Urban Food Mapping

Connecting people and places

Chapters in this section highlight maps and mapping as registers of the complex, often hidden linkages and interdependencies between stakeholders, space, produce and resources in urban food systems. Whilst covering inner-city and peri-urban places geographically, urban food maps are often employed by various urban agents to capture the need for food practices to be rescaled across and between all food system aspects and to be integrated into local, regional, national and global networks. Benefiting from a range of mapping methods, including participatory, co-design and artistic, as well as techniques, such as GIS, photography, plan drawing and installation, urban food maps can demonstrate the potential, nature and urgency of change within current urban food systems. They aim for a better understanding of network-based food spaces and practices and how these can be safeguarded and developed to secure regenerative urban ecologies in the future.

Uncovering the special in the everyday

This section refers to maps and mappings of urban collective agency, memory and food fiction, as well as of adaptation and resilience. Through case studies, its chapters explore the role of urban food mapping especially around the everyday as they contribute to urban histories and narratives, identities and customs. They show how participatory and scientific mapping methods combined with a range of approaches, such as ethnographic observation, literature and historical analysis as well as photographic fieldwork, can make concealed connections visible. Past and present challenges can so be understood as future opportunities. Urban food mapping understands food system activities to be made up of everyday practices, performed by individuals and collectives on a local level with repercussions of global reach. Spatialised across our daily work routine, domestic or social life, they often slip from our memory as each day passes. Here, authors map these small connections between individuals, social groups and the local built environment as a product of everyday life.

Proposing change for communities

This section acknowledges a new wave of emerging urban food maps that disrupt traditional mapping approaches. The most radical of these are often called ‘counter or guerrilla mapping’ where critical cartography democratises the practice of mapping to make counterclaims, to express competing interests around food, to make practical plans for social change or to imagine utopian worlds. The chapters show how through participation with maps, locals can be invited to insert detailed knowledge about food practices and spaces within their cities. Such urban food mappings can help advocate for the actions and desires of residents to make something happen, such as aiding informal food security or urban agriculture. Often, counter-maps are used to lay claim to land with clear political and ecological goals. Counter cartography can highlight diversity within the urban food system whilst harnessing opportunities for socio-ecological change through revealing new connections between people, place and what we eat. Map makers apply the entire breadth of mapping methods and techniques, from oral interview via drawing and performance to digital and satellite imagery.

Recording economies, patterns and crises

This section includes maps and mappings that make evident our actions on and with food thereby providing a permanent record of these transient activities. Food – where it comes from; how it is produced, transported, traded, prepared, consumed and its waste recycled; and what this signifies to individuals, social groups, societies and the environment – provides an essential focus from which to understand themes that include identity, the senses, economy and place-making. Often, it is the altering of everyday food environments that makes visible their underlying structures and constraints. The Covid-19 pandemic, for example, affected us all, probably most through changes that happened at the individual scale. At the other end of that scale, there is the global food landscape, equally hard to detect, which explores how food travels from field to fork almost invisibly. Urban food maps can capture such patterns using a wide range of mappings methods, from quantifiable to qualitative, including drawing, redrawing, photographing, counting, calculating, journaling, walking and eating.

Reimagining land use

Chapters in this section show that maps and mapping underpin much of the reimagining of how city regions can re-establish connections between their land and more resilient, equitable and sustainable urban food systems. Central to these concerns is the identification of spaces that can be re-natured and (re)connected to accommodate food growing and a diverse range of food activities and cultures. Authors speak about uniting, mediating and collaborating through mapping practices, moving beyond the dichotomy of urban/rural or human/nature. Orthographic plans and sections merge and blend with cartography. Beyond these familiar mapping techniques, photography, narrative, collaging and painting all contribute to extending the content and meaning embodied in and attributed to mapping land use. Urban food mapping, as it is evolving as a method within food systems design, activities and research has the capacity to highlight (sometimes unspoken) conflicts and potential, aid scenario building and provide evidence for negotiating a reimagined urban habitat.