Exploring food and urbanism

Introduction

The relationship of food to urbanism – or is it the other way round? – is something the Journal of Urbanism has engaged with in a variety of articles over the years since the Journal was established in 2007. In previous issues, we have published excellent papers on food-related topics as various as complexity in urban agriculture (Napawan 2016, 9(1)); on walkability related to access to food stores for older people (Negron-Poblete, Séguin, and Apparicio 2016, 9(1)); the role of “ethnic” retailing in retrofitting suburbia (Zhuang and Xiaoxuan Chen 2017, 10(3)); and on the integrative potential of food markets (Schappo and van Melik 2017, 10(3)). All of these have provided insights into the nature of food-related urbanism but its complex patterns still deserve further investigation. Before turning to examination of these patterns as explored in this Issue’s papers, I want to briefly “situate” food within an urbanist scholarly context and outline the purpose of this Special Issue.

An overarching point is that the whole area of food and place has burgeoned in recent years as a thematic field of primary research-based, peer-reviewed and applied policy study, moving from the margins to the mainstream in a variety of built environment disciplines (Parham 2005, 2015). Food has also proved to be one of the ways that scholars can make connections across disciplines and in this sense reflects the integrative, holistic nature of urbanism and of food as an area of enquiry.

When I first wrote a paper linking food, urban design and planning with conviviality and sustainability in 1990, a colleague asked me if it was a joke. That is not likely to happen now, with an increasingly widespread understanding of the intricate and multifaceted ways that food and urbanism interconnect, and that this matters in the face of the looming climate emergency (Viljoen and Bohn 2005; Beatley 2010; Duany, 2011; Calthorpe 2015; Waterman and Zeunert 2018). There is some comfort in knowing that many more of us than in the early 1990s now recognise and acknowledge the crucial importance of thinking about and gathering primary evidence in relation to how settlements have worked in the past, and operate today in food terms. There is now much more analysis of how places may be made resilient and convivial in the future, with food unapologetically understood to be at the centre of design, planning, political economy and sociability.

As both an academic and an long-term enthusiast in exploring food and place, the way food and cities interconnect has been an area of ongoing fascination to me: reflected in a series of writings on aspects of the subject (Parham 1990, 1992, 1995, 2005, 2012, 2015, 2018). I noted in 1990 that how food is grown, transported, bought, cooked, eaten, cleaned up and disposed of has significant effects on creating a sustainable, resilient and convivial future (Parham 1990, npr). By the time I came to write books about this, first on the remaking of food market places and areas into hybrid food quarters (2012) and then a wider look at food and urbanism from the scale of the table to the agricultural region (Parham 2015), it was clear to see that food was now rightly considered a legitimate object of study.

About this special issue’s aims

There remains a huge scope to explore food and urbanism in different contexts and through its many themes. The articles in this Special Issue on Food and Urbanism contribute by exploring and extending knowledge and understanding of the ways that food and urbanism interconnect in diverse urbanism contexts worldwide. As is increasingly clear, we noted in the Call for Papers that, “food is a critical aspect of urbanism: an insight sharpened by the connected and worsening issues of inequality and climate change we face globally. The complex roles food plays are now the object of research in a number of disciplines, as well as in cross-disciplinary work, in urban design, planning, architecture, geography, sociology, anthropology, urban history, gastronomy, political economy and more.” We asked contributors to submit papers which would use primary research to explore

ways that food influences placemaking and can help or hinder sustainable urbanism outcomes. The aim is to add to the body of knowledge about food and urbanism with a view to advancing both conceptual and theoretical frameworks and showcasing specific applied research findings. We welcome papers concentrating on (but not limited to) a range of urbanism scales that might extend from the domestic to the region, a diversity of food centred research sites, and in relation to any aspect or aspects of the food system from production, through distribution, exchange, consumption, and ‘waste’.

