Paper short abstract:

This paper presents selected examples of several differing qualitative and quantitative approaches to deep mapping, pursued by the authors, to explore the potential of urban environments to produce food. Complex data emerges, showing how agile sustainability needs to be.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will present examples of several differing qualitative and quantitative approaches to mapping, pursued by the authors, that explore the potential of urban environments to produce food. These different mapping techniques offer a rich and diverse set of tools to enable deep mapping of existing situations and most importantly glimpses of future scenarios for lifestyles more in-tune with equity, equality and the environment.

Approaches range from physical mappings such as scale architectural diagrams, opportunity maps, hand-drawn maps, aesthetic and experiential mappings. Participatory walks, go-along interviews, food rituals, and pop-up events complement the physical mappings. Go-along interviews record in-depth conversation as people move about their neighbourhoods where local knowledge is fully embedded in its own social and cultural context, showing the city as more than a physical space devoid of emotion or story. Or using costume or events such as picnics to simulate food growing ritual and customs in the context of urban harvest and communal eating. Aesthetic and experimental mappings, showing how every day utilitarian objects such as greenhouses used for food growing can be seen as objects with their own rich materiality, contributing positively to our experience and comprehension of our environment.

Such practices build a complex and sometimes contradictory set of data that shows how sustainability needs to be agile. It cannot state simply "I am here" in the singular, but "I am also here, and also here", moving in several directions at once through strategy, innovation, crisis, and the incremental towards sustained changed.

Paper short abstract:

With a general interest in homing in the context of mobility and migration, I look at the food cultures of Bad Godesberg as a highly polarised urban district. I show how eating in public places contributes to homing processes, using maps, sketches and situational analysis.

Paper long abstract:

Many urban districts face different and heterogenous groups of people with a life course shaped by mobility and migration. Here the process of relating to public places, or 'homing', can provoke conflict. To take a closer look on how homing proceeds, I investigate eating as a highly complex, but weakly regulated activity of everyday life (Warde 2016). My main argument is that non-domestic eating contributes to homing processes on different levels. As a member of the project "Urban Food Cultures and Integrative Practices" I observe why people in the district of Bad Godesberg go to certain places for eating out and avoid others. Also I am interested in what they think about where certain groups eat and where they don't.

Based on situational analysis (Clarke 2005) and critical cartography, on the one hand I register places of non-domestic eating on a map myself. On the other hand, I use sketching interviews asking for a description of the district as well as certain gastronomical places. Enriched by participant observation I compare those three levels of general district mapping, subjective district mapping and place sketching. Hereby I get a "deep map"-like impression (Roberts) of the food cultures and their relation to homing processes in the highly mobile urban district of Bad Godesberg.

Clarke, A. 2005: Situational Analysis. Grounded Theory After the Postmodern Turn, London

Roberts, L. 2016: Deep Mapping and Spatial Anthropology. Humanities, 5 (1), 5.

Warde, A. 2016: The Practice of Eating, Cambridge

Paper short abstract:

Food systems researchers are deploying innovative methodologies to render foodscapes visible and legible for governance. This paper juxtaposes quantitative representations using charts and maps, with knowledge co-production through digital storytelling, presenting divergent views of foodscapes.

Paper long abstract:

Public health, ecological and economic impacts of food system transitions are concentrated in metropolitan areas and require urgent local governance innovations. "Food environments" and "foodscapes" represent conceptual tools rendering local drivers of food purchasing and consumption ("foodways") visible and legible. The concepts are widely deployed in discursive struggles to galvanise the will to govern urban food insecurity. This paper discusses divergent methodologies employed to inform food governance in Cape Town. In presentations to governance stakeholders, quantitative attempts to survey and represent foodscapes using GIS and charts were juxtaposed with qualitative digital storytelling processes co-producing knowledge with residents of surveyed neighbourhoods. Analysis of quantitative findings generated a series of maps and charts offering policy-makers "evidence" to inform discourses legitimising regulatory intervention. However, territorial and temporal limitations make generalisation risky, and the "birds-eye" perspective results in a high level of abstraction which limits comprehension, participation and the affective impact necessary to develop the will to govern foodscapes. The digital storytelling process generated a series of personal stories telling of difficult decisions which members of the affected communities made concerning food. These represented a "worms-eye" view highlighting how "foodways" are shaped by intersectionalities and embedded in wider social practices and particular places. Although emotionally compelling stories may galvanise greater political will, thus complementing and raising the visibility of representations of quantitative data, the divergent perspectives raise important questions about the role of researchers in the co-production of knowledge and how this may variously open up and close down discursive space for policy development.

