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Article
Urban Studies
2015, Vol. 52(8) 1379–1394
Ó Urban Studies Journal Limited 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0042098014534902
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Nourishing the city: The rise of the
urban food question in the Global
North
Kevin Morgan
Cardiff University, UK
Abstract
The urban food question is forcing itself up the political agenda in the Global North because of a
new food equation that spells the end of the ‘cheap food’ era, fuelling nutritional poverty in the
cities of Europe and North America. This article explores the rise of the urban food question in
the Global North through the multiple prisms of theory, policy and political practice. First, it
explores the theoretical ways in which the food system is being framed in urban planning, urban
political ecology and community food security. Second, it charts the rise of new urban foodscapes
associated with urban agriculture and public health. Finally, it identifies a new urban food politics
and asks if this constitutes a new social movement.
Keywords
food, political ecology, security, sustainability, urbanisation
Received December 2012; accepted April 2014
Introduction
Cities in the Global North are increasingly
confronting the problem of urban food secu-
rity, a problem normally associated with
their poorer counterparts in the Global
South. Although food security has been
defined in various ways since the concept
was first introduced in the 1970s, the origi-
nal definition is now deemed to be inade-
quate in two respects. First, it was originally
framed in productivist terms, as a supply-
side problem, whereas today the accent is on
access to food rather than the supply of
food. Second, food security was initially
conceived as a rural problem, whereas the
urban dimension of food security commands
most political attention today because of the
confluence of rapid urbanisation and the
new food equation.
The new food equation signals high level
political acceptance, by national and inter-
national bodies, of the multifunctional char-
acter of the agri-food system, a system that
is beginning to be viewed and valued anew
because of its role in burgeoning public
health costs, dwindling natural resources
and escalating national security threats.
Food security has segued into a national
security issue largely because the food price
Corresponding author:
Kevin Morgan, Cardiff University, School of Planning and
Geography, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WA,
UK.
Email: MorganKJ@Cardiff.ac.uk
surge in 2007–2008 triggered a wave of politi-
cal protests in more than 60 countries, one-
third of which were middle-/high-income coun-
tries, highlighting the fact that food security is
no longer an issue confined to the poorest
countries. As these food-centred protests were
overwhelmingly urban protests, cities now find
themselves on the front line of the new food
equation (Morgan and Sonnino, 2010).
While the Global North is the spatial
focus of this article, it needs to be said at the
outset that the most damaging effects of the
new food equation are being wrought in the
cities of the Global South, where the nox-
ious interplay of poverty, hunger and cli-
mate change is most apparent (Joubert,
2012). Although the relief of hunger has the
greatest claims on our ethical responsibil-
ities, the urban food question cannot be
reduced to a single issue because food, by its
very nature, has a multifunctional character.
In other words, we need to resist the tempta-
tion to reduce the urban food question to a
narrow nutritional agenda because a purely
needs-based conception cannot possibly do
justice to the kaleidoscopic character of the
food system and the multiple prisms – social,
economic, ecological, cultural, political, psy-
chological, sexual – through which food is
viewed, valued and used in society. How to
feed cities in a just, sustainable and cultu-
rally appropriate manner in the face of
looming climate change, widening inequality
and burgeoning world hunger is how I
define the urban food question, a non-
reductionist definition that does justice to
the multifunctional character of the food
system (Morgan, 2009).
‘Eating may be a humble subject’, said
Leon Kass, ‘but it is the first and most
urgent activity of all animal and human life’
(Kass, 1999: 2). Despite the existential signif-
icance of eating, the food system has been
strangely neglected in urban studies until
quite recently and therefore the main aim of
this article is to chart the rise of the urban
food question in theory, policy and practice
in the context of the Global North.
Ways of seeing: Framing food in
urban studies
Cities cannot function without the basic
essentials of human life, especially air, water
and food. One might have thought that
urban studies would be replete with studies
of these basic essentials, but this is not the
case. Urban scholars are now beginning to
redress this intellectual lacuna and here I
explore some recent contributions to food
system planning, beginning with the urban
planning literature.
Urban planning: Re-discovering the food
system
If the urban food question has been some-
what marginal to mainstream politics in the
Global North, it has fared no better in the
urban planning field until recently. That the
food system should be described as ‘a stran-
ger’ to the planning system is little short of
extraordinary given the manifold ways in
which food shapes the materiality of the city
(Pothukuchi and Kaufman, 2000). The criti-
cism levelled at the planning community, the-
orists and practitioners alike, is that it had
addressed all the basic essentials of human
life – air, water, shelter and the like – with the
conspicuous exception of food. This has been
described as a ‘puzzling omission’ by the
American planning community (American
Planning Association (APA), 2007).
