Knowing “Good Food”: Immigrant Knowledge and the Racial Politics of Farmworker Food Insecurity

Abstract: This article explores the ways that farmworkers, many of whom come from a culture deeply rooted in food and agricultural practices, cope with food insecurity by utilizing their agricultural and nutritional knowledge. Food assistance providers in the USA often treat farmworkers' inability to afford healthy food as a lack of knowledge about healthy eating, reinforcing racialized assumptions that people of color don't know “good” food. I argue that in contrast to food banks and low‐income nutrition programs, home and community gardens provide spaces for retaining and highlighting agricultural, cultural, and dietary practices and knowledge. This paper investigates the linkages between workers' place in the food system as both producers and consumers, simultaneously exploited for their labor, and creating coping strategies utilizing agrarian and culinary knowledge. I argue that food security and healthy eating, rather than being a matter of consumers making healthy “choices”, is a matter of class‐based and racial differences in the food system.     

Reconciling Economic and Cultural Explanations for Participation in Alternative Consumption Spaces

ABSTRACT With the cultural turn in economic geography, the emphasis on economic necessity when explaining participation in alternative consumption spaces (i.e. informal and/or second‐hand retail channels) has been contested by an agency‐orientated cultural reading that views engagement in such spaces as about the search for fun, sociality, distinction, discernment, the spectacular and so forth, and more recently by a geographically sensitive approach that ascribes agency to affluent populations and economic rationales to deprived populations. Drawing upon evidence collected during 120 face‐to‐face interviews in the English city of Leicester, however, this paper finds that people's reasons for engaging in such practices cannot be reduced simply to either economic necessity or agency. Instead, it reveals that such either/or thinking obfuscates how both co‐exist in people's explanations for engagement and combine in contrasting ways in different neighbourhood types, modes of goods acquisition and according to the type of good sought. The outcome of this paper is thus to transcend and reconcile previous reductive explanations using a both/and approach that recognises the varying ways in which economic necessity and choice are entangled in rationales for participation in alternative consumption spaces.     

Children, ‘healthy’ food,school and family: the ‘[n]ot really’ outcome of school food messages

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on a multi-method study with 50 families in Victoria, Australia. Primary school children were asked about food knowledge from school and whether they felt motivated to bring knowledge home. Generally, children and parents felt school food messages are unclear, contradictory and not relevant to them and this reduced the likelihood of messages coming home from school. We identify a critical difference in how families thought about healthy eating and food practices at home and the framework of school messages. Families focused on children’s eating in a pragmatic way, infused with nurturance as well as concern. We argue their practices can be viewed as a form of relational consumption (Lindsay and Maher 2013. Consuming Families: Buying, Making, Producing Family Life in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge.) where food is part of the everyday exchange of love and care. A disjunction exists between familial relational approaches and the regulatory framework of school food messages that impacts how messages move between these spaces. Attention to relational aspects of food consumption at school might allow for a more valuable exchange between family and schools that supports family endeavours to feed children well.     

Building Localized Interactions Between Universities and Cities Through University Spatial Development

Universities are important players in the global development of knowledge economy, alongside being significant contributors to the economic development of their host cities. They are both significant knowledge enterprises and the suppliers of the human and intellectual capital on which the knowledge-based economy depends. What seems under-explored is how deliberative partnerships between universities and city authorities can develop around projects of mutual benefit, especially based on campus development. In this paper, with the help of five case studies (QUT, MIT, Harvard, Twente and Newcastle universities), we investigate how the spatial development of universities can be one of the main meeting points between the city and university and how it can be used for stimulating economic development and managing growth. These cases show that university—city collaborative initiatives focused on the university properties represent a desire to produce creative and competitive new urban spaces, which reinforce the position of the university and the city in global economy. They also show that these developments need to be jointly managed to avoid undesirable impacts on either side.     

Urban Villages in China: A 2008 Survey of Migrant Settlements in Beijing

A team of Beijing-based urban planning specialists is joined by a noted American geographer to present the results and analyze their 2008 survey of migrant settlements in China's capital city. The paper examines the living and work conditions as well as housing consumption behavior of migrants in Chinese cities, focusing on chengzhongcun or urban villages—rural settlements that have been transformed into poor living spaces for migrant workers. It finds that although migrant workers are willing to pay the same or higher rent per unit of space, they consume much smaller dwelling spaces than local residents. Estimations of the Mincerian wage equation and of a housing demand equation show that migrants' small space consumption is a function not only of low income but also of a reluctance to spend their earnings in the city. The findings reinforce the notion that migrant workers consider the city as a place to work rather than a home in which to live. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: J610, O150, R210, R230. 14 figures, 5 tables, 34 references, 1 appendix.     