Paper short abstract:

This scholar activism reflects on counter-cartographies in the context of community gardens. It offers insights into how map(ping)s and DIY-mapping materials (f.ex. "This Is Not an Atlas") can contribute to a geographical alphabetization that fosters a commons-based rural-urban relationship.

Paper long abstract:

This research is generated from activism rooted in urban gardens (Allmende-Kontor network) and counter-cartographic education (kollektiv orangotango). Our collective mappings in Europe and Latin America are generating, in a ludic way, map(ping)s on different scales: from how to organize a community garden, to finding allies for an alternative regional food system and finally sharing cartographic skills in a way, that enable a mapping of commons-based rural-urban relationships. The results of these mappings vary from collective scribble maps to elaborated (online) maps of all the community gardens in a city like Berlin. But even more important is the educational aspect, which is a collective process of geographical alphabetization in spaces of everyday action (Halder 2018). This means also making mapping knowledge accessible and learning to read maps critically. Based on this educational approach, we published DIY-materials like manuals and tutorial videos as well as a book which is Not-an-Atlas but a global collection of counter-cartographies. Not-an-Atlas features projects like 596acres from New York, which makes the potential urban commons visible and actionable or a DIY-balloon mapping manual used to find a place to garden in a refugee camp in Libanon (kollektiv orangotango+ 2018). This research analyses (learning) processes which are connected to the formation and the dissemination of these map(ping)s. The analysis is divided into an engagement with the political goals of our activist practices, as well as a methodological reflection of our action research.

Paper short abstract:

This project investigates the future of thriving urban agriculture by mapping its expressed value (social, economic, environmental) and success criteria by juxtaposing economic challenges urban farms face with the benefits they bring to communities in New York, Chicago, and Seattle.

Paper long abstract:

While growing food in the city and growing food to feed a city are not yet synonymous, advances in commercial-scale urban agricultural systems, such as hydroponics and aquaponics, and technical capacity to assess how and where they have the best potential for implementation and integration, bolster a viable future of increasingly self-feeding urban fabrics. Community-oriented food production and educational urban agriculture operations are equally vital for rapidly growing global urban populations. The sustainable and multimodal impacts of urban agriculture are manifested differently by forms of urban growing ranging in application of technology and scale, with economic viability and social benefits disparately expressed.

Through an integrated mapping exercise of the expressed value (including social, economic, environmental) and success criteria of urban agriculture, we ask: what makes food urban? Comparing three North American cities: New York, Chicago, and Seattle, this set of maps investigates and juxtaposes the economic challenges urban farms face with the benefits they bring to communities. Using GIS and open data sources, we map among multiple factors urban agriculturally relevant metro area sites- identified as commercial, educational and social and grouped by size; commercial data points including land value and commercial rent levels; demographic data and key indicators of social equity; and potential future sites for urban agricultural operations. Where, and how, urban agriculture can succeed is a vital determinant of the potential success and scalability of urban agriculture to feed our growing cities.

Paper short abstract:

At a transitional point in the access to Amsterdam's public space greens, this contribution illustrates the tensions between the mapping practices of the municipality and citizen experts vying for stewardship in the development of the public space as multispecies food forest commons.

