Mapping landscapes of food urbanism

Urban food practices - including alternative food economies, food sharing, edible city solutions, consumption and waste - are creating virtual and actual landscapes. They challenge industrial agricultural approaches that typically separate city from country and people from nature to (re) engage people to their food, the city, and to each other. Cities are fertile ground for (re) connection where people, nature and place are pushed together in heightened proximity. However, diverse actual and potential relationships between urban actors are rarely fully explored, eventhough new (re) configurations could serve as a basis for sustainable urban change. This paper examines actual and potential connections within the urban landscape through the lens of food mapping. Recognizing that maps are no longer singular, static or reductive, emerging food mapping approaches apply new methods and technologies to explore contemporary urban relationships. In such emerging versions, maps are being transformed to make visible, educate and to empower by engaging different perspectives, topics, tempos and mobilities. Novel approaches range from radical, guerrilla, emotional and critical cartography to GIS and other forms of artist, participatory and community mapping. In this presentation, we explore how food mapping has become a tool in which to communicate new ways of understanding future urbanisms, and connections in and across the city, in addition to contesting stubborn barriers and boundaries that displace food in the city. This presentation explores such tensions and criticisms to offer suggestions on how food mapping can offer a step towards creating more sustainable and just urban food landscapes.