Abstract
Local food initiatives are steadily becoming a part of contemporary cities around the world and can take on many forms. While some of these initiatives are concerned with providing consumers with farm-fresh produce, a growing portion are concerned with increasing the food sovereignty of marginalized urban communities. This chapter provides an analysis of urban contexts with the aim of identifying conceptual barriers that may act as roadblocks to achieving food sovereignty in cities. Specifically, this paper argues that presupposed commitments created during the birth of the modern city could act as conceptual barriers for the implementation of food sovereignty programs and that urban food activists and programs that challenge these barriers are helping to achieve the goal of restoring food sovereignty to local communities, no matter their reasons for doing so. At the very least, understanding the complexities of these barriers and how they operate helps to strengthen ties between urban food projects, provides these initiatives with ways to undermine common arguments used to support restrictive ordinances and policies, and illustrates the transformative potential of food sovereignty movements.
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Notes
- 1.
Note: this chapter draws on and expands some of the ideas in my article “History lessons: What urban environmental ethics can learn from nineteenth century cities.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Volume 28(1): 143–159.
- 2.
It should be noted here that the terms “food sovereignty” and “food justice” are often used interchangeably, as both signify food related movements that accept a wide range of justice concerns, including but not limited to increasing community control of food systems. For this reason, both terms will be used interchangeably in this chapter.
- 3.
This paper, specifically, utilizes Andrew Light’s (2003) broad definition of “cities” found in his seminal essay on the urban blind-spot in environmental philosophy. As such, the paper roughly defines “urban areas” or “cities” (the terms will be used interchangeably) as built spaces connected to both the past and the future, as they are continually being developed in such a way as to act as physical manifestations of community priorities and values (Light 2003). In addition, it is important to note that urban areas are often opposed, or form dualisms, with other areas. For example, the city is opposed to the country and nature is often opposed to culture. This definition is deliberately vague, as its aim is to capture the essence of built areas, while still respecting the unique cultural and historical manifestations found in individual contexts. Due to this vagueness, it should be noted that the insights identified in this paper may not apply to all cities, but still of may be of use at a future date. As the historical section draws heavily on work in North America, this essay may be of particular use to practitioners working in similar contexts.
- 4.
For the purposes of this chapter, a “commitment” should be understood as an underlying feature of social existence (Rose 2003) or a basic concept that a person holds concerning what something “is” (Inwagen 2013; Noll 2015). Such commitments are influential in all areas of life, including the development of personal identity (Ricoeur and Blamey 1995), how we treat various groups, such as other those of other cultures, animals, and the environment, and in scientific inquiry (Haraway 1989; Harding 1993). There is a plethora of work in humanities and social sciences devoted to teasing out the social, symbolic, and cultural aspects of food (Mcgirr and Batterbury 2016). This chapter builds on this work, by identifying historical commitments that may act as conceptual barriers to food sovereignty.
- 5.
Von Thunen’s influential thesis was that when there is a lone market located in an urban center, “crops with high transportation costs and intensive uses of land would be produced near the market than would other types of crops… Distance determined land value and transportation costs and therefore the margin of profit from a particular enterprise needed to be sufficient to pay these costs” (Barthel et al. 2015, p. 80). In this theory, economic factors cause the creation of “rings” of varying productivity around city-centers.
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Noll, S.E. (2017). Food Sovereignty in the City: Challenging Historical Barriers to Food Justice. In: Werkheiser, I., Piso, Z. (eds) Food Justice in US and Global Contexts. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, vol 24. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57174-4_9
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