Exploring food and urbanism II editorial

KEYWORDS:

• Urbanism
• food
• planning
• conviviality
• sustainable transitions

Editorial overview

In work exploring food and cities, there can be a tendency to treat food-focused urbanism as essentially and even solely about urban agriculture. The papers in this second part of the Special Issue of the Journal of Urbanism, Exploring Food and Urbanism, demonstrate that while urban agriculture continues to be a very important theme – and three papers here are primarily teasing out aspects of such food production – there are a multitude of other fascinating food-related topics for urbanists to get their teeth into. As all six papers brought together in this Special Issue (II) show, food can be conceptualised in terms of the workings of the food system in different spatial loci and scales, and thematically as both central to sustainable transitions and green infrastructures and capable of both commodification and conviviality. It is within these broad thematic groupings that this Editorial first discusses the papers, before drawing some brief conclusions for food and urbanism from this heartening diversity of evidence-based perspectives.

Food as urban commodification and conviviality

Three of the six papers in this Special Issue focus strongly on aspects of food and place in terms of urban commodification and conviviality. With echoes in terms of themes explored by Yasmeen (1996), Laura Arciniegas’s paper, “The foodscape of the urban poor in Jakarta: street food affordances, sharing networks, and individual trajectories,” tells a transforming urbanism story in which the physical, social and economic boundaries between domestic space and local areas are being blurred In food terms. The insertions of commercial forces, including out-of-home food offers, the preponderance of packaged and precooked food, growing distribution networks and increasing globalising of food influences, have all impacted on what had been predominantly domestic food production by women in poverty stricken urban kampungs. This has in turn changed the foodscapes of Jakarta’s urban poor in ways which have emphasised negative effects including obesity and other public health issues (p. 1).

Arciniegas explores the gap between a Jakarta envisioned as a mega-city of “manufactured modernity” (p. 2), hosting malls, business centres, fast food brands, residential skyscrapers, and gated communities for the urban middle class and one in which “poor urban dwellers [are] densely concentrate in kampungs … poor neighborhoods, enclaves located in the city center, isolated within.” (p. 2). For kampung dwellers, a challenging everyday life revolving around informal structures is encompassed by this urban village space. “The same goes for the food chain of supply, transformation and consumption which is embedded in the informal economic network of street vendors and hawkers and on which households largely depend upon day-to-day.” (p. 2). Although households depend economically on these food services for meeting nutritional needs, they have been ignored in economic analysis and their social and environmental dimensions underexplored.

This is where the interplay between food and urbanism comes in as a way of framing conceptually the changing foodscape situation of the kampungs. As Arciniegas suggests, these foodspaces are dynamic and evolving and the informal food vendors provide a “moving foodscape” (p. 3) in which eaters, vendors and food interact permanently. Thus, the binary distinction between “home” and “out-of-home” eating behaviors should be reconsidered (p. 3). As there is no longer a “bold border” (p. 3) between home and out-of-home eating, this active creation of a blurred foodscape must also focus on gender relations given the primary responsibility of women for domestic work of cooking, an onerous one based on the complex gastronomy of Indonesian dishes. Eaters are not just located in this urbanism – they are actively shaping it through their practices. Thus “the daily supply of street- foods give[s] dynamism to the space, redrawing the lines between inside and outside the home, and by that establishing new relations between people, food and the space they live.” (p. 3).

One of the strengths of this absorbing paper is the methodological approach used to tease out what is happening here. Combined qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches have been exemplarily employed by Arciniegas to explore food practices temporally, spatially and in terms of the meanings, norms and representations they reflect (p. 4). Drawing on non-participant ethnography, quantitative survey and finally in-depth case study by way of an ethnography of the kampungs’ foodscapes, the methods provide a rich mix of data from which to analyse this transforming case of food focused urbanism. Within the case study, it is intriguing to see the intricacy and fragility of the physical spaces of the kampung – themselves subject to spatial and social stratification – and the robust way that both domestic and narrow shared spaces between houses are employed for resilience purposes in relation to food. While homes often have little cooking infrastructure, the public spaces of narrow alleys and corners are busy with mobile food vendor carts, mobile hawkers and spontaneous stalls. Food interactions often occur at the tera – the threshold space of the house – as part of a supportive and convivial food ecosystem.