If planning practitioners failed to engage
with the food system, much the same can be
said of their theoretical peers. This ‘puzzling
omission’ may be symptomatic of a deep
shift in the nature of planning theory, where
leading exponents have become more exer-
cised by the principles and procedures of
planning as a deliberative process and less
concerned with the substantive content of
1380 Urban Studies 52(8)
urban plans. Ash Amin offers an illuminat-
ing perspective on this shift, arguing that
planning theory has shifted from a ‘know-
ing’ to a ‘deliberative’ tradition in recent
years. The former, he argues, sought to
observe the city from a privileged vantage
point and aspired to re-engineer the urban
fabric to meet the goals of modernity. The
latter, by contrast, seeks to avoid the hubris
of the knowing tradition and implores plan-
ners to act as enlightened intermediaries
who can harness lay knowledge, broker
agreements, speak for the disempowered
and address issues of common concern and
so forth (Amin, 2011). Though clearly sym-
pathetic to the deliberative tradition, Amin
pointedly asks if its commitment to decision-
making procedures has compromised ‘the
necessity to know about substantive matters
of urban change and wellbeing?’ (Amin,
2011: 638).
Clearly not all planning theorists fall
neatly into these two traditions; indeed some
of them have explicitly called for a more
integrated approach, arguing that ‘planners
need to combine both their procedural and
their substantive skills and thus become cen-
tral players in the battle over growth, the
environment and social justice’ (Campbell,
1996: 297). This integrated approach has
been the inspiration for what we might
loosely call the new food system planning
movement, a capacious movement that seeks
to overcome the debilitating divide between
‘expert’ and ‘lay’ knowledge by embracing
urban designers, landscape architects, public
health officials, environmental planners for
example, as well as a wide array of civil soci-
ety groups and NGOs that are committed to
reforming the urban food system (Cohen,
2012; Morgan, 2009; Pothukuchi, 2012;
Raja, 2013; Viljoen and Wiskerke, 2012).
Food system planning theory is now evol-
ving rapidly, thanks to new conceptual
developments in urban design and the
healthy urban planning discourse.
A good example of the urban design
approach to food system planning is the con-
cept of the Continuous Productive Urban
Landscape (CPUL), conceived by Katrin
Bohn and Andre Viljoen. CPUL is a physi-
cal and environmental design strategy that
proposes that urban agriculture can contrib-
ute to more sustainable and resilient food
systems while also improving the quality and
conviviality of the urban realm. The CPUL
City concept provides a strategic framework
for the theoretical and practical exploration
of productive landscapes and, far from being
a utopian spatial form, it is being adopted in
cities in Europe and Africa (Bohn and
Viljoen, 2012; Viljoen, 2005). In other words,
the CPUL City concept puts the food system
back into the centre of planning theory and
practice, exactly where it was more than a
century ago, when Ebenezer Howard pro-
posed the concept of the Garden City, a con-
cept that is resonating once more in urban
planning circles in the Global North
(Howard, 1902; Steel, 2008). Like the
Garden City, the CPUL concept aims to
overcome the binary divisions – between
urban and rural, society and nature – that
defined a modernity project in which food
was rendered invisible in the political arena
and a ‘stranger’ to the planning system.
The healthy urban planning discourse
also straddles theory and practice because it
is both a theoretical strand within planning
theory and a social movement associated
with the World Health Organisation’s
Healthy City network. The theoretical strand
has been enhanced by the recent work of
Jason Corburn, for whom healthy urban
planning is both a means and an end in the
sense that it is a democratic and deliberative
process that aims to promote positive health
outcomes for all, especially for poor and
marginalised groups in the city (Corburn,
2013). Corburn’s conception of healthy
urban planning (or healthy city planning as
he calls it) is an intensely political conception
Morgan 1381
that foregrounds a pro-poor planning
agenda and the emphasis on social justice
constitutes a powerful antidote to the idea
that physical design changes are enough to
secure access to healthy food in cities.
However, the real significance of Corburn’s
work is twofold: it helps planning theory to
re-integrate the ‘knowing’ and ‘deliberative’
traditions and it helps re-unite planning
practice with public health, professional
domains that evolved separately despite their
common heritage.
Urban political ecology: Re-naturing the
city, exposing unjust landscapes
No strand of urban studies has done more
to transcend the binary division between
nature and society than urban political ecol-
ogy (UPE), an emerging body of theory that
is committed to re-naturing the city and
securing social justice (Heynen et al, 2006;
Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2011; Keil, 2003;
Swyngedouw and Kaika, 2000). UPE draws
its inspiration from a wide array of intellec-
tual influences, including Marx, Lefebvre
and Harvey, as well as critical social theory,
eco-Marxism and eco-feminism (Keil, 2003).
One of these inspirational texts is Nature’s
Metropolis, William Cronon’s majesterial
study of Chicago and the Great West
(Cronon, 1991). Here Cronon sought to
overcome the bifurcated histories of urban
and rural regions by writing a history of the
relationship between Chicago and the Great
West. Conventional wisdom, he argued,
conceived the city and the country as sepa-
rate places, seeing the differences rather than
the connections, and therefore he wanted ‘to
tell the city-country story as a unified narra-
tive’. Cronon was influenced here by
Raymond Williams, the Marxian cultural
critic, who had shown that the ‘town and
country’ fiction of capitalist modernity
served ‘to promote superficial comparisons
and to prevent real ones’ (Williams, 1993:
54). To this end, Cronon challenged the spa-
tial and ecological dichotomies that defined
capitalist modernity:
The urban–rural, human–natural dichotomy
blinds us to the deeper unity beneath our own
divided perceptions. If we concentrate our
attention solely upon the city, seeing in it the
ultimate symbol of ‘man’s’ conquest of
‘nature’, we miss the extent to which the city’s
inhabitants continue to rely as much on the
nonhuman world as they do on each other.
