Growing food inside cities as tool or contribution to the re-vitalisation of city quarters, neigborhoods or completely new city developments is currently in high fashion. The examples of successful integration of food growing or even bigger…urban agriculture in city development, however, are still scarce. Designers and artists are at the forefront of imagining what it can be like. For example, the PeerGroup currently runs a project with a neigbhorhood in the city of Groningen which took on the responsibility to care for pigs at a brownfield site in the city.  But to actually combine creative imagination with the reality of re-development of a place, its people, culture and institutions is quite something else. In Cologne they have tried this recently with open space methodology and the ideas of Continous Productive Landscapes. A process of planning and discussions was organised to re-develop the working class neighborhood Ehrenfeld. Food and food growing were explicitely taken into account here. Although in German, this blog writes about it and shows an English video of the process. Additionally, this website contains pictures. Probably an interesting case for a conference such as the upcoming AESOP conference on food planning in Cardiff end of October!

Consumer driven food networks are differently named and organised in every country. At the European Society for Rural Sociology (ESRS) conference we saw many types and forms passing by in the working groups within the theme Food networks and supply chains. GAS groups in Italy, AMAPs in France, CSA’s and Community food co-ops in the UK, food coops in Germany, ‘proximity contract farming groups’ in Swiss, Grupo de consumo’s in Spain, Food teams in Flanders. Consumer driven food networks are scattered all over Europe it seems. It seems indeed but not evenly distributed. There are approximately 15 CSA’s only in the Netherlands and a very recent initiative to create food coops, called ”voko’s”. Uniquely here are the many adoption schemes; adopt a chicken, apply tree or cow. But initiatives are not booming like Italy, Spain or France. In his concluding presentation, Henk Renting offered a few factors for the non occurance of consumer driven food networks in countries such as Portugal, Greece, the Netherlands, Ireland… First of all, farm structure and the scale of farming matters. Where the farming structure is based on large scale farms integrated into the bulk supply chain it is difficult to conver to on-farm processing or direct marketing. The availability of local and/or organic products in the conventional supply chain. The existence of tradition in gardening and the way food is cultured into society.

The existence of a tradition of gardening is an interesting one. Will such a tradition inspire or hamper the establishement of consumer driven food networks? In comparative EU perspective the Netherlands has low levels of food provisioning by self-growing showed Petr Jehlicka and Joe Smith in another working group which would fit low levels of consumer driven food networks too. On the other hand, countries like Poland or Czech Republic have very high levels of food self-provisioning but low incidences of consumer driven food networks as presented by Lukas Zagata. Of course there a complex context around this but it is therefore time to start relating and researching both practices at the same time. Household food provisioning strategies are not yet on the radar of researchers working with alternative food networks.  The fact that work on household food provisioning strategies was presented at other places simultaneously to the working group on consumer driven food networks is illustrative.

At the ESRS conference, currently ongoing, there are a few working groups situated around empirical and theoretical work on ” Alternative Food Networks (AFNs)” . Different studies have identified many different alternative food initiatives and networks which are situated outside the consolidated agro-industrial complex both physically and in their socio-political organisation.

The working groups show different cases from Europe and beyond in which participant involvement is being analysed. How participants of AFNs frame their involvement varies. The frames are often overtly political referring to marxist ideologies and anarchist principles or quite the opposite. The latter – no overt political statements – can be found in the cases presented by Esther Veen on two urban agricultural initiatives in the Netherlands.

Participants were extremely hesitant to frame their membership in political terms and were outright rejecting ‘ oppositional’  language. They were downplaying the significance of their membership, not prepared to place it in broader ideas of societal change, but framed it instead as a personal choice, as something nice to do and as their little contribution to make the world better.

Particularly in one case, this contrasted heavily with the initiator of that case who strongly voiced his political statements and discontent with the agro-industrial system. The audience to the presentation suggested that one of the explanatory factors could be Dutch culture which generally avoids politization but focuses on the ‘ tolerance’  of leaving you to do your thing while I do mine. Certainly, so far food has not underwent the same level of politization as is the case in Britain. But further unpacking is needed of these initiatives in order to firmly conclude at this point.

At the bi-annual conference for rural sociologists in Europe  at this moment going on at Crete, we organised a working group to compare food and farming strategies in the rural and the urban. We discovered confusing (see blog 1) and potentially clarifying concepts while listening to the many interesting presentations. As an example of sustainable rural development Ignacio Lopez Moreno presented the concept of co-production as ” the ongoing interaction and mutual change of human and living nature”  (after van der Ploeg 2008) while explaining the case of quality production under the Waddengoud label in the north of the Netherlands. This definition fitted the presentation of Esther Veen and myself too who saw the urban residents in urban agriculture initiatives as co-producers in the sense of this definition.

Although co-production and co-producership also have contested meanings in the academic debate these terms are potentially bridging the rural and urban studies on the way people grow food as alternative to buying it in the regular retail outlet as part of the agro-industrial complex. Both rural dweller and urban residents interact with and change nature while becoming active in growing food.  Food provisioning strategies that involve co-production open the dichotomy between producer and consumer and perspectives which start (implicitly) from one or the other side.

Today we had the last session of our working group ” Comparative perspective; governing semi-subsistance food and farming strategies in the countryside and city” . In this group we deliberately were seeking to contrast  cases of food and farming in urban and rural contexts. Can urban agriculture be compared with small-scale farming in rural areas? What has peasant farming literature to offer in how we can look at what is going on with food growing in cities?

We discovered useful and potentially bridging concepts and concepts which may confuse more than they reveal. To start with the latter, “semi-subsistance farming” may not be a useful concept. One reason is the many definitions as Imre Kovach showed us. But another is the meaning of the separate terms in the different rural and urban contexts. Is the ” semi”  in subsistance referring to selling surplus or buying the remaining part of the food supply if you only produce some of your vegetables? And is ‘ farming’  the appropriate term for growing food in allotments or community gardens?  From a rural perspective food production as a side, or part time activity is easily seen as farming and the person foremost as a producer and only in second instance as consumer. In city initiatives it is the reverse. Consumers usually do not ‘ farm’  but ‘ grow food’  or ‘ garden’  and hence are only a ‘ producer’  after their identity as a consumer. This while a rural hobby farm may be as intense in land use as an allotment at the city fringe. The focus on food provisioning strategies  seems therefore better since it refers to the activities one undertakes to eat, which may include growing activities too.