Girls,consumption space and the contradictions ofhanging out in the city

Geographers have effectively examined girls' reactions and resistances to adult control in public space, but the ways that girls learn about and reinscribe social differences like race and class through ‘hanging-out’ practices in public, urban space have yet to be sufficiently explored and theorized. Therefore, in this paper I consider the normative productivity of girls' spatial practices, as well as girls' resistances to adultist space. I examine the case of consumption space and focus on how girls utilize, create and reproduce myriad social identifiers as they hang out in public, urban space. Consumption space and consumerism dominate the urban spaces and hanging-out practices of teenagers, and while girls complain about the ubiquity of consumption space, girls' public social-spatial activities inevitably involve consumption space. Therefore, consumption's symbols and spaces are central to the normative production of girls' identities like class and race, and of social difference more generally in urban space.     

The Author Responds

Abstract

Administrative practices, political initiatives, and budgetary concerns are eroding the ability of most universities to fulfill their mission as engines of meritocratic upward mobility. Colleges fulfilled this mission because they signaled that a student had acquired—or had always possessed—superior skills. Elite universities admit students who we know can succeed: Upward mobility occurred because other schools took chances on students whose backgrounds suggested that they might or might not succeed. Pushes to improve undergraduate retention and completion rates at these other universities result in a lowering of standards that threatens their signaling role, and with it, their ability to open doors for their students.     

‘Just looking’: domestic workers' consumption practices and a latent geography of Beijing

The post-socialist Chinese city has been an important site to explore the formation of modernity in its everyday shape and manifestations. A common way of understanding urban experiences is through the prism of consumption. Rural migrants in the city cannot compare with urban residents in terms of their consumption level, but they are seen to be equally enthusiastic in partaking in consumption, and their identities are also believed to be (re)shaped by consumption practices. Drawing on several years' extensive ethnographic research in Beijing, this article suggests that these scenarios cannot adequately account for the diversity and complexity of rural migrants' experience in the consuming city. In this article, I put forward a methodological argument for considering the lived spatiality of ethnographic subjects in conceiving and considering consumption. Then, through an investigation of how migrant domestic workers use urban spaces, I consider the ‘dialectic of freedom and constraint’ which marks their agency and their individual choices and decisions. Finally, I explore the social production of space by considering migrant domestic workers' ‘subversive’ behaviours within rather than in opposition to the capitalist commercial logic and space. This discussion demonstrates that consumption practices are at the same time spatial practices, and despite the many obstacles and constraints, migrant domestic workers are actively availing themselves of the opportunities that the city has to offer. This creative process is crucial if we are to gain a new and more nuanced understanding of consumption as a social practice. I further argue that it is also a process by which rural migrants hold on to their sense of dignity and self-respect in an environment of exclusion and discrimination.     

Radical Urban Horticulture for Food Autonomy: Beyond the Community Gardens Experience

For those who are interested in radical changes, it is important to analyze the forms of resistance that promote self‐managed practices, also at apparently very small scale. In Italy the experience of “community gardens” is usually named “orti urbani”. In the last 10 years, the occupation of abandoned urban spaces to set up orti urbani has increased within the squatting movement. The case of the city of Rome is interesting because there has been a widespread activity to organize self‐managed spaces to grow fruit and vegetable plants. These initiatives make up not only potential spaces of dense social networking, political action and discussion on environmental issues, but also supporting large food autonomous configurations such as Genuino Clandestino, that are challenging dominant food production. A proliferation of orti urbani located in Social Centers, squatted houses or other abandoned spaces represents a scalar strategy to re‐appropriate and commune urban space.     

Fast food/organic food: Reflexive tastes and the making of 'yuppie chow'

Organic food consumption is one of several new trends in eating read as active opposition to industrialized food provision. While fast food consumption is characterized by compulsive gluttony, manifest in fat bodies, alternative consumption practices are seen to be driven by conscious reflexivity, such that consumers monitor, reflect upon and adapt their personal conduct in light of its perceived consequences. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. One is to examine the evolution of organic food from what Belasco called the 'counter-cuisine' to what organic growers call 'yuppie chow', to show how organic salad mix was the carrier of major changes in the organic system of provision, thereby calling into question the notion that organic food is necessarily an antidote to industrialized food. The other is to problematize the facile dichotomies between fast and slow, reflexive and compulsive, fat and thin, and, hence, good and bad eaters, to show where there is slippage and instability in these categories, in addition to a troubling politics of class and gender. To these ends, I showcase the changing provision of a particular organic commodity (salad mix, or mesclun) in California.     