(Cronon, 1991: 18)
Animated by this socio-ecological concep-
tion, UPE is committed to nothing less than
‘re-naturing urban theory’ by challenging
both the basis and the direction of main-
stream urban studies, much of which is said
to be ‘symptomatically silent about the
physical-environmental foundations on
which the urbanization process rests’
(Heynen et al., 2006: 2). To illustrate their
own approach to urban studies, UPE theor-
ists have conducted a series of compelling
case studies, most notably of water, to
demonstrate how a socio-ecological focus
can shed new light on the intimate interplay
of power, politics and place (Kaika, 2005;
Swyngedouw, 2004). In other words, the re-
naturing of urban theory is a means to an
end because the central concern of UPE,
especially of Marxist-inspired UPE, is to
expose the roots of unjust urban landscapes
and effect a more equitable distribution of
social power (Swyngedouw and Heynen,
2003). From a UPE perspective then, inequi-
table urban food systems reflect asymmetri-
cal power relations in the city, so much so
that hunger and other forms of food insecur-
ity are the result of the interplay of power
and politics in urban space.
On the face of it, UPE would appear to
be an ideal medium through which urban
theory could learn to re-connect to some-
thing that is just as essential as water, namely
food. What is surprising about the early
1382 Urban Studies 52(8)
evolution of UPE is that, with notable excep-
tions (Heynen, 2006), it has done little to
address itself to the political ecology of
urban food provisioning. Perhaps this short-
coming will be redressed at some point in the
future because, in charting a new research
agenda for UPE, one of its leading theorists
has suggested that ‘food may be the next big
thing’ (Keil, 2005: 647). Given its emphasis
on re-naturing the city and securing a
socially just urban landscape, UPE is well
equipped to bring out the socio-ecological as
well as the political economic dimensions of
the urban food question.
1
Community food security: Re-affirming the
right to food (justice)
The food security literature may be more
than 50 years old, but urban food security is
a relatively new theme. Originally addressed
to the plight of low-income countries in the
Global South, food security has become a
mainstream political issue in the countries of
the Global North because unprecedented
levels of hunger have been spawned by the
austerity policies introduced since the 2008
financial crisis. However, the framing of
food security has changed quite considerably
since the concept was first introduced in the
1970s as a welfare measure. Thanks to the
community food security movement, the
concept is now used to affirm the right to
food as a mark of food justice rather than
charity or welfare. This is not so say that
basic hunger relief is no longer a concern,
merely that hunger and malnutrition are
now framed in a broader, more empowering
conception of community food security.
In conceptual terms the most important
change in food security thinking was the
shift to a demand-side perspective that
stressed access to food rather than the sup-
ply of food. This shift was largely attributa-
ble to the pioneering work of Amartya Sen,
who demonstrated with analytical and
empirical rigour that a productivist perspec-
tive could have disastrous human conse-
quences because hunger often co-existed
with adequate food supply. Famine exists,
he argued, where people do not have enough
food to eat, it is not the condition where
there is not enough food. Sen’s other great
insight was to say that there has never been
a famine in a functioning democracy, a
political framing of food security that under-
lined the critical role played by voice in fore-
stalling famine conditions (Sen, 1981). Sen’s
work helped to overhaul the official defini-
tion of food security, so that it is now
defined as a condition which exists ‘when all
people, at all times, have physical, social and
economic access to sufficient, safe and nutri-
tious food which meets their dietary needs
and food preferences for an active and
healthy life’ (FAO, 2006: 1).
Although the concept of food security is
still something of a novelty in Europe, it has
a long pedigree in the USA, where the para-
dox of ‘want-amidst-plenty’ was always more
pronounced (Poppendieck, 1986). US food
security policy, which originated in the anti-
hunger programmes of the 1930s, is now
embodied in a wide array of food assistance
programmes, the cornerstone of which is the
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
(SNAP), the former Food Stamp Program.
These are de facto income support pro-
grammes and it is instructive that the minim-
alist American welfare system should assume
the form of domestic food aid, a term nor-
mally associated with international food assis-
tance programmes for low-income countries
in the Global South. But food insecurity has
reached alarming proportions in the USA
according to the Food Research and Action
Center, which revealed that 46.6 million peo-
ple were in receipt of SNAP aid in 2012 and
more than 60 million – one in f ive of the total
population – were actually eligible for it.
While urban food security has been a
neglected topic in Europe, much can be
Morgan 1383
learned from the theory and practice of com-
munity food security (CFS), a concept that
was developed in the USA to help the
American food movement to advocate for
food justice and sustainable agriculture
(Alkon and Agyeman, 2011; Allen, 2004;
Gottlieb and Fisher, 1996). Under the CFS
banner the American food movement has
sought to shift the terms of the political
debate from a debate about hunger as a
problem of individuals to a debate about
food justice for poor communities that suffer
multiple deprivations, food insecurity being
one of them. Framed in these broader, more
inclusive terms, food justice becomes ‘the
governing metaphor for the transformation
of the food system that links disparate
movements and ideas’ (Gottlieb and Joshi,
2010: 224).