We did not limit contributors to particular topics within this broad purview but did identify some themes we thought might be helpful pointers including the urbanism of food in the domestic sphere, foodscapes within “traditional” urban spaces including markets, shops, cafes, restaurants; the relationship to food and urbanism to evolving experiences of public space; sustainable urban design and food at any stage along the food chain from production to retailing, consumption, and “waste”; food production and distribution landscapes; food and urbanism in suburbia, post-suburbia and megalopolis; gender and sustainable urbanism in relation to food; the urbanism of urban agriculture including “transect” and other design-led approaches; and urbanism and urban food design and planning policy.

Our contributors to this Special Issue on Food and Urbanism have richly responded to this invitation, further developed their work through peer review and produced a considerable number of fascinating papers – some of which are already available on our JoU online system. In the hard copy of the Journal, we have six papers and they are notable for the diversity and range of insights offered. They also provide a very useful framing of the individual research articles by taking us through pressing issues relating to food and cities in the context of the Anthropocene, the climate emergency in an era of massive urban growth (especially in the global South), green urbanism and environmental decline represented in the negative ecological loops as identified by Hough (1984). Authors also drew out the urbanism aspects of this process, with the nature of the place making in these contexts teased out for its urbanism mistakes, challenges, and lessons in food terms. For readers wanting to increase their understanding of these, the Issue provides a useful and up-to-date primer.

Feeding the global city: urban transformation and urban food supply chain in twenty-first-century Istanbul

The first paper in the Special Issue is both spatially broad and ambitious in scope, exploring a number of fascinating contemporary issues in food and urbanism. Candan Turkkan’s (2018) excellent “Feeding the global city: urban transformation and urban food supply chain in 21st-century Istanbul” is a fascinating exploration of urbanism transformation in the growing conurbation of Istanbul since the 1980s. The paper traces both the place making changes, and the political and economic underpinnings that sit behind often negative urban alterations, through examination of a number of fresh fruits and vegetables’ supply chains. Among the core points demonstrated is the transformation away from a well functioning and relatively sustainable urbanism approach to food provisioning based around local food markets and bazaars supplied by diverse economically supportive supply chains.

These “provisioning agents” which Turkkan (p. 1) identifies as including “mixed/foreign-capital supermarkets, domestic-capital supermarkets, bazaars, local suppliers, and urban and semi-urban/peripheral farmers, [and] internet or store-based alternative food networks” formed part of a robust supply system. Turkkan shows has this has been actively dismantled as forces of capital appropriated the spaces of neighbourhoods in which the urban food system once formed a central element. As Turkkan argues, this is an under researched aspect of urban transformation, and one which in my view this paper beautifully addresses.

Drawing on a wealth of data Turkkan demonstrates how regeneration and renewal in historic centres and informally settled neighbourhoods has led to gentrification and private, securitised homogenisation, enabled, and facilitated by “a coalition among bureaucrats, elected government and municipal officials, and public authorities” (p. 4). Turkkan notes (p. 2) that “the new residents of these newly transformed neighborhoods have different food consumption patterns and preferences” and thus how this has meant to undermining of traditional food elements. ‘Certain provisioning agents, like bostancıs, mobile and bazaar vendors, and food production, consumption, and exchange spaces, like bazaars, bostans, and manavs have been either reduced in size and numbers, or in some cases, completely eradicated through these transformations. Turkkan notably succeeds in the broader reach of her paper in not just drawing attention to increasingly precarious livelihoods, greater inequality, and more separation between urban and rural spatially in food terms but also the forces of neoliberalism and globalisation underpinning these shifts, and the authoritarian discourses that help maintain the changed food status quo.

Turkkan sets out four food supply chain effects of these transformations: centralising of power, completing food identities, topographical change and changing residential structure in historical districts. The paper presents a very well worked analysis of the urbanism implications, arguing that food spaces disappeared with the advent of detached private dwellings and high-rise buildings:

Some of them were two or three-story single unit houses; others were multistoried, multiunit apartment buildings; and yet others were skyscraper-height residences. Because their entrances and exits were carefully controlled, these new buildings did not espouse organic relations with the public streets. Many of them did not even have direct access to public streets. Consequently, some of the older provisioning actors who relied on an active public street life in the neighborhood, such as bakkal, manav, or seyyar satıcı, began to lack both clientele and spaces of operation. In the few cases where the building complex or the gated community had store fronts with direct public street access, rents were often too high for these traditional provisioning actors to operate successfully.‘ (p. 9)