Fixed stalls like warungs and galeran are key spatial dispositions as they work almost like central kitchens providing daily meals, organizing eating routines and gardening tradition, preparing food as “it has to be”. Even though they do not provide a place to eat they are perceived as familiar entities that nourish the rest of the community. (p. 13).

There is little space here to explore Arciniegas’s absorbing findings and analysis but a key urbanism point emerging is how street food becomes an extension of the home while functioning as a domestic support system for women who are already undertaking substantial other responsibilities for childcare, housework and paid work. Arciniegas reflects on how the kampung foodscape also provides a social platform for experiencing the city. Although kampung dwellers are aware of the modernity of malls and fast food restaurants and may visit these (going out to eat means going out of the kampung to eat), the vending networks and fixed stalls of the kampung are part of a spatially and temporally dynamic urbanism of community and home (p. 7). With reminders of David Bell’s (2007, 8) notion of an ethics of conviviality being fostered in places with commercialised social relations to make a hospitable city, the blurred foodscape researched here is an intriguing one for urbanists to explore.

Another perspective on the urbanism of conviviality comes from the very different setting of “Emotional diners and rational eaters–constructing the urban lunch experience” by Ari Hynynen, Inari Aaltojärvib, Anu Hopiac and Heikki Uimonend. Here, the authors reflect on the experience of the nationally legislated free lunch in Finnish cities: for children at day-care and schools, for students at universities and for workers at workplace canteens (Abstract). Setting out a dichotomy between the rational and the sensory, the authors argue that lunch is an urban phenomenon in Finnish society which has both geographic and cultural meaning (p. 1). In a spatial sense, lunch venues are spread out across Finnish cities but it is suggested may be rather overlooked as worthy places for study in urbanism terms. The antecedents of the free lunch are explored here and the link between healthy diets and productivity in underpinning this rational element of welfare state provision in workplace canteens and other institutional settings is explored as a fascinating slice of Finnish food and urbanism history. A gradual shift away from this form of provision reflects changes in both the spatial food environment, and in socio-cultural transformations in Finnish society, and the authors examine this as a backdrop to the specifics of the research.

As a writer on food and urban design for convivial urbanism (Parham 1991, 2005, 2015), it is especially pleasing to see how the authors engage with notions of conviviality to provide a central theoretical framing for the paper. Invoking Illich (1973) and more recent theorists including Shaftoe (2008) and Rodriguez and Simon (2015) – Lisa Peattie’s (1998) work on convivial cities would have been another useful reference point – they bring together urban design and conviviality to argue that the social life of urban places is fundamentally tied to food and individual identities can be constructed through foodspaces and practices (p. 4). In contemporary urban Finland, they note however that “work and urban life have splintered into various genres and brought about a wide array of lunch places” (p. 6). Yet, they ask, how can lunch transcend its mundane qualities as a routine, rational, unremarkable everyday practice to become an appealing and convivial local food event that is experiential, embodied and sensory?

The methodological approach helps unpack the fine grain of the spatial design of the lunch experience using observations and interviews with groups of diners in canteen and pop up restaurant spaces using focus group methods. Divided in terms of class, occupational and education aspects the case study results explore a range of factors impacting on perceptions about the urban lunch (and dinner) experience. My own biases were confirmed in the finding that “Contrary to scholarly assumptions that background music in a commercial space is perceived positively, the respondents in our study preferred to eat in a peaceful atmosphere without any background music at all” (p. 13). Overall, participants are more likely to treat lunch with an instrumental, logistic focus – what is easy, quick, and available becomes central – while at dinner experiential urbanism and emotion-related aspects are more prominent.

In urbanism terms, the details of urban design matter: aesthetics of the setting and ambience including acoustic design and noise level. The authors argue that if urban lunch providers can pay attention to these more urbanism focused aspects comprising the totality of “served dishes, surroundings, ambiance, and indoor environment of the eating place” in which food is just one element then they may halt the drift away from taking part in the convivial urban lunch (p. 16).

Food places have certain potential to form soft edges (Gehl 2010, 75) for public urban spaces, and make inviting places for people to gather around and socialise, thus adding to urban conviviality. Many mundane eating places are not considered magnetic, invigorating potential for city life. However, urbanism starts already from the indoor practices and the manner how the role of food is conceived and played in urban context (16).

