Fare sharing: interrogating the nexus of ICT, urban food sharing, and sustainability

Abstract

Sharing economies are being identified across diverse territories, including the food sector, as potential means to enact urban sustainability transitions. Within these developments ICT (information and communication technologies) are seen as a crucial enabler of sharing, stretching the spaces over which sharing can take place. However, there has been little explicit conceptual or empirical attention to these developments within the broad landscape of food sharing. In response, this paper provides the first macro-geographical analysis of urban food sharing mediated by ICT. Focusing on individual food-sharing initiatives drawn from a scoping database of 468 urban areas and ninety-one countries, this analysis reveals a variegated geography of food sharing in terms of location, what is being shared and the mode of food sharing adopted. Also documented is the extent to which these initiatives articulate sustainability claims and provide evidence to substantiate them. In conclusion, the paper reflects on the work that such a scoping database can do in relation to wider challenges of transforming urban food systems.

Keywords:

• Food
• sharing
• cities
• urban transitions
• sustainability
• information and communication technologies (ICT)

Acknowledgements

Research assistance was provided by Gill Buckle and her help in compiling the scoping database was crucial to the research reported in this paper.

Notes

1. This is not to deny the existence or significance of non-ICT-mediated sharing, which has been studied in the food arena in relation to alternative food economies (Cameron and Wright, 2014), community gardening (Ferris 2001; Turner 2011), and food banks (Tarasuk 2005; Jackson 2015), rather to broaden analyses to include attention to ICT.

2. Online dictionary available at: http://www.oed.com/.

3. W³Techs (2015) Usage of content languages for websites. Available from: http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_language/all Retrieved December 3, 2015.

4. This number was selected as the top ten cities are all within the United States except for London.

5. This breaks down as 34 percent of initiatives with two different sub-categories of food sharing, 14 percent with three sub-categories, 5 percent across four sub-categories, and less than 1 percent across five and six sub-categories.