Paper long abstract:

Since September 2018, the Amsterdam Zuidoost Food Forest community of practice (VBAZO-CoP or CoP) engages in mapping practices to develop, document and communicate their project. These differ from the mapping practices used by municipal maintenance and infrastructure departments in that they aim to foster citizen expertise in the stewardship of public greens as multispecies food forest commons. Yet even the most visually evocative maps and practices developed by the CoP are seen as legible and/or usable by the municipal administrators and process managers responsible for mowing and maintenance schedules. The CoP, whose concerns are focussed on multispecies resource availability and climate crisis mitigation, sees gaps in the municipality's mapping and that lead to ecosystem resource destruction. Might the weekly monitoring of the CoP's planting interventions better serve the municipality as maintenance maps? Might maps of nectar resources better guide mowing practices? Might maps of pollinator habitats better clarify the maintenance of the waterscapes? Might the CoP's soil-sample archive better chart the levels of soil organic matter and thus better serve the community's climate crisis mitigation goals? With regard to providing insight into the human food resources of the developing food forest, might the CoP's foraging practices better clarify leafy greens and fruit availability in Amsterdam's poorest food-resourced neighbourhood? At a transitional point in the access to Amsterdam's public space greens, this contribution illustrates the tensions between the mapping practices of municipality and citizen experts vying for stewardship in the development of the public space as multispecies food forest commons.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores Islamic urban food practices in Lisbon through an analysis of the spatiality of halal in the city. Findings contrast the emplaced practices of halal consumption central to community and identity formation with the transnational reach of diaspora ties and global halal production.

Paper long abstract:

Modern halal markets are increasingly complex and recent studies have drawn attention to the political economy of halal as well as its social and cultural dynamics (Bergeaud-Blackler, Fischer and Lever, 2016). In a post-colonial and post-immigration context, the recent growth and diversification of the traditionally small-sized communities of Muslim confession in Lisbon has created new patterns of spatial appropriation, consumption, trade and production in the city. In their main areas of settlement, this has given visibility to new and expanding retail commerce where halal butchers assume particular relevance. Drawing on an analysis of the spatiality of halal in the city and qualitative fieldwork with producers, retailers, religious community leaders and consumers, this paper explores Islamic urban food practices. Findings reveal that localized practices of halal consumption are central to community and identity formation and place making. Affordability and differential spatial accessibility to shops are pushing forward changes in the halal meat market (Bergaud-Blackler Fischer and Lever, 2016) resulting in the emergence of alternative economies such as raising animals on informal suburban homesteads. Moreover, the geography of halal expands beyond the city and is embedded in global commodity chains and links with the wider diaspora revealing the ways in which, "… transnational networks are maintained, negotiated, and sustained in everyday urban life …" (Brickell and Datta, 2011: 3).

Paper short abstract:

This research has analyzed and mapped three kinds of land in peri-urban area of Nanjing and tried to adjust the unsuitable land transformation in urban planning and improper use of farmlands according to sustainable assessment results.

Paper long abstract:

With rapid urbanization, urban-rural fringe in China is changing dramatically and a lot farmland has transformed to construction land. The urban-rural junction is a composite area of a trinity of urban construction land, rural construction land, and agricultural land. Farmers are forced to move from villages to high residential buildings and a great number of migrants live in peri-urban areas. Some residents make a living through peri-urban agricultural land. Changes of land use in the peri-urban area are extremely rapid and irreversible. In view of this, maintaining a certain amount agricultural land in the urban-rural fringe is of great significance for ensuring national food security, ensuring the daily needs of urban residents, and adjusting urban living environment and climate conditions.

This research has analyzed and mapped three kinds of land in peri-urban area of Nanjing including construction land, agricultural land and other green land through database form Nanjing Planning and Natural Resources Bureau and Google Earth. Then farmlands which will be transformed in urban planning and farmlands which are not protected and might be transformed in the future are extracted by comparison of current land use and urban planning of Nanjing. Sustainable assessment indicators are proposed to link with spatial characteristics of urban-rural fringe. In the end, this research tried to adjust the unsuitable sites and adverse environmental conditions or improper use of farmlands according to assessment results.