Turkkan’s overall conclusions are not optimistic. The spatial and economic re-sorting of the better off to historic neighbourhoods is counterpointed by the often coercive relocation of the poor to urban peripheries with a range of negative food effects. As well as the incorporation of the food provisioning system into a formal structure dominated by fewer actors (p. 20) Turkkan points out that, “While resistance by way of AFNs and urban gardens is ongoing, it is not dominant enough to inhibit consolidation. Surely some of this failure has to do with futility of trying to solve problems of capitalism with consumer activism or moral consumerism.” An overarching conclusion is that food urbanists also need to focus more broadly on the political economy of place rather than just individual changes to their own food practices to resolve food and urbanism issues.

Malawian urbanism and urban poverty: geographies of food access in Blantyre

A strong theme within the set of papers is about the urbanism of everyday life, often in settings in the Global South which arguably have been underreported in the food research literature. Papers set in Blantyre, Cairo, Islamabad and the Netherlands all focus on transformations in this area relating to issues of food poverty, accessibility, and changing social relations. Turning first to Liam Riley’s excellent paper, “Malawian urbanism and urban poverty: geographies of food access in Blantyre”, Riley draws our attention to another under researched aspect of the interplay of food and cities in the global south. Riley points out the variety of urbanisms that require our attention and focuses on one example: everyday life in Blantyre among the urban poor. Food is presented as a kind of vector that allows intertwining aspects of life to be explored, and in the paper, Riley unpacks ‘diverse urban forms [that] feature unique assemblages of markets, shops, farms, gardens, supermarkets, communal kitchens, restaurants et cetera that condition people’s access to food and sense of food security.‘ (p. 2).

As Riley notes, the “analysis is based on information gathered by asking people where and how they access food – through purchases and own production – and then describing these places in terms of how they facilitate or impede food access.” (p. 2) Riley presents a food picture that is diverse, complex, and fragile. Food may be available in principle but not accessible in practice. It is informal systems that provide the most resilient aspects of food access as Riley shows in both his fascinating historical review and in the fieldwork findings and analysis based on his semi participant observations, interviews, and case study construction. The scope is ambitious: encompassing a range of both food consumption and production-related land uses. On the consumption side, the urbanism work traverses supermarkets, municipal markets, designated markets in housing areas, unsanctioned markets in informal settlements, and traditional peri-urban and rural markets. On the production side, it covers a variety of places where people produce food, often informally in leftover spaces.

Riley situates and analyses this rich set of foodscapes in urbanism terms and demonstrates that those who can produce at least some of their own produce are advanced by comparison with those entirely reliant on external sources. This often highlights important rural-urban linkages: a feature of Malawian urbanism (p. 11). Even though as Riley notes “Malawian urbanism is enmeshed with the rural”, this is changing, with negative effects on food resilience (p. 11). Thus, “It is important to note that current demographic changes mean that more and more of the urban population are born in town and have weak social ties to their “home villages” (p. 11).

Riley uses his picture of Blantyre foodscapes as a baseline from which to explore such urbanism transformations, in part relying on a participatory GIS method focused on young peoples’ food experiences. The enclosure of open space and customary land has constrained food growing and foraging opportunities while population growth has made food more expensive and markets more congested (p. 12). Transportation changes in the name of road safety have made it difficult to access peri-urban markets by mini bus, in turn affecting the affordability and accessibility of food supply.

As Riley (p. 12) concludes, “A relatively conventional analysis might frame the new developments and increased foreign business investments as inherently positive, thus failing to capture the significance of cutting down fruit bearing trees, polluting water sources, making mobility more costly, and closing down informal markets.” Thus, urban informality is an element of urbanism which in this context confers food system benefits in everyday life rather than being a marker of failure (p. 12). More broadly Riley (p. 12) makes the point that “Empirical research into how these systems function and how people navigate the urban foodscape is an important contribution to the demystification of urban poverty, and the long term re-imagining of cities rooted in the lived experiences and aspirations of residents.” Riley has some important arguments to make about how we approach this urbanism conceptually and in this paper in my view makes an important contribution to the discussion or urbanism as an area of academic and applied enquiry about food and place.