In “Digging up the past: urban agriculture narratives in Melbourne and São Paulo” by Adrian H. Hearn, Thaís Mauad, Chris Williams, Luis Fernando Amato-Lourenço and Guilherme Reis Ranieri, the food focus turns to urban agriculture but in this case with urbanism explored in terms of the very different commercial or convivial agendas it may serve. On the one hand, the research explores urban agriculture’s commodification as a “purchasable commodity” to enhance real-estate sales, drawing on Sarah Dooling’s (2009) concept of ecological gentrification to demonstrate how this exacerbates spatial inequality (p. 1). On the other hand, urban agriculture is also understood to underpin community aspirations for food-centered places by its “ability to confront the long-term neglect of land, employment, and environment” (p. 1). As the researchers point out, in Melbourne and São Paulo, broadly similar colonial and industrial legacies “have set the stage for urban agriculture’s resurgence and resulting ‘internal contradictions’” (p. 1). They argue that only by coming to terms with these conflicting capacities can those pursuing a progressive role for urban agriculture as part of food centred urbanism do so successfully.

Vegetable gardens and micro-orchards have become a selling point for supposedly green apartment blocks in both cities but often become little more than small fenced off areas with little ecological, cultural or material food value. Urban agriculture initiatives, by contrast, have emerged that more genuinely address structural issue in relation to food in cultures with a tradition of productivity but “an erosion of enabling conditions” (p. 2). Reflecting on their approach, which encompasses property market literature, a series of case studies which incorporate interviews, observations and public policy review, and a secondary source-based overview of the São Paulo situation, the authors explore their own positionality. Their intention to make a positive, practical impact benefits from a reflexive discussion framed within “auto-ethnography” methodology.

The rich description from the case study research is one of the pleasures of the paper. Among interesting insights is the focus on how narratives about the past – including the heritage of the garden city movement’s food principles in Australian suburbia – are used to frame food and urbanism in the present in ways that are selective, forget inconvenient historical contexts and structural conditions, and can be instrumentalised and commodified as part of a “sustainability fix” (p. 7). They conclude that the real estate industry invokes “ecological heritage but obscures the loss of enabling conditions such as protection of productive land, subsidised horticultural workforces, and environmental stewardship as espoused by the garden city movement. By contrast, community advocates presented history as a source of insights for redressing the long-term erosion of urban food systems.” (p. 22). In both Melbourne’s hinterland and in São Paulo, they end hopefully with the possibilities represented by the studied initiatives for more convivial and less commodified approaches through which urban agriculture can be enabled to contribute strongly to sustainable urbanism.

Food and urbanism in sustainable transitions and green infrastructures at varying loci and scales

A number of the papers explore the urbanism of food in different spatial loci and scales in order to focus on sustainable transitions and edible green infrastructures. Although not explicitly discussed as about nature-based solutions or edible city solutions this is an implied theoretical framing for food related urbanism in each of these papers. What is made explicit is the important role of planning and place design at the city region scale for underpinning food focused urbanism in part through the medium of urban agriculture. Thus, decentralised urban agriculture initiatives and the interesting form of the urban food forest is a focus in one paper. Another expresses how urbanism research is capable of integrating and showcasing diverse sets of methods to enable transitioning into more sustainable places. In a third paper learning by doing in relation to food is framed by transition theory whereby innovation and experimentation is used to envision new food focused urbanism possibilities.

As in relation to urban agriculture in Melbourne and São Paulo, garden cities are again invoked to frame work on food and urbanism. “Urban food forestry networks and Urban Living Labs articulations” by Barbara Ribeiro and Nick Lewis, cites the Garden City among modernist approaches including the Ville Radieuse and the Broadacre City planned to be able to fill a mooted “urban-rural gap” through a focus on a localised food system (p. 4). Although these utopian models, plans and urban programmes vary extremely widely in food terms (see Parham 2015), the authors argue they allow us to think about how we might reshape our relationship with the food system from production to consumption, even if unable to in practice operationalise that aspiration in full. In so doing it is posited they have “place-making educational potential to activate our cities’ commons into dynamic knowledge platforms” … “if turned into a network, these localised actions and proposals could kindle more significant systemic change in metropoles.” (p. 4). It is acknowledged that the potential to feed people locally has been compromised as urban settlements’ scale and nature is transformed into megacities yet urban food forestry is being increasingly portrayed “as a mechanism for reconnecting urban people with food processes” (p. 4).

