In early september I attended the RGS-IBG meetings in London. The theme of the meeting was inequalities. it was an excellent theme. So many geographers consider this topic in one way or another.
I was asked to be on a panel discussion. It was a challenge for me. I would not consider myself an urban food infrastructure theorist, necessarily. I have taught urban geography in modules, though not recently (I may add a session on this topic into my master’s food security module this year).
I wasn’t the only panel member, and the audience drove the discussion in new and different ways. I am going to share my notes from the discussion here and end with a few thoughts that came from the discussion and are even less organised.
I wanted to consider three related questions in my opening gambit.
- First, what comes into view when we approach urban food infrastructure from the perspective of people trying to feed themselves and others?
- Second, how are these infrastructural relationships and enablements geographically produced?
- And third, what is specifically urban about them—and who has the power to change them?
So first, what comes into view when we begin with people trying to feed themselves and others?
Eating is not simply an act of consumption. Feeding ourselves and others is part of social reproduction: the continuous work required to sustain people, households and communities. Cities do not reproduce themselves. Urban life is reproduced every day through acquiring food, preparing meals, caring for others and maintaining households.
Much of this remains invisible within urban food policy, where food may appear as retail, land use, economic development or public health. This obscures the work required to turn provision into meals people can eat.
To address this, I want to consider how social reproduction theory and theories of practice may contribute.
Social reproduction fixes our gaze on the multi-scalar connections, power relations, differences and absences through which life is sustained—and what is at stake when that becomes difficult or impossible.
Practice theory helps us understand how it is accomplished. It brings us to the intersections where bodies, materials, meanings, competencies and other practices must be coordinated, showing how infrastructures become usable or unusable and where they might be reconfigured.
Let me explain.
Eating requires people to acquire food, get it home, store it and prepare it around employment, care and health needs. The infrastructure of eating therefore extends far beyond shops and markets.
Nor do these infrastructures enable people equally. They assume money, time, mobility, secure housing, adequate kitchens and the capacity to absorb disruption. Those unable to meet these assumptions must compensate through additional labour, travel, debt or going without.
This is where combining practices and social reproduction matters. Inequalities do not simply affect infrastructure use; they are produced through its organisation. Some lives are supported while others absorb the costs of failure within their bodies, households and communities.
Beginning with people therefore reveals a different problem. The issue is not simply whether food moves through the city or is physically present. It is how infrastructures distribute the resources, labour and capacity required to turn food into meals and sustain life.
It also reveals different possibilities: how food, transport, housing, energy, welfare and care infrastructures might be reorganised together, and the labour of feeding distributed more justly.
This brings me to my second question: how are these infrastructural relationships and enablements geographically produced?
A foodscape does not simply contain food. It is a geographically produced arrangement that organises encounters with food and shapes which forms of provisioning become possible.
Foodscapes are made through everyday practices, but carry the sedimented effects of decisions about investment, land use, transport, housing, retail and welfare. Some actors have considerably more power than others to determine what food is present, where it is located, and for whom spaces of provision are designed.
This means that systems not conventionally recognised as food infrastructure are nevertheless part of the foodscape. Transport, housing, energy, welfare and care all shape how food is encountered and made usable, even though they are usually governed as separate policy domains.
Together, these material, social and institutional infrastructures produce the foodscape itself: what people encounter, what appears available, and what remains absent or hidden.
The food desert debate provides a good example. If the problem is defined as the absence of a supermarket, the obvious response is to introduce one. But this may not provide access to healthy, affordable or culturally appropriate food. It may displace independent retailers or leave underlying inequalities untouched. The map may now show the area as provisioned while the conditions producing injustice remain—or become harder to see.
Foodscapes can also be remade from below. Community organisations and informal networks can reorganise encounters with food, creating trust, knowledge and connection. But they often repair gaps created by markets, welfare systems and public institutions, revealing both infrastructural failure and displaced responsibility.
