Lucie Sovová

Wageningen University & Research | WUR · Rural Sociology Group

This study contributes to research proposing the ethics of care framework as a way of imagining a food system that cares for Others. We expand this exploration to the everyday practice of home gardening and the related social relationships and material flows. This area complements current scholarship, which mostly focuses on food-related care as a...

While alternative food networks (AFNs) have become the leading conceptualisation of sustainable food systems, vibrant scholarship on food self‐provisioning (FSP) in Central and Eastern Europe has remained confined to the geopolitical region it investigates. This article brings these two bodies of thought closer together in two steps. First, we trac...

This paper brings together two streams of literature which rarely enter into conversation: diverse economies scholarship and critical readings of postsocialism. Mobilising the cases of food self-provisioning (FSP) in Czechia and agricultural cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan as an empirical basis for our reflections, we pursue a two-fold aim. Firstly, we...

While degrowth as a plural and decolonial movement actively invites the Global South to be part of its transformative project, the current North-South dichotomy threatens to miss the variety of semi-peripheral contexts. Against this backdrop, we aim to contribute to dialogues on degrowth from the often-overlooked ‘East’ – specifically post-socialis...

This paper investigates food system resilience—conceptualized through the four dimensions of agency, buffering, connectivity, and diversification—from the perspective of rural–urban relations. We consider three cases that capture distinct actor and policy foci in the wider literature on urban–rural interactions. These are secondary cities and their...

Urban food is a key lever for transformative change towards sustainability. While research reporting on the urban food practices (UFPs) in support of sustainability is increasing, the link towards transformative potential is lacking. This is because research on urban food is often place-based and contextual. This limits the applicability of insight...

Urban food is a key lever for transformative change towards sustainability. While research reporting on the urban food practices in support of sustainability is increasing, the link towards transformative potential is lacking. This is because research on urban food is often place-based and contextual. This limits the applicability of insights to la...

While urban gardening and food provisioning have become well-established subjects of academic inquiry, these practices are given different meanings depending on where they are performed. In this paper, we scrutinise different framings used in the literature on food self-provisioning in Eastern and Western Europe. In the Western context, food self-p...

The position of urban allotments in the rural-urban spectrum is evaluated in this paper, which contributes to literatures on urban gardening, as well as contemporary rural-urban dynamics. Historically, European allotments can be seen as a product of urbanisation. At the same time, they embody a number of “non-urban” characteristics that create the...

Despite rising enthusiasm for food growing among city dwellers, local authorities struggle to find space for urban agriculture (UA), both literally and figuratively. Consequently, UA often arises, sometimes temporarily, in marginal areas that are vulnerable to changes of planning designation. In the literature, spatial issues in relation to UA have...

This paper seeks to contribute to the topic of alternative food production, which has attracted the attention of both scholars and practitioners in the last years, together with the increasingly stronger critique of the current food system. In the past, allotment gardens played an important role in cities' food self-sufficiency, however they are of...