Reconnection and reflexivity in Islamabad, Pakistan

Saher Hasnain’s (2019) intriguing paper “Reconnection and reflexivity in Islamabad, Pakistan” explores informal food spaces and flows in everyday life in Islamabad, and likewise makes some absorbing connections between urbanism and everyday life. While the context in which foodways are played out is often constrained here by gender and income inequality and overall conditions marked by security threats, in fact, the main focus is on an aspect of “reflexive consumption”. Hasnain (p. 1) sets up the proposition that distinctly non-urban food elements are in a strong interplay with informal urban food spaces and particular food habits, arguing that the intention is by studying these “to understand informality and the subaltern as a device used to describe changing urban geography and urban identity” (p. 1). Hasnain (p. 1) makes close connections between food and urbanism, arguing that “Analysing food in the context of urbanism in transforming environments allows for the opportunity to explore the effects of food on spatiality, materiality, and human relations, and vice versa.”

Working from an excellent grounding discussion of Pakistani urbanism, Hasnain draws out the particular urbanism conditions of Islamabad as a context for the food research. The 1950s urbanism work of Constantinos Doxiadis in shaping Islamabad as a new city is one of the fascinating backdrops to the focus of the paper and Hasnain shows how the original intentions for food provisioning of the planned city, including a peri-urban productive zone, have not worked out as anticipated. Hasnain also demonstrates how food decision-making can be subaltern in rejecting or working around the modern food system. This informality connects residents to earlier foodways and challenges dominant transformations towards the modern food systems. Through informal food spaces including urban food markets Islamabad residents are able to bypass the system and establish more direct and reflexive connections to producers.

Using methods including a substantial tranche of interviews and participant observations Hasnain explored the interactions of a set of food buyers from markets, bazaars, street vendors, and food, livestock and poultry vans, positing a kind of “non urban” informality. As Hasnain puts it, ‘The sites discussed here are notable in their non-urban characteristics. Even if they are formalized within governmental structures and regulations, they signal culture and practices considered alien to Islamabad’s ideal appearance. Often considered as “dirty”, “chaotic”, and “busy”, they are a stark contrast to the clean and “civilised” lines of a modern supermarke. (p. 7). One of the aspects reported on by the research subjects is the very enjoyable nature of a visceral, sense-rich experience of smelling, handling, and looking at food (p. 7) which is also understood as authentic in Pakistani cultural terms. Another is that this constitutes a kind of Alternative Food Network, bypassing the modern food system’s formal supply chains and more ethical and healthy.

Hasnain points out that the actual food landscape experienced by these producers and consumers is in contrast to the formal urbanism of Islamabad that nods towards a westernized notion of modern town planning. Moreover, these informal spaces and practices, “enable potentially disconnected urban consumers to reconnect with and engage with their food, its producers, and its places.” (p. 11) Hasnain concludes that “Consumers are more likely to have conversations related to the origins, quality, ethics, and the transportation of food, than they otherwise would have if purchases were made at a supermarket.” (p. 12). In urbanism terms, this disparity is central to what is being experienced here. Thus, “the urban population may aspire towards a westernized modernity, but the strong foundations of a rural and agrarian society are visible through the porous nature of urban foodscapes.” (p. 12)

Food consumption in the everyday life of liveable cities: design implications for conviviality

Turning next to Abeer Elshater’s fascinating paper, “Food consumption in the everyday life of liveable cities: design implications for conviviality”, focuses on concepts of the interplay of design and conviviality in another context; that of certain urban quarters in Cairo. I was especially interested in seeing how the research theme played out in food terms here, given that this design and conviviality interplay has informed my own work on food and place over many years. To an extent echoing Hasnain’s paper, as Elshater (2019), notes, “The main issue is that some cities of Global South have programmes to handle challenges related to food, but users do not have a pleasant experience while meeting these daily food needs. These constraints increase the problem by providing challenges to the design qualities and implications for public places in line with planning policies.” This conundrum is explored in what Elshater argues is a disciplinary gap in bringing together food and design which is an issue I too have commented on previously (Parham 2012, 2015).