From a theoretical perspective, the great
merit of using a food justice frame is that it
‘opens up linkages to a wider range of con-
ceptual frameworks drawn from the litera-
ture on democracy, citizenship, social
movements, and social and environmental
justice’ (Wekerle, 2004: 379). From a politi-
cal standpoint, food justice helps the CFS
movement to re-assert the right to food in
the strongest and most capacious possible
terms. Although it was first proclaimed in
1948, as part of the UN Declaration of
Human Rights, the right to food is often
misunderstood. Far from conveying a right
to be fed, which is how it is often (mis)con-
strued, the right to food actually means ‘the
right to feed oneself in dignity’ (UNHCR,
2010).
The re-assertion of the right to food is
part of a wider rights-based approach to
food system reform, an approach that helps
to ensure that social justice does not get mar-
ginalised in the political agenda for food sys-
tem reform. Food system reform is often
framed in terms of ‘sustainability’ and ‘loca-
lisation’, implying that such terms are synon-
ymous and necessarily progressive, when
this is clearly not the case (Born and Purcell,
2008). As Patricia Allen says, local food sys-
tems serve many purposes, but ‘they do not
automatically move us in the direction of
greater social justice’ (Allen, 2010: 306). The
rights-based approach is being deployed in
part to remind self-referential environmen-
talists that class, race and gender need to be
factored into the framing of food system
reform alongside ecological considerations
because, as feminist theorists have convin-
cingly argued, ‘positionality’ shapes the way
we view and value the world (Alkon and
Agyeman, 2011).
2
Significantly, urban geographers are
beginning to utilise the food justice frame to
speak of ‘just urban food systems’, a prism
through which they are exploring the avail-
ability of and access to nutritious food in the
city, especially for the urban poor who live
in so-called ‘food deserts’, areas that have
been abandoned by mainline grocery stores
(Bedore, 2010). Framing the urban food
question in terms of a ‘just urban food sys-
tem’ has two advantages: it helps to render
food visible in the urban political realm and
it connects the community food security lens
with the other ‘ways of seeing’ that we exam-
ined in this section, namely healthy urban
planning and urban political ecology. The
CPUL concept helps the urban planning
community to make good its neglect of the
productive food landscape and encourages
urban planners to use their substantive
‘space shaping’ knowledge to fashion just
and sustainable urban foodscapes. Urban
political ecology also makes a major contri-
bution to the understanding and realisation
of community food security because it high-
lights the existential significance of urban
nature and the extent to which cityscapes are
shaped by asymmetrical power relations.
The fact that urban planning theory and
urban political ecology are beginning to
address food system reform suggests that the
urban food question can help us to
1384 Urban Studies 52(8)
overcome the debilitating dualisms – such as
nature/society, town/country, urban/rural –
that have bedevilled urban studies in the
past.
Emergent foodscapes:
Re-connecting food with
nature and health
Food looms large across large swaths of
human and non-human life, shaping human
health and wellbeing, the treatment of ani-
mals and the use of land, water and other
natural resources. This multifunctionality
carries threats as well as opportunities from
a political standpoint. On the positive side, it
helps to explain why food has a capacity to
bring people together from different walks
of life, its convening power so to speak, which
is why food is the focus of so many social
movements in the world today (Morgan,
2009). On the negative side, this multifunc-
tional character poses threats because, strad-
dling so many diverse domains, food politics
can become locked into single issue political
frames – local food, organic food, fair trade,
food banks etc. – creating food issues rather
than a food movement. Because the urban
food question cannot be reduced to a single
issue, the aim of this section is to highlight
some of the multifunctional values associated
with these new foodscapes. I discuss these
foodscapes with reference to urban agricul-
ture and public health because these resonate
most with the theoretical themes addressed
earlier.
The rise of urban agriculture
Urban planners in the Global North find
themselves increasingly embroiled in the
urban food question because they have to
adjudicate on practices that used to be con-
sidered the domain of rural planners. In
North America and Europe they are facing
a whole series of novel zoning challenges
triggered by a bewildering array of activities,
including the keeping of chickens in urban
and suburban areas, urban bee hives, front
yard planting, community gardens, farmers’
markets, green roofs, wild flower meadows,
guerrilla gardening and the like, all of which
signals the rapid growth of urban agriculture
in the Global North (Cohen, 2012; Nasr and
Komisar, 2012).
Once considered to be ‘the ultimate oxy-
moron’, urban agriculture is now part of a
burgeoning movement that aims to ‘farm
the city’ for a whole series of reasons, includ-
ing growing food for personal or commer-
cial purposes, nurturing social capital and
fashioning alternative food networks. For
some radical geographers, urban agriculture
can even help redress social and ecological
alienation in capitalist societies by helping to
‘re-establish a conscious metabolic relation-
ship between humans and our biophysical
environment by reintegrating intellectual
and manual labour’ (McClintock, 2010:
202).