To sexually perform or protect: masculine identity construction and perceptions of women's sexuality on a university campus in the Midwestern USA

Modern universities in the USA are places of recreation and leisure in addition to institutional spaces of education. Often characterized by alcohol-fueled socializing and sexualized interaction, university social life rivals the formal curriculum, and hooking up – or recreational sexual interaction outside of committed relationships – has become a defining feature. This article examines the spatiality of sexual and gender identities among heterosexual men at a 4-year residential university located in the Midwestern USA. Drawing on in-depth and focus group data, the article examines how men from contrasting peer cultures construct masculine identities in relation to casual sex and perceptions of women's sexuality. Particular attention is paid to how men negotiate senses of self in relation to the sexual practices, processes, and identities played out in the dominant party scene on campus.     

Mobile Cartographies and Mobilized Ideologies: The Visual Management of Jerusalem

This article analyses a recent ideological shift in the visual management of Jerusalem. Through two case studies in the real estate and tourism industries we show how mobile technologies are shaping both actual settings in, and visual consumption of, Jerusalem. The analysis points at the creation of a “tunnel vision” for consumers and visitors, which promotes Jewish hegemony in the city and simultaneous detachment from Palestinian spaces and histories. This tunnel vision situates the viewers in physical and simulated enclaves within the city, creating a relationship of distance and elevation to promote their embodied identification with Israel's Judaizing mission for the area, primarily the Holy Basin. This mode of viewing Jerusalem is evocative of Israel's post‐second intifada policies and the concurrent rise of right‐wing ideologies, which relegate to the margins alternative readings of the contested urban landscape.     

(Ad)dressing belonging in a contested space: Embodied spatial practices of Palestinian and Israeli women in Jerusalem

The article explores women's clothing choices from a feminist geopolitical lens to comprehend mobility practices and power-relations across the contested city of Jerusalem. Building on 80 interviews with Palestinian and Israeli women, we explore the different ways in which women's clothing choices can be interpreted as a spatial practice that affects urban im/mobilities. First, we demonstrate the different ways through which cultural and religious norms and representations of the body are perceived as both excluding and restricting women from using certain areas in the city. Second, we suggest that clothing practices may enable movement and mobility that potentially undermine social-cultural norms. Thus, women's bodies and clothing can be a political site of difference and resistance that somewhat underscores the insurmountability of boundaries in the contested spaces of Jerusalem.     

Screening Singapore: The Cinematic Landscape of Eric Khoo's Be With Me

This paper investigates the mutually constitutive relationship between the context of film production and the composition and content of images produced. Singapore film director Eric Khoo is central to our investigation, and his 2005 film Be With Me is a key example of how Singapore's ongoing urban redevelopment to become a world city reflexively shapes the style and appearance of the city‐state projected in the film. Singapore's history as a developmental state, its pervasive influence on the public and private spaces of its citizens, and recent state‐led initiatives to nurture the arts and media sectors all make it an ideal site to examine the relations between the cinema and space. Be With Me also lends itself to spatial analysis as its mise‐en‐scène is a geography of the life course: particular parts of the city are ‘cast’ as spaces of youth, middle, and old age. We elaborate how the landscapes deployed in the film are simultaneously constituted through state policies, mise‐en‐scène, and gender/age/class considerations. In so doing we show how Khoo's vision of the city‐state has altered since his emergence as a film director in the 1990s: from an oppressed site of hyper‐modernity to a more ambivalent ‘globalised’ built environment in which marginalised or liminal urban spaces for sensuous life and hope for human connection can be experienced.     

Consumption,Environmental Sustainability and Human Geography in Australia: a Missing Research Agenda?

