Recently, there’s been a convergence of food sustainability and map-making among food activist’s networks, researchers, academic and artists. In this article, I look to uncover how innovative mapping techniques are emerging as a central tool for engaging with, understanding, and potentially reshaping our food systems.
There is no doubt that our rapidly expanding global cities are becoming the default habitat for the majority of humans and there is an increasingly urgent need to decipher the intricate tapestry of how we might successfully feed ourselves as cities continue their exponential growth.
There is a sharper focus on questions about food sustainability and what alternatives we might have to adopt in the very near future. These adaptations may be forced upon us from within a crisis, or we may make the decision to move to a more sustainable food economy while we still have the capacity to change. Certain communities and individuals are already asking questions and seeking, if not demanding, alternatives to the current economic system that produces abundance but seems to have no answer to food poverty set against a backdrop of mountainous waste.
Despite food’s significance to planning, culture and community welfare, these systems remain under-discussed and poorly understood. While we meticulously map infrastructure like roads and buildings, food production and supply chains often elude scrutiny. Consequently, consumers are left in the dark and ill-informed regarding the origins, production methods and stakeholders involved in how food arrives at their table.
This year sees the publication of ‘Urban Food Mapping: Making Visible the Edible City’, a book I have edited (along with Katrin Bohn) on how we need to make food mapping a central response within food crises.
Urban Agriculture – more than a city of allotments
Yet communities and individuals are increasingly asking questions about food systems and are keen to seek alternatives. One option is for