The aim here is to provide design implications that target convivial experience for the majority of food consumers. The focus is on the social practices related to food consumption in the public realm and how the design of the built environment should have the location’s prosperity and conviviality in mind.’ (p. 2)

In so doing, Elshater poses three questions for developing countries in this area. What are those concerned with food strategies saying about cities in terms of conviviality? Can having a pleasant experience in food spaces be on the planning agenda along with economic and more technical land use concerns? And finally, how can place designers strengthen the conviviality of places through their design inputs?

In seeking to answer these questions, Elshater identifies a gap in the literature relating to Egyptian urbanism which the research looks to help fill, using a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods. First, though there is a very useful review of the notion of conviviality setting out what this might be argued to be and how it relates to food and food spaces. A particularly interesting part of this discussion is on interrogating the pertinence here of cultural specificity in defining what constitutes conviviality.

This critical discussion acts to ground the paper before it moves on to outline methods and provide an analysis of the data derived from interviews and survey elements, including in the physical case study locations in Heliopolis, Cairo that were studied for the research. The methods cover qualitative observations within the case study location, interviews with a substantial tranche of participants reviewing a larger number of locations, alongside more quantitative “opinionaires” and spatial analysis of the material obtained. These data sources were undertake in four concurrent streams, that in some cases overlapped (observations and interviews interconnecting for example).

It is fascinating to see in Elshater’s work how the qualitative opinion-based perspectives of the participants relate to the more design-based spatial analysis of qualities including permeability of the case study spaces. The observational and spatial work for example shows how physical access to market spaces is undercut by design quality to support walkability and public transport accessibility. The interviews identify that food conviviality is found to be low in public spaces in part because of restrictive social mores about public eating, especially for women, in line with other studies Elshater cites. Issues are both physical and social: “Most interviews reported unpleasant experiences at Al Gamea Square. Reasons include concerns over crime and harassment, cleanliness, convenient parking, and a lack of sidewalks. Encountering stray animals, animal excrement, and obstacles on sidewalks (e.g. parked cars) on the way to and from food access further detract from experiences” (p. 14).

The opinionaire’ user satisfaction data largely reinforces points from interviews and observations, demonstrating “dissatisfaction based on inconvenient experiences. Negative food access and shopping experiences were caused by unprofessional product displays and physical environments, causing social and functional problems such as sexual harassment, bad-tempered sellers, and parking shortages.” (p. 20). Apart from noting that there is an implied assumption that access should be by car within at least some of the surveyed group, it is notable that a considerable proportion of dissatisfaction is not about urbanism per se but about social attitudes and negative behaviours towards consumers, especially women. Elshater’s spatial analysis then identifies some permeability issues which may be undercutting use.

The resulting discuss focuses on the question about what can be done to make these places more convivial in food terms. Elshater shows that higher-class consumers seem to be opting out of food related public spaces and instead shopping in more expensive car-based supermarkets and hyper markets. Implied by this is that those who can afford to avoid the negative conviviality experiences of such spaces as currently operating. It is the lower and middle classes with fewer resources who are frequenting these more traditional food spaces, including shopping in small food shops and purchasing food from street-based vendors, and to varying extents finding them wanting in both physical and social terms. Elshater concludes with some suggested improvements in design to address various of these points and includes some very useful proposals for further research to deepen our understanding of this fascinating area, within a strong and very welcome practice orientation.

Sharing a meal: a diversity of performances engendered by a social innovation

Turning to the next paper in this Special Issue, the focus tightens to the experience of social innovation in meal sharing in the context of the urban Netherlands. The authors, Marianne Dagevosa and Esther Veen, make urbanism connections between this process and the socio-spatial transformations they argue are embedded in this developing social platform related to food. Dagevosa and Veen approach this theme using social practice theory, arguing that the paper “shows how tactics of appropriation” of meal sharing programmes “can result in trespassing the boundaries between private and public, and between domestic and communitarian space” (p. 1).

