Making sense of urban food festivals: cultural regeneration, disorder and hospitable cities

This article examines urban food festivals, and in doing so it carries out a case study of Nottingham’s Food and Drink Festival (NFDF). It contends that such festivals need to be understood in relation to local contexts, such as the reputation for alcohol-related disorder associated with Nottingham’s night-time economy. Rather than being used to attract tourism, NFDF was primarily directed at existing residents of Nottingham, where it sought to produce particular kinds of guests who would be able to invest in the city’s wider regeneration. Here, the article draws on recent academic work on hospitality in demonstrating how NFDF attempted to rebrand the city centre as a more hospitable place. It concludes by showing how visitors to NFDF exhibited a sense of generosity and pride, and argues that the meaning of urban food festivals cannot therefore simply be reduced to the logic of neoliberal governance

The Incompatibility of Economic Development Policies for Rural Areas in England

Four different and incommensurate economic development policies currently pertain in rural England: the pursuit of productivity, well-being, endogenous development and income support. This paper describes these policies as they pertained in 2007 in different Government Departments and evaluates salient changes in Departmental positions in respect of these policies since that time to the end of 2009. The impacts of these policies, and their shifts, on rural areas are assessed.

Beyond ‘food apartheid’: Civil society and the politicization of hunger in New Haven, Connecticut

This article illuminates the extent of community-based activism around food justice in New Haven, CT. Data was gathered through 28 in-depth interviews with civil society actors and participant observation across the food policy and urban agriculture (UA) sectors in the Fall of 2018. The paper traces the challenges that the sector faces in advancing a more democratic food agenda even when the municipality is relatively open to activist claims. Three key findings are identified. (a) Following in the American communitarian tradition, civil society groups working at grassroots level largely set the agenda for tackling food hunger in New Haven. That agenda, however, is broad-based and contradictory, incorporating initiatives aimed at addressing food insecurity and radical advocacy for food justice. (b) The efforts of civil society actors are structurally constrained by their dependence on philanthropic or grant based funding, on the one hand, and the symbolic rather than substantive support afforded by a fiscally weak, resource-poor municipality, on the other. (c) There is an inherent tension within the civil society sector arising from the disjuncture between strategies that have the effect of depoliticizing hunger and those that increasingly demand a repoliticization of hunger. These issues have been brought into sharper relief in light of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) mobilization, which, in concert, expose deep fissures in American society