Infrastructure as assemblage is useful here—not as an inventory, but as a historically and geographically produced set of relationships. It asks what holds them together, whose labour maintains them, whose interests they serve, and who can assemble them differently.
This brings me to my third question: what is specifically urban about these conditions, and who do we mean by ‘the city’?
Infrastructure does not become urban simply by being inside a city boundary. Urban foodscapes are produced through supply chains, labour markets, welfare and financial systems connecting urban lives to other places and scales.
Nor is the city a single actor, and many institutions shaping food infrastructure do not understand themselves as food actors. Local authorities do so through planning, transport, housing, procurement and public health; businesses and property owners help produce the foodscape; and national governments shape welfare, income and regulation.
The power of the city is therefore distributed, relational and constrained. What makes these conditions urban is not simply their location, but the particular ways that density, distance, connectivity, governance and political visibility are assembled in place.
This connects food justice to the right to the city. The issue is not only access to the existing foodscape, but whether marginalised groups have the recognition, resources and power to produce a different one.
Food makes visible how political economy and urban governance enter into bodies, kitchens, care and everyday life. It forces us to ask whose lives and foodways urban infrastructures enable, who can shape them, and what, exactly, makes them urban.
This leaves me with a further question. If the infrastructures that reproduce urban life are assembled across multiple places and scales, but their failures are lived with and repaired through everyday labour, what would it take for the people undertaking that repair to gain the power to remake the foodscape—rather than simply holding an unjust arrangement together?
And then the discussion started …
We had questions about what distinguishes an infrastructure approach from a systems perspective and as assemblages . We also questioned the perspective’s utility for action and change.
I reflect on that here.
For me, a systems view is the god’s-eye view. What connections and elements do we see when we look down from above? This is important. It brings everything together. But systems can also feel natural and predetermined. It is hard to consider how we change a system.
An assemblage is a bit of a hybrid between this and the infrastructure perspective. It focuses on the connections and linkages between nodes; it can blur boundaries between where one part of a system sits and another. Assemblages can draw our attention to connections that may not sit adjacent in a systems diagram. It allows for both sequential and non-sequential happenings and for teleological (ordered) cause and effect, but also for aspects that exist at the same time and create something in that existence that is not there without the connection. It is probably where I would sit (I used the term in my discussion above). But it is a term that is harder for people to understand; it is hard to see. How do you convince people to create new assemblages?
I think an infrastructure view is different from the systems perspective and has different utility. It is a landscape view. From different perspectives, we see what matters in wider systems for different people, and we can more easily consider how that landscape has changed over time and how history is sedimented in it. We can see and feel how it has been designed, and so can be redesigned. We can see how our collective values are materialised in that landscape through the material and immaterial infrastructure we have built and how that may create difficulty for some that is not experienced by others. This is often hidden in the other ways of understanding urban (food) space. This perspective brings the assemblage into view, including what is present and absent.
This framing gives the infrastructure perspective further utility that the other two ways of thinking I’ve touched upon do not have. When you can situate yourself, or someone else, within a landscape, they (or you) can begin to see how we are all part of that landscape and what our roles are in remaking it through our everyday actions and decisions as we navigate it. It offers a way to create change.
At the end of the session, further questions came to mind. I keep hearing the term food as infrastructure, and a panel member used it too. I began wondering if we need to distinguish between food as infrastructure and infrastructures of food.
The latter seems easier to grasp; these are the infrastructures that enable food to be eaten. These are the elements that shape how we get and have food, and the inequalities that can emerge from them.
Food as infrastructure makes me think more specifically about questions concerning what food is. Is it nutrients and calories, a commodity to be sold and profited from, a connector of people, a way to express care and other values such as thrift, environmental concern, or something else? Food-as-infrastructure thinking, I think, can make us consider how we ontologise food. This matters because connected infrastructures then reflect, inhibit or enable specific ways of living.
GeoFoodie 