As Ribeiro and Lewis point out, urban agricultural practices including foraging can have multifunctional benefits that intersect across a range of categories including ecosystem services, human well-being and material productivity. The authors do not claim that urban food forestry can necessarily feed a whole city, but such networks can help “conceptualisation of edible landscapes as a pathway for reconnecting urban people with food processes while enhancing biodiversity and ecosystem services” (p. 6). The development of an urban food forestry network is practically articulated through Urban Living Labs, which are conceived as spaces for placemaking experimentation about edible landscapes using engagement and co-creation approaches which embrace the commons.

Setting out a utopian model for Auckland, New Zealand the paper provides a worked example through, which an urban forestry network protects biodiversity including pollinator pathways increasingly missing from an industrialised countryside. The forestry network could, it is argued, encompass “Auckland’s vast availability of parks, squares and green pockets within the urban limits of the city” to grow food (p. 12). New development areas envisaged by the City’s Unitary Plan could be allocated in part to edible landscapes (as it should be remembered was envisaged by Ebenezer Howard as the Garden City was built out). Drawing on a circular economy approach, the urban food forest network would keep both nutrients and social values circulating within the food system (p. 12). As the authors conclude:

It took humanity 100 years to build the degree of disconnection with food processes experienced in cities today, but there is no reason to believe that this could not be undone by creative models and approaches to educating urban people about food.

Cultivating food and sharing harvesting practices in cities are activities that embed an urban experience of more sustainable living mechanisms, which could hopefully lead more of us to question our reliance on the unhealthy system that currently feeds us (p. 14).

The issue of transition is again the focus in “Planning for a sustainable food system. The potential role of urban agriculture in Lisbon Metropolitan Area” by Teresa Marat-Mendes, João Cunha Borges, Ana Dias and Raul Lopes.” Here, the authors are concerned with the capacity of planning and urban design for urban agriculture at the city region scale to underpin more sustainable urbanism. Municipalities are situated as central to this endeavour and it is argued they have a paramount responsibility to work on connecting food and place through planning strategies, policies and community focused programmes. This call is, as the authors acknowledge, not a new one and it is noted that architectural approaches which centre on buildings have tended to be inadequate to deal with food and place issues. The urbanism issues are certainly urgent – and longstanding – for example this author wrote about the critical need to integrate food, urban design and planning as far back as the early 1990s in ways that focused on diverse, human scaled, mixed use, walkable and food focused neighbourhoods, and transitioning to urban food growing through green infrastructure in the form of “convivial green space” (Parham 1991, 1992, 1992). Yet still, 30 years later in 2021, we remain at a relatively early stage of institutional incorporation of food into planning and urban design practice.

The paper explores this theme by drawing on an ongoing academic research project, “SPLACH – Spatial Planning for Change” which “aims to inform urban policies and decision support systems to guide Portuguese planning practice on promoting a sustainable and effective urban transition, towards a low carbon and social inclusive urban system.” (p. 6).

The authors further articulate their aim as being to explore both what has been done to integrate food into metropolitan Lisbon’s planning instruments and what needs to be done by way of transition to embed food as a valued urban activity. Framed by a detailed review of literature about planning and the food system in Portugal (and Lisbon specifically), the paper uses methods including a review of planning documents, mapping of potential food locations, site visits and observations, and interviews with producers to build their understanding of land uses typologies and food opportunities. Urban agriculture case-studies in Almada, Cascais, and Lisbon are developed to study emerging urban agriculture initiatives and there is a focus here on well-illustrated urban design and morphological aspects – the mapping and other visual elements of this paper are particularly strong.

A detailed discussion section draws together these varied threads and concludes that as it stands municipalities seem very underequipped to support and manage urban food planning and production. The authors argue that something akin to a continuous productive urban landscape (drawing on the work of Viljoen and Bohn 2009) could be instituted in certain parts of the metropolitan area. They suggest, however, that there is a paucity of morphological solutions for possible food spaces within planning in part because of a faulty understanding of the spatial nuances of rural and urban interconnections. This is something to work on as part of the culture of planners and designers – in engagement with producers and would be producers – to extend food possibilities through key instruments such as the Municipal Director Plan (PDM). As the authors conclude, a new conceptual framework is need at municipal level to foreground urban agriculture and the food system as legitimate foci for planning policy and urban design practice and thus to meet ecological, productive and social outcomes for food focused urbanism in future.