The authors start from the proposition that food provisioning techniques can enhance urban dwellers’ wellbeing within a heavily industrialised modern food system, and act as an implied critique of that system by offering alternatives to it. As they argue, “Alternative projects and enterprises offer ways to differently produce, distribute and consume food, thus proposing socio-spatial transformations, making use of critical mass and highlighting issues as sustainability, locality, and sharing.”

Reporting on an online meal-sharing programme called Thuisafgehaald (picked up from home), the platform connects those who make meals with others who want them, and it is argued, is a form of intervention in urban space. In social practice terms, they contend this ‘opens up and challenges the practices of everyday life. As meal makers and takers interconnect they in turn change the way the platform operates and this has socio-spatial facets and implications. So for example the meal sharing valorized proximity which is something the modern food system does not do. In urbanism terms, it works to be near someone who is making you a meal or for whom you can make a meal. As well as new spatial connections, the process creates new networks that increase social richness.

As Dagevosa and Veen (p. 3) note, there are similarities here were tactical urbanism but with particularly resonances in relation to food. Making reference to that great theorist of everyday life, Michel De Certeau (1984), the authors argue that

“Especially on the tactical level and in the sphere of daily practices, it appears that social innovations and DIY urbanism share similar logics to achieve impact. Hence, even though social innovations are mostly explained by the transformations in social relations and values they propose, they have a clear spatial dimension as well. This spatial dimension is specifically important when considering the food system.”

Methodologically the research relies on case study-based approach with a series of interviews and participant observations. In teasing out its urbanism aspects through the case study research, a range of spatial transformations can be identified including changes to kitchens’ (and sometimes living rooms’) configurations in order to increase cooking capacity, and visits to others’ domestic space to collect food. Commenting on this urbanism shift, the authors (p. 14) posit that

Sharing meals which are picked up in one’s private home and kitchen can be considered as examples of how citizens challenge urban design, as they open up their private space for strangers, creating meeting hubs within a street or neighbourhood.

In part this is a reconsideration of what domestic space is: “The platform challenges its users to reconsider the public–private divide which conventionally organises social and spatial order, transforming private space into an interactive, more communitarian space.” (p. 14) Given that much of the intrusion into domestic space experienced through commercial food provisioning is far less convivial and positive than this kind of platform it is intriguing to see this development of “hybrid” urbanism space (p. 15) in a more socially and sustainably focused mode.

Production of edibles and use of garden waste in domestic gardens of a middle-class suburb in Cape Town, South Africa

A different urbanism theme explored in the Special Issue’s final paper is one strongly connected to green urbanism (Beatley 2010; Lehmann 2010). But just what is the potential for such edible urbanism activity? I argued many years ago (Parham, 190, 1992) that we should be learning from wartime experience on the importance of production close to home to turn much of our urban landscape space into food growing space using what I conceptualised as “convivial green space” creating techniques. I noted the need for much more primary research-based data about the potential scope.

A fascinating paper reflecting on South African suburban experience delves into just this issue and using mixed methods tries to get a much clearer picture of what amount of “edibles” growing and local composting would be possible, using a Cape Town suburb as an urban laboratory. The authors (2019, 6) explain that their research “aimed to establish whether the owners of suburban homes with domestic gardens are contributing to urban sustainability through household food production and correct ways of disposing of garden waste.”

As the authors report, such sprawling suburban settings are areas of spatial and resource privilege separated from denser urban areas along class and race lines, but in theory able to contribute strongly to urban food growing and composting through their private garden spaces. With urban food systems contributing a third to cities’ ecological footprint in South Africa (this kind of proportion can be extrapolated for other places too), this would seem a useful area to explore to improve resilience through these local food production methods. Yet, because they are small scale and private, gardens have tended to attract relatively less public, political, or research attention than other elements of urban food systems. Work by Andrea Gaynor (2006) reflecting on Australian suburban food growing experience is an honourable exception.

