Pop-up food provisioning as a sustainable third space: reshaping eating practices at an inner urban university

ABSTRACT

We examine one innovative response to the social, spatial and environmental sustainability challenges posed by food provisioning and consumption for large-scale organisations—pop-up or mobile food provisioning—focusing on the specific example of a large, inner urban university campus in Melbourne, Australia. Emerging from a larger project examining sustainability and eating practices on campus, this study of pop-ups draws on a multi-method empirical investigation involving ethnographic fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, and digital methods. While the university’s use of pop-ups in this case has been primarily as a flexible, just-in-time way of engaging with the food needs of students during a large-scale campus rebuild, we argue that the mobile and malleable nature of pop-ups may offer a more sustainable way of envisaging eating spaces in urban organisational contexts. Drawing on conceptual frameworks taken from social practice theories and theories of space, the paper conceptualises the hybrid and convivial spaces produced through the bundling of mobile food provisioning practices with the university practices as third spaces of hybrid hospitality and urban commons. We argue that through disrupting and challenging many of the temporal and spatial norms that govern mainstream food provisioning and consumption, these third spaces can enable pathways to sustainable social practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Social practice theories
• third spaces
• sustainable food consumption
• pop-ups
• inner urban universities
• mobile food provisioning
• urban commons

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Work/Life Ecologies project team (https://worklifeecologies.org/), especially A/Prof. Yolande Strengers, now at Monash University, Melbourne, in supporting us while conducting this research and helping us put together this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All names in this article are anonymised, and a pseudonym has been assigned to each participant. Formal data generation was conducted after approval from the RMIT ethics committee as a low risk research project. All pictures are taken by the first author as part of the fieldwork, unless otherwise mentioned.

Additional information

Funding

An RMIT University Sustainable Urban Precincts Programme, RMIT University (2014-2019) Scholarship (SUPP) funded Bhavna Middha for the duration of her doctoral research while SUPP also funded the larger Work-Life Ecologies project (headed by Professor Tania Lewis and A/Prof. Yolande Strengers) in which this doctoral research was located.

Notes on contributors

Bhavna Middha

Dr. Bhavna Middha is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT University. As an environmental sociologist her research interests lie in the area of food, waste and sustainable consumption. She has investigated the diverse ways in which spaces and spatialities are implicated in sustainable food provisioning and consumption by investigating topics such as digital food practices, relationships between food and packaging waste, and food justice.

Tania Lewis

Professor Tania Lewis is a media and cultural studies scholar and is the author of several books focusing on urban lifestyles, sustainability, consumption, and global media cultures, including Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise. She is a chief investigator on the ARC Discovery project, ‘Ethical Consumption: From the Margins to the Mainstream’.