The resurgence of urban foraging under COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed cracks in American food security, as global supply chains seised, movement within cities and regions halted, and restaurant access diminished. During this time, new interest in local food provisioning surfaced in the US, highlighting the value of productive agriculture within urban landscapes. In many areas, this urban food provisioning expanded to include foraging, the practice of acquiring food products from edible landscapes for free. This paper charts the resurgence of urban foraging during the pandemic, frames this activity within theory on do-it-yourself (DIY) urbanism and the right to the city, and makes planning and design recommendations for bolstering this trend in the future. While urban foraging has historically been characterised by bottom-up participation, the addition of top-down organisational frameworks and legal structures could reinforce this practice in North America, helping to promote local food security, particularly during periods of crisis.

Keywords:

• Food security
• urban foodscapes
• foraging
• COVID-19 pandemic
• urban planning
• DIY urbanism

Acknowledgments

I owe a debt of gratitude to Margaretha Haughwout and Ethan Welty for patiently walking me through their work, and to each of the reviewers and editors for their thoughtful review of this essay.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Popular sites for online sharing include art projects by Fallen Fruit: https://fallenfruit.org/, opensource maps at https://fallingfruit.org/ and foraging advice on social media from Alexis Nikole Nelson: https://www.tiktok.com/@alexisnikole?lang=en

2 More information about the Vibrant Cities Lab can be found here: https://www.vibrantcitieslab.com

3 Urban gardening is well covered in landscape architecture and planning scholarship, but attention to the position of foraging or gleaning as a genre lacks development. However, ideologically-aligned organizations have pushed for greater awareness about foraging and gleaning over time. For instance, the policy work of the Berkeley Food Institute currently challenges anti-foraging laws; see: https://food.berkeley.edu/

4 More information about the city’s work, which includes both interfacing with fallingfruit.org and producing associated events, is here: https://www.billingsparks.org/parkland-gleaning

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carey Clouse

Carey Clouse is Associate Professor of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at UMass Amherst. Her research addresses climate change adaptation strategies and actors, food security, and the potential for design to influence environmental challenges.