What distinguishes urban agriculture is
its visceral materiality, the fact that it is
palpable, tangible and above all visible –in
contrast to the industrial food system, where
food of doubtful provenance flows into cit-
ies from placeless foodscapes (Morgan et al.,
2006). Until recently, the political visibility
of urban agriculture depended almost exclu-
sively on inspiring municipal experiments in
the Global South, especially in Havana
(Cuba), Rosario (Argentina) and Belo
Horizonte (Brazil), all of which were crisis-
induced developments. In the Global North
today, however, urban agriculture is begin-
ning to assume a political visibility that
would have been unthinkable a decade ago,
and nowhere more so than in Detroit, the
industrial city that is more famous for its
cars than its gardens (Cohen, 2012; Giorda,
2012).
As an icon of post-industrial urban
decay, Detroit is second to none in the USA,
a process that has been underway for half a
Morgan 1385
century in many rustbelt cities. What distin-
guishes Detroit from other northern cities,
however, is the phenomenal scale of its emp-
tiness – the fact that it has some 20 square
miles of vacant land within its city limits, an
empty space the size of Manhattan (Detroit
Works Project (DWP), 2012). The interplay
of food and race is another distinctive fea-
ture. Food insecurity in Detroit is twice the
national level and the city is chronically
under-served by full-service supermarkets, a
sector in which there is only one black-
owned grocery supermarket in a city where
four out of five residents are African-
Americans (Pothukuchi, 2011). To redress
these problems the Detroit Black Community
Food Security Network has been largely
responsible for creating the Detroit Food
Policy Council, whose mission is ‘to nurture
the development and maintenance of a sus-
tainable, localised food system and food
secure City of Detroit in which all of its resi-
dents are hunger-free, healthy and benefit
economically from the food system that
impacts their lives’ (Pothukuchi, 2011: 6).
Urban agriculture has been identified as
the first priority of the food strategy, a prior-
ity that triggered deep divisions in the city as
to what kind of urban agriculture should be
prioritised. Although there are many com-
peting schemes for urban agriculture, the
most divergent visions are the community
vision and the corporate vision: the former is
being championed by the Detroit Black
Community Food Security Network, which
has a vision of community gardens and
neighbourhood-based urban farms; while
the latter is sponsored by Hantz Farms, a
company that proposes to build a large-scale
commercial farm in Detroit (Gallagher,
2010). Detroit’s urban food strategy also
raises important questions about the role of
civic universities in helping post-industrial
cities to re-invent themselves in more socially
just and sustainable ways. The work of
SEED Wayne, a programme in Wayne State
University, has sought to promote commu-
nity development through the medium of a
sustainable food action research project.
Despite its pioneering work, however, the
programme has been stymied by a university
bureaucracy that remains in thrall to a single
bottom line accounting metric (Pothukuchi,
2012).
As cities throughout the world struggle to
deal with the competing claims of climate
change, economic renewal and social justice,
it is now being suggested that ‘Detroit may
emerge as the city that figured it out first –
how to use its open lands to foster a local
food economy’ (Gallagher, 2010: 151). While
this is hugely optimistic, it does at least
underline the new political visibility of urban
agriculture in the post-industrial cities of the
Global North, where ‘farming in Motown’
has become a mainstream narrative of urban
development in what was once the quintes-
sential industrial city (Giorda, 2012).
The new urban health discourse
Re-connecting food with human and ecolo-
gical health is the central aim of food system
reformers, clearly reflected in the Soil
Association motto ‘healthy soil, healthy peo-
ple, healthy planet’. City governments are
beginning to address the noxious legacy of
lax planning policies that squeezed out urban
and peri-urban food producers in the past
and enabled the fast-food industry to colo-
nise the urban environment, contributing to
the rapid increase in diet-related diseases
such as obesity. Although city governments
have limited powers to reform the food sys-
tem, they are invoking their public health
mandate to fashion healthier urban foods-
capes, provoking charges from the fast-food
industry that city governments are the new
‘nanny states’, the sexist response of the cor-
porate food lobby to any restrictions on its
freedom of action. This new food policy bat-
tle is most pronounced in New York City,
1386 Urban Studies 52(8)
where the city government has been a pio-
neer of public health reform in the USA with
its ban on trans-fats, portion caps on soda
drinks, and the calorie posting requirement
on food service establishments on the
grounds that New Yorkers get one-third or
more of their calories eating outside the
home and they need help to make informed
choices (New York City (NYC), 2011).
Some of New York’s food policy inter-
ventions are proving more politically con-
tentious than anyone anticipated. By far the
most contentious intervention to date was
former Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed
Portion Cap Rule to ban the sale of soda
drinks above 16 ounces, designed to help
reduce the escalating costs of obesity in the
city. Although this was the Mayor’s signa-
ture public health intervention, widely per-
ceived by friends and foes alike as a global
bellwether for a city’s right to regulate the
powerful fast-food industry, the Cap was
overturned by a state supreme court on two
grounds: it was found to be arbitrary and
capricious in its effects and it was therefore
deemed to be unconstitutional.
3
More trou-
bling for the Mayor was the fact that the
Cap was unpopular with 60% of New York
residents, especially in the poorer boroughs
of Queens and the Bronx (Grynbaum,
2013).
