Kids, Kale, and Concrete: Using Participatory Technology to Transform an Urban American Food Desert

Abstract

This chapter develops the concept of “American Apartheid” (Massey and Denton, 1993) by placing access to healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate food for urban youth in the context of structural racism, racial formation, and racialized geographies. An important way to bridge the gap between academic knowledge and local knowledge and advance preventative policy is through Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR). YPAR is an increasingly utilized research approach that involves the affected community identifying a local issue, developing a research agenda, and planning an appropriate intervention to address the issue. We document a YPAR partnership in the East Oakland neighborhood and the development of a community food security intervention in response to youth-led research. Specifically, we describe how Streetwyze—a new mobile, mapping, and SMS platform that allows users to find goods and services, take action on important issues, and visualize health and well-being in their neighborhoods—coupled with “ground-truthing”—an approach in which community members work with researchers to collect and verify “public” data—sparked a food revolution in East Oakland that led to an increase in young people’s self esteem and environmental responsibility and encouraged urban youth to become more civically, community, and academically engaged. We discuss recommendations and implications for future research and collaborations between researchers, teachers, neighborhood leaders, and youth-serving organizations.