Methodologically it was intriguing to see how the researchers developed a mix of qualitative and quantitative techniques to gather their primary data on this question of growing and composting activity. First, they identified through plot data held by the City of Cape Town the potential growing and composting area; finding that in theory around two-thirds of plot space was available for food growing. They calculated that some 78% of plot area was available for food production – a very substantial proportion in fact – although much of this space was in fact given over to lawns. Exploring the “production and consumption of the lawn aesthetic” (Mistry and Spocter, p.10, referring to Robbins, Polderman, and Birkenholtz 2001) was an intriguing aspect of the work. While a substantial proportion do nevertheless grow some fruit, fewer grow any vegetables, only 26%, and only around a quarter practice home composting. As the authors note

The results of the study show that Soneike residents do impact on waste, but that there is a cohort who, knowingly or unknowingly, are tending to a more sustainable way of living. The production of edibles in gardens in the study area calls attention to the suburb’s gardens not just being sterile, lawn-covered areas and that the chosen methods of disposal of garden waste are signs of the residents’ behaviour of embracing environment-friendly practices. (p. 13)

The authors go on to say that more is needed to get the word out about what contribution such home production can make, “sensitising” residents to the need and the possibilities: “Alerting suburbanites to the possibilities of domestic food gardening must be twinned with informing them of sustainable small-scale cultivation practices which minimises environmental harm.” (p. 13). In future, they conclude this must occur in existing suburbs and be planned into new ones, with governments taking a policy and programme lead and residents themselves contributing more to sustainable food practices within a broader green infrastructure and ecosystem services approach.

In conclusion

As can be seen from this Editorial the range of papers in the Special Issue on Food and Urbanism offers a fascinating and rich set of primary research findings on a wide range of food and place topics. There is great diversity in the urbanism settings for the research: Blantyre in Malawi, Cairo in Egypt, urban neighbourhoods in the Netherlands, Islamabad in Pakistan, Istanbul in Turkey and Cape Town in South Africa all feature. It is also pleasing to see the number of papers from the global south given the need for more research on food and urbanism in these settings. In terms of the urbanism itself, research contexts include planned towns and more traditional settlements, urban neighbourhoods, more sprawling suburbs, expanding peri-urban edges, and even entire urban areas as in Istanbul.

The papers demonstrate some equally interesting areas of interconnection in their engagement with urbanism. Perhaps most important is that the “paradigm” of resilience is a notable framing element in each case. All the papers in some way also consider Issues and challenges to social inclusion in relation to food. Another overarching theme discernable among the papers here is the focus on everyday life and how that is being expressed through and transformed by food systems and practices. As might be expected spatial design is critical to how urbanism plays out in food terms including in relation to but not limited to green infrastructure and resilience. This while food growing is a strong and highly relevant aspect of the urbanism being interrogated, as well as urban agriculture papers explore other aspects of the food system which are also of huge interest to researchers. One of these in my view is the political economy of food which informs the socio-spatial practices on display. Again it is excellent that a number of the papers directly focus on the politics and economics of food and how these underpin food and urbanism problems and possibilities.

The authors of papers in the Special Issue are making a substantial contribution to filling in more of the food and urbanism jigsaw puzzle, for which they should be highly commended. Their papers are not only of great academic interest for urbanists in terms of theory, methods, and analysis of primary data but they also provide in each case evidence to help inform policy and practices, and make positive connections to sustainability goals for cities and other urban areas. Given the climate emergency (and other food-related issues for sustainable urbanism) the need to respond to these food and urbanism insights is an urgent one.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susan Parham

Associate Professor Susan Parham directs the University of Hertfordshire’s Urbanism Unit (UHUU) and is Academic Director of the International Garden Cities Institute (IGCI). Research interests encompass food and spatial design, the urbanism of Garden Cities and New Towns, sprawl retrofitting, transport-oriented compact cities, and engagement on planning, urban design and urbanism. Associate Professor Parham is Book Reviews Editor of the Journal of Urbanism and Editor of Urban Design and Planning.