In addition to public health regulations,
New York has launched new urban food
strategies, the most celebrated of which is
FoodWorks, a comprehensive programme to
promote a healthier and more sustainable
urban food system covering production, pro-
cessing, distribution, consumption and post-
consumption activities. On the production
side, the programme has boosted the num-
ber of Farmer’s Markets, which totalled 123
markets in 2011, and helped support more
than 100 Community Supported Agriculture
schemes, which build direct links between
farmers and residents. On the consumption
side, FoodWorks has sought to address the
twin public health challenges of obesity and
food insecurity. The city has used legislative
and zoning changes to launch its Food
Retail Expansion for Health (FRESH)
programme, which provides incentives for
grocery stores to offer fresh produce in
under-served communities. It is also spon-
soring alternative retail options, such as food
coops, while its Healthy Bodegas Initiative
has encouraged over 1000 vendors across the
city to begin stocking healthier options (New
York City, 2011).
Public health interventions and urban
food programmes are designed to comple-
ment the city’s school meal and childhood
nutrition provisions, which are federally sup-
ported but locally delivered programmes.
Here, too, NYC has played an innovative
role by designing a creative procurement
policy that seeks to purchase as much fresh
regionally produced food as possible, espe-
cially through the Farm-to-School pro-
gramme. It is seldom realised that the
purchasing power of NYC is second only to
the US military and this procurement bud-
get can shape where food is sourced and
how it is produced and consumed, a power
of purchase that the city government has
deployed to promote healthier school food
and combat nutritional poverty in the city’s
public schools (Morgan and Sonnino, 2010).
Through all these means – health regula-
tions, food programmes and the power of
purchase – NYC is becoming a testbed for
healthy urban food planning.
The rise of urban food politics: A
social movement in the making?
In most countries agri-food policy has been
fashioned by a combination of national gov-
ernments and international bodies (such as
the World Trade Organization) working in
concert with a narrow and self-serving agri-
business sector. But in recent years this cor-
poratist producer-driven alliance has been
Morgan 1387
forced to adapt to a rapidly changing food
policy agenda in which radically different
voices, representing health, poverty and
environmental lobbies, have demanded a say
in shaping agri-food policy (Lang et al.,
2009). Conspicuous by their absence until
recently, city governments are now begin-
ning to see themselves as food system play-
ers on the national and international stage
(FAO, 2012; Morgan, 2009).
The most dramatic change in food policy
governance in recent years has been the
advent of Food Policy Councils. Although
they are relatively new in Europe, Food
Policy Councils (FPCs) have been growing
rapidly in North America – at city, county
and state levels – and these provide an insti-
tutional vehicle for local governments to col-
laborate with civil society groups to raise the
profile of the food system and advocate for
community food security in and beyond their
local jurisdictions (APA, 2011). Following
the creation of the first FPC in Knoxville,
Tennessee, in 1980, there are now 193 such
councils in North America. The proliferation
of urban food strategies in Europe suggests
that European cities could also become
important players in food system reform,
especially if they can collectively advocate
for just and sustainable urban foodscapes.
The aim of this final section is to chart
the rise of the city as a food policy actor and
assess the significance of the new urban food
politics. Here the spatial focus shifts from
American to British cities because the latter
appear to be ahead of the game in the
Global North in trying to fashion an urban
food coalition that seeks to overcome the
problems of fragmented localism, which
threatens the solidarity between cities, and
ecological exclusivity, where urban food
quarters become the unwitting agents of
green gentrification.
During the past decade a number of city
governments in the UK have begun to
design urban food strategies, a totally novel
experience for all of them. While each strat-
egy has its own local nuances, the common
thread is the political desire to address the
socio-ecological problems associated with or
generated by the industrial food system,
including some or all of the following: plan-
ning barriers to urban agriculture, diet-
related diseases, carbon footprints, land
conservation, food poverty, junk food clus-
ters, urban–rural linkages and supermarket
power. City governments have a love/hate
relationship with the supermarkets, the
dominant players who collectively control
more than 80% of the UK grocery market.
While supermarkets claim to perform quasi-
public duties – such as job creation, urban
regeneration and food price control for
example – they are also charged with abus-
ing their power, by squeezing suppliers,
reducing retail diversity and fostering unsus-
tainable consumption (Morgan et al., 2006).
The greatest weakness of these emerging
food strategies is that they have yet to expli-
citly address the issue of supermarket power,
preferring to raise awareness of the links
between food, health and ecology like their
counterparts in Detroit and NYC. For
example, the Spade to Spoon strategy in
Brighton and Hove, which was launched in
2006, aims to forge better links between food
policy and local policies for public health
and education, environmental planning,
local economic development and culture and
tourism (Brighton and Hove Food
Partnership (BHFP), 2012). The former
London Mayor, Ken Livingstone, also
launched a strategy (London Food Strategy)
in 2006 to secure a healthier and more sus-
tainable urban food system. In 2010 Bristol
created the first Food Policy Council in the
country and produced the most comprehen-
sive urban food system assessment ever con-
ducted for a city in the UK in which the
issues of public health, ecological integrity
and social justice figured prominently
(Carey, 2010).
