发展后遭遇产业结构、就业结构和居民身份转换与市民待遇转换长期不同步的"非均衡"发展状况,再到突破旧村拆迁瓶颈,实现建立现代城市社区的曲折历程。这一过程提供了以村为单位研究中国北方城郊传统农庄城市化的完整标本,也为推进北方城郊农村城市化发展提供了宝贵经验。     

大城市旅游结构性增长的驱动力——基于广州和西安的比较研究

以广州和西安两个省会大城市为例,通过比较广州和西安旅游人数和旅游收入的增长差异,指出广州城市旅游呈现显著的结构性增长,而西安城市旅游的结构性增长不明显。进一步基于层次与等级的旅游供给分析框架,解释大城市旅游结构性增长的驱动力。研究表明,城市功能和地位的提升是大城市旅游的结构性增长的主导驱动力。大城市要实现旅游的结构性增长,要重点提升旅游相关的城市功能和地位,如政治、文化、现代服务业、交通、商业和城市接待功能等,并配合旅游核心要素的建设以及旅游主题和特色的营造。结构性增长是判断大城市旅游发展效率的重要指标,也是指导大城市旅游发展的重要参照。