‘Consumption’ is a central concept in the global environmental sustainability agenda. However, one important argument from Agenda 21 — that all social actors must now practise ‘sustainable consumption’— has been publicly and politically marginalised in high‐income countries such as Australia. Geographers potentially have a role in bringing consumption back onto the agenda by constructing a critical geography of consumption. Such research can help understand how the contextual use of natural resources is perceived and practised, and how consumption helps to shape contemporary social relations. This body of knowledge is vital for building sustainable development into everyday lives. Yet a focus on urban consumption perceptions and practices appears somewhat lacking in Australian geography. Ways forward can be drawn from international geography, such as in the United Kingdom where a substantial body of work has drawn a complex picture of contemporary consumption and environmental understanding. It has also challenged prevailing ‘ecological modernisation’ policy approaches, which ignore consumption's cultural facets. In sum, considering consumption in Australia can offer insights into cultural practices expressed through consumption; can challenge and add to European geographical literatures, and can also contribute to sustainability debates by offering alternatives to currently ineffective policy discourses.     

Riding the Dialectical Waves of Gay Political Economy: A Story from Birmingham's Commercial Gay Scene

In this paper I aim to contribute to work addressing the relationship between dissident sexuality and gay political economy by providing a reconfigured Marxist exploration into the ambivalence of commercial gay space. Through the application of a central theme from Marx's Grundrisse—the civilising influence of capital—I propose a means to move beyond an Althusserian view of commercial gay space as a contained ideological incorporation of capitalist hegemony, to that of a capitalist embodiment of constraints and radical possibilities. Focusing on the commercial gay scene of the UK's second largest city, Birmingham, and the survival of a monthly British Asian gay club night therein, I explore the dialectical waves of capitalism. These waves drive conditions which both differentiate identity‐based production/consumption to the assimilative relations of exchange value, and accommodate moments of cultural creativity that feed off this continual differentiation and escape its economic relations in the formation of radically new use‐values.     

Ghosts,Memory, and the Right to the Divided City: Resisting Amnesia in Beirut City Centre

Violently divided cities are incubators of ethnic conflicts. Under the auspices of postwar reconstruction, these cities are supposedly disciplined into peace through the regeneration of the city centre, including privatization, commercial adaptation and gentrification strategies. Such dynamics render city centre space amnesiac, with no reference to the history of sectarian violence, and exclusivist by limiting public access. Rather than foster peacebuilding, city centre regeneration exposes the dangerous weakness of the neoliberal peace built on accommodating ethnic and socioeconomic divisions. This paper connects Lefebvre's right‐to‐the‐city to non‐sectarian social movements’ struggle to forge participatory democracy in Beirut's city centre. A key aspect of these movements’ activities is to reprogramme memory—cosmopolitan and inclusivist—into the city centre, a project supporting peacebuilding.     

CHILDHOOD IN A NEOLIBERAL UTOPIA: PLANNING RHETORIC AND PARENTAL CONCEPTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY STOCKHOLM

This article addresses how neoliberalism as a utopian ideal of the urban affects the practices of planners and parents, drawing on Stockholm, Sweden, as an example and foregrounding how these adult conceptions of the city are manifested, both socially and physically, and shape children's geographies. Through an analysis of planning documents and interviews with planners and parents, this study shows how Stockholm's planning is clearly conditioned by neoliberal beliefs, but rather than being linked with political sympathies, neoliberalism is expressed as a contemporary urbanism. This specific urbanism is not compatible with children's independent mobility and easy access to nature and play spaces, but demands, as expressed by planners and parents, certain “sacrifices” in order to be achieved. The study shows that age is an organizing norm in terms of spatial justice in the city and that ideological beliefs about the urban development affect how this (in)justice is organized. The planning documents reflect utopian neoliberal ideas about a specific urban identity, and when private actors are given more influence over what is being built and which spaces are developed, there is a deliberate transition from welfare‐planning values and the belief that children and adults have equal rights to urban neighbourhoods. This is expressed as a necessary transformation to a more urban and globally competitive city but given the extent to which welfare values are taken for granted in Sweden it is unlikely that the effect this transition will have on social and spatial justice in the city is recognized.     

Urban commons are more‐than‐property

Urban commons are characterised in the literature as collectively shared property in the city shaped by a context of scarce resources, population density, and the interaction of strangers. In the broader commons literature, commons appears as a verb, a noun, and a process made by practices of commoning—albeit still with a focus on property. In this paper, I argue that an understanding of urban commons as more‐than‐property is needed to recognise how present but elusive urban commons are. I use examples from interviews and observations conducted at a Women's Library to discuss how the access, use, benefit, care, responsibility, and ownership of this urban commons bring it into being through particular practices of commoning. By questioning current ways of defining urban commons, urban scholars gain a grounded understanding of the role of property, and other practices, in maintaining an urban commons over time.