1388 Urban Studies 52(8)
The role of food-focused NGOs has been
critical in inspiring these urban food strate-
gies and orchestrating the political partner-
ships on which they depend. What is not
sufficiently appreciated is that these urban
food strategies signal a new era in local food
politics in the UK: where community groups
and NGOs were once content to advocate
for ‘alternative food systems’ from the mar-
gins of the political system, they are now
actively collaborating with the local state to
design and deliver strategies that address the
shortcomings of the conventional food sys-
tem whilst advocating for more sustainable
food systems. This political change can be
interpreted as a shift from a politics of pro-
test to a politics of co-governance in the sense
that NGOs are now members of the official
partnerships that oversee urban food policy,
symptomatic of a broader trend towards
‘collaborative planning’. Although an impor-
tant change is clearly underway in the politi-
cal tactics of NGOs, it would be premature
to think that these civil actors are equal part-
ners in the new governance arrangements.
Even more problematical, the politics of co-
governance can very easily degenerate into
the politics of co-optation, where NGOs
sacrifice their radical voice for the semblance
of political influence.
On the other hand, it is undeniably the
case that NGOs are beginning to influence
two local state policies that have a strong
bearing on the urban food system, namely
planning policy and procurement policy. On
the planning front, Sustain has helped urban
planners to re-imagine their roles and
responsibilities by offering practical gui-
dance as to how planning policy can create
new opportunities for urban food projects to
flourish (Sustain, 2011). As regards public
procurement, the Soil Association has
helped the public sector to design and
deliver a school food service in which local
authority food purchasing is part of an inte-
grated education and training programme to
teach children and caterers the merits of a
whole school approach to sustainable food
provisioning (Soil Association, 2012a).
City governments are beginning to realise
that, while their powers over the food system
are circumscribed, the concerted use of plan-
ning and procurement powers can make a
significant difference to the quality of the
urban foodscape, especially in public can-
teens and public spaces. By working alone,
however, they can achieve little on the
national or international stage. To overcome
the limitations of cities working in isolation,
the silo city syndrome, a new urban food
coalition has emerged in the UK. Together
with Sustain and Food Matters, the Soil
Association has launched the Sustainable
Food Cities Network, the most ambitious
urban food programme ever created in the
UK, the aim of which is to inspire and
enable 50 towns and cities to develop sus-
tainable food programmes. A condition of
membership is that each member subscribes
to the following principles of a sustainable
food charter: health and wellbeing for all,
environmental sustainability, local economic
prosperity, resilient communities and fair-
ness in the food chain (Soil Association,
2012b). Although clearly aspirational at
present, these principles provide a vision of
an alternative food system and such re-
imagining is acknowledged to be an impor-
tant pre-condition for political change
(Blay-Palmer, 2010).
Creative procurement and food-friendly
planning policies require a more iterative
governance relationship between planners
and purchasers on one side and civil society
interlocutors on the other, providing new
opportunities for genuine co-governance.
Although a new urban food politics is begin-
ning to emerge in the UK, to what extent
can we say that it constitutes a new social
movement? The sobering conclusion would
seem to be that it is too early to interpret the
urban food coalition as a new social
Morgan 1389
movement. This is not to say that a food-
based social movement could not emerge at
some point in the near future, but this would
require a soundly based organisational vehi-
cle. While the Sustainable Food Cities
Network aims to be more than the sum of its
parts, it is too soon to know whether this
promising initiative will survive the neolib-
eral ‘age of austerity’ that is gutting city gov-
ernments throughout the country, which is
why the new food coalition is perilously
dependent on funding from a progressive
foundation called the Esmee Fairbairn
Foundation.
Even so, the fact that such trans-local
initiatives are emerging suggests that urban
food politics could be evolving from a purely
localised and marginalised alternative food
politics, where it was content to contest
rather than engage the local state, into some-
thing more ambitious and potentially trans-
formative. If civil society groups such as
Sustain and the Soil Association can engage
city governments as partners in new food
alliances without forfeiting their radical
voice, and to the extent that these alliances
assume a trans-local form, then it becomes
possible to harness the power of the urban
public realm to fashion more sustainable
urban foodscapes – foodscapes that are fash-
ioned by design rather than default, where
the food system is subject to democratic
deliberation and where it is no longer seen
as a ‘stranger’ to the planning system.
Conclusions
How to feed cities in a just, sustainable and
culturally appropriate manner in the face of
looming climate change, widening inequality
and burgeoning hunger is one of the quintes-
sential challenges of the 21st century.
Although it may seem too capacious, this
definition of the urban food question has
the merit of doing justice to the multifunc-
tionality of food, an attribute that gets lost
when the urban food question is reduced to
a purely needs-based nutritional agenda.
This is not to deny the significance of the
nutritional agenda. On the contrary, the
nutritional agenda will continue to dwarf all
other urban food issues because the double
burden of malnutrition – hunger and obesity –
is increasingly assuming an urban form and
these are pre-eminently social justice issues
because mortality and morbidity are the ulti-
mate inequalities in capitalist society. All the
more surprising, then, that the urban studies
literature in the Global North has been slow
to address itself to the multifunctionality of
urban food systems. This article has sought
to open a new debate by focusing on key
aspects of the urban food question, namely:
the need for a new theoretical synthesis in
urban food studies; the advent of new urban
foodscapes that seek to re-connect food,
health and nature; and the politics of the
urban food movement.
