17 research outputs found
âGrowing your ownâ: a multi-level modelling approach to understanding personal food growing trends and motivations in Europe
Growing food for personal and family consumption is a significant global activity, but one that has received
insufficient academic attention, particularly in developed countries. This paper uses data from the European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) to address three areas of particular concern: the prevalence of growing your own food and how this has changed over time; the individual and household context in which growing takes place; and whether those who grow their own food are happier than those who do not. Results showed that there
was a marked increase in growing your own food in Europe, in the period 2003â2007. This increase is largely
associated with poorer households and thus, possibly, economic hardship. In the UK however the increase in
growing your own food is predominantly associated with older middle class households. Across Europe, whether
causal or not, those who grew their own were happier than those who did not. The paper therefore concludes
that claims about the gentrification of growing your own may be premature. Despite contrary evidence from
the UK, the dominant motive across Europe appears to be primarily economic â to reduce household expenditure
whilst ensuring a supply of fresh food
Food insecure community gardeners in rural Appalachian Ohio more strongly agree that their produce intake improved and food spending decreased as a result of community gardening compared to food secure community gardeners
Cultivating (a) Sustainability Capital: Urban Agriculture, Eco-Gentrification, and the Uneven Valorization of Social Reproduction
Urban agriculture (UA), for many activists and scholars, plays a prominent role in food justice struggles in cities throughout the Global North, a site of conflict between use and exchange values, and rallying point for progressive claims to the right to the city. Recent critiques, however, warn of its contribution to gentrification and displacement. The use/exchange value binary no longer as useful an analytic as it once was, geographers need to better understand UAâs contradictory relations to capital, particularly in the neoliberal Sustainable City. To this end, I bring together feminist theorizations of social reproduction, Bourdieuâs âspecies of capitalâ, and critical geographies of race to help demystify UAâs entanglement in processes of eco-gentrification. In this primarily theoretical contribution, I argue that concrete labor embedded in household-scale UAâa socially reproductive practiceâbecomes cultural capital that a Sustainable Cityâs growth coalition in turn valorizes as symbolic sustainability capital used to extract rent and burnish the cityâs brand at larger scales. The valorization of UA occurs, by necessity, in a variegated manner; spatial agglomerations of UA and the eco-habitus required for its misrecognition as sustainability capital arise as a function of the interplay between rent gaps and racialized othering. I assert that eco-gentrification is not only a contradiction emerging from an urban sustainability fix, but is central to how racial capitalism functions through green urbanization. Like its contribution to eco-gentrification, I conclude, UAâs emancipatory potential is also spatially variegated