Food system transitions are also the focus of “Scaffolding transitions of possibility: the food walk as embodied method in Singapore“ by Huiying Ng which uses a highly theoretised approach and a visually informed set of methods to explore the edge of the food system – with the notion of the edge understood as “to refer to spaces where forms of inclusion-exclusion become perceptible” (p. 2). The core of this paper is in the area of co-production and it makes a strong case for learning about food and place by the embodied and temporally bounded practice of walking and visualisation to reimagine desired foodscapes. “By considering walking as a method in the design of desired foodscapes, this paper addresses how ‘time niches’ foster embodied knowledges of care and haptic connection” (Abstract). Framed within Singapore’s rich relationship with food as cultural memory and identity formation as well as central to its everyday life, Huiying Ng sees food as offering a way “to understand larger societal preoccupations” (p. 2). The bricolage of Singaporean food spaces reflects this complexity and provides a context for imagining transitions (p. 6).

Using both walking and visualisation workshops to develop two case studies, the author worked with participants, supported by resource people to provide participants with expert knowledge in areas including biowaste conversion, food waste, environmental education, and urban farming. Together they walked specific green spaces then spent time reimagining them as foodways. Presented in text and visual material including drawings, maps and photographs and the author’s own observational commentary these elicitation methods produced intriguing ideas for reimagined foodspaces. This future making it is argued that emancipatory as a form of immersive social learning and should be reflected in food pedagogy (p. 18). In fact, an “urban food pedagogy that cultivates spaces and skills to engage these issues would smoothen the transition from one socio-technical system to another, as part of systemic transformation.” (p. 18). In conclusion, by using such adventurous pedagogies such approaches can “scaffold” the process of transition to more sustainable urbanism in food terms. In closing, Huiying Ng argues:

Singapore’s self-conscious status as a foodie city is continually renewed as uniquely Singapore. Yet, much of its food is sourced beyond national borders. A global food systemin-transition offers exceptional moments of rupture, to create material and institutional structures for better foodscapes, where an ethics of possibility (Appadurai 2004, 2013) seeds itself in collective study (21).

A brief conclusion

As can be seen, the papers in this second part of the Journal of Urbanism Special Issue on Exploring Food and Urbanism traverses complex and challenging food and urbanism territory theoretically and in practice. The papers demonstrate that in settings as diverse as Indonesia, Finland, Brazil, Portugal, Singapore, New Zealand and Australia scholars and practitioners are actively engaged in finding ways to conceptualise the interplay of food and place and to study aspects of that interplay in an intriguing range of empirically based ways. At a diversity of scales from the metropolitan and often now megacity region in its peri-urban and rural hinterland to the very fine grain of the small urban greenspace or the shared table, the focus is not only on urban agriculture but on a much wider range of food experiments, transitions, infrastructures, cultures and solutions. Conviviality is a golden thread running through the papers, while forms of commodification and inequality are strongly critiqued. Although nature-based solutions are not explicitly the urbanism focus, there is a clear sense that these papers are concentrated on aspects of making and remaking the edible city in tune with nature, to achieve a sustainable, egalitarian conviviality.

A notable element is that each author makes clear in a reflexive way they are also personally invested in making a positive, practical contribution in transitions to more sustainable urbanism and this commitment does shine through the work. There is a real sense of the urgency of the need for change in all kinds of practice forms and sectors relating to food and place: planning, urban design, policy, governance, engagement, knowledge and education. As a researcher who has been advocating for this for many years it is heartening to see this wealth of literature informed, methodologically robust research on a diverse range of food and urbanism themes and topics. Like the researchers showcased in this second part of the Special Issue on Food and Urbanism, I too hope we can make urgent and profound progress towards a more food-centred urbanism in future.

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susan Parham

Susan Parham is Associate Professor and Director of the University of Hertfordshire’s Urbanism Unit (UHUU), Academic Director of the International Garden Cities Institute (IGCI) and a Research Associate at the Laboratory for Building Cultures at the École Nationale Supérieure Architecture Grenoble. Susan has written a number of books, book chapters and academic papers on research areas including food and spatial design, garden cities and new towns, sustainable building and construction, ‘sprawl’ retrofitting, transport oriented, compact and sustainable cities and community engagement on planning and urbanism. Susan has a background as a political economist, town planner, urban designer and urban sociologist. Previously Susan was a policy analyst and rapporteur for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, is a Member of the Royal Town Planning Institute and a Royal Society for the Arts Fellow.