On the theoretical front the article draws
on a key insight of Heynen et al. (2006), who
argued that urban studies has been rather
silent on ‘the physical-environmental’ foun-
dations of the urbanisation process. I sug-
gested that this neglect can be redressed, at
least with respect to the food system,
through a theoretical synthesis of recent
thinking in urban planning theory, urban
political ecology and the community food
security literature. For example, the concepts
of the continuous productive urban land-
scape and healthy urban planning resonate
with the concerns of urban political ecology,
which is bent on ‘re-naturing the city’ and
contesting ‘unjust urban landscapes’. They
also help the planning community to engage
with the social justice concerns of the com-
munity food security movement, which aims
to subject urban food provisioning to more
democratic forms of urban planning. Taken
together, these theoretical developments
help us to re-imagine the city as a socio-
ecological space in which the traditional
1390 Urban Studies 52(8)
dualisms – such as nature/society and urban/
rural – are no longer allowed to obfuscate
the real connections that Raymond Williams
and William Cronon were keen to capture in
their seminal studies of the country and the
city. Framed in these socio-ecological terms,
the urban food system becomes an ideal
prism through which to understand the
materiality and relationality of urban nature,
a process of re-engagement that is spawning
a new ‘politics of conviviality’ according to
some ecological geographers (Hinchliffe and
Whatmore, 2006).
Far from being a purely theoretical devel-
opment, new urban foodscapes were shown
to be emerging in the cities of the Global
North in response to growing concerns
about the conventional food system and its
noxious effects on public health, ecological
integrity and social justice. In their different
ways the new urban foodscapes aspire to be
‘sustainable’ in the sense that they explicitly
seek to address one or more of the values of
sustainability, be it health, ecology or justice
(Morgan, 2009). The article sought to cap-
ture this multifunctional character by high-
lighting two themes that are commonly
associated with these new foodscapes,
namely urban agriculture and the new urban
health discourse.
One of the hallmarks of the new foods-
capes is the rapid growth of urban agricul-
ture, a broad definition which includes bee
hives, urban chickens, front yard planting,
community gardens, farmers’ markets, green
roofs and wild flower meadows among many
other things, all of which are a stark contrast
to the invisible and anonymous factory-
based foodscapes of the conventional food
system. Urban agriculture is nowhere more
visible in the Global North than in Detroit,
where it has been propelled into the forefront
of the political debate about re-imagining
Motown by bringing the ‘country’ into the
‘city’ and challenging urban zoning laws in
the process.
The new urban health discourse was illu-
strated with reference to New York City,
which has been a pioneer of healthy food
planning. However, the significance of
NYC’s initiatives are fiercely debated in the
city and in the wider academy: while sup-
porters claim that the FoodWorks strategy
makes a difference because healthier food
options are now more readily available in
poor neighbourhoods, critics allege that it
does nothing to challenge the mainstream
food industry or address the underlying
causes of food poverty in the city. Although
the contentious soda cap policy was
defeated, this was primarily a defeat for an
imperious Mayor who sought to flaunt his
power rather than engage his people in a
conversation about urban food policy.
Finally, the article addressed the rise of a
new urban food politics, drawing on the
municipal experience in the UK, where food
policies are the result of a novel political alli-
ance between local governments and civil
society groups. The latter have shifted their
tactics from contesting the local state to col-
laborating with it in the hope of exercising
some influence over planning and procure-
ment, two municipal policies that have the
greatest purchase on the local food system.
While some progress has been made in cer-
tain cities, it is hard to avoid the conclusion
that such local efforts will remain partial and
symbolic unless these cities can form a trans-
local urban food movement to leverage the
power of the public realm to deliver more
ambitious reform of the food system. The
new urban food coalition is a progressive
step in this respect, but it is under-resourced
and its municipal partners are being eviscer-
ated by a Conservative-led government in
thrall to a pre-Keynesian creed. While local
food campaigns in the UK are a dynamic
urban force, nourishing the city in more ways
than one, they do not (as yet) possess the
trans-local reach and organisational coher-
ence to constitute a new social movement.
Morgan 1391
Acknowledgements
This article has benefited immensely from the
comments of three anonymous referees as well as
the constructive criticisms of Leah Ashe, Nevin
Cohen, Kami Pothukuchi, Roberta Sonnino and
Andre Viljoen, my fellow food researchers. I
thank them all for generously sharing their
knowledge.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any
funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-
for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. A good example of this is Galt (2013).
2. On the subject of race and class, Julie
Guthman has spoken of ‘the unbearable
whiteness of the alternative food movement’
(Guthman, 2011) and Thomas Forster con-
cedes that the American organic movement
was not only ‘a mostly white movement’ but
was also ‘largely blind to hunger, race, and
class issues’ (quoted in Winne, 2008: 133).
3. Overturning Bloomberg’s public health inter-
vention, the judge said the Portion Cap Rule
would ‘violate the separation of powers doc-
trine’ (Tingling, 2013: 35). This was aimed at
Mayor Bloomberg, who had introduced the
Cap in a high-handed fashion through the
Board of Health, which he controlled, rather
than the City Council, the legislative branch.
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