Exploring Food and Urbanism

Exploring Food and Urbanism looks at the ways food and cities interconnect in a diversity of places across the globe. The book?s focus moves from transformations in feeding the city and its hinterland in Istanbul, Turkey, through neighbourhoods struggling with food access in Blantyre, Malawi, to the challenges in making convivial public food spaces in Cairo. It explores everyday buying practices in Islamabad food markets that reflect wider changes in food cultures in Pakistan. The possibilities for growing food in suburban Cape Town in South Africa are tested, while possibilities for sharing meals using online methods to bring cooks and eaters together are considered across the Netherlands.

This edited volume makes clear that globally food is critical to sustainable urbanism everywhere across cities from kitchens to gardens, food markets, food shops, streets, squares, neighbourhoods, cities, suburbs, and hinterlands. It shows how food cultures, practices, and economics are closely intertwined with how places are planned and designed even if this is not always fully recognised. The editors of the book conclude that food can and should contribute to responding to the challenges presented by the worsening climate emergency through a focus on sustainable urbanism.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Urbanism.

Introduction: Exploring food and urbanism

Susan Parham

1. Feeding the global city: urban transformation and urban food supply chain in 21st-century Istanbul

Candan Turkkan

2. Malawian urbanism and urban poverty: geographies of food access in Blantyre

Liam Riley

3. Reconnection and reflexivity in Islamabad, Pakistan

Saher Hasnain

4. Food consumption in the everyday life of liveable cities: design implications for conviviality

Abeer Elshater

5. Production of Edibles and Use of Garden Waste in Domestic Gardens of a Middle-Class Suburb in Cape Town, South Africa

Anjali Mistry and Manfred Spocter

6. Sharing a meal: a diversity of performances engendered by a social innovation

Marianne J. Dagevos and Esther J. Veen

Susan Parham, MRTPI FRSA is food and urbanism specialist, Director of the University of Hertfordshire’s Urbanism Unit, Academic Director of the International Garden Cities Institute, and Research Associate at the Laboratory for Building Cultures at the École Nationale Supérieure Architecture Grenoble.

Matthew Hardy, FRSA FRAIA RIBA is Senior Lecturer in Architecture & Urbanism at The Prince’s Foundation, Senior Associate Tutor in the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford, Research Associate at the Laboratory for Building Cultures at the École Nationale Supérieure Architecture Grenoble, and co-founder and co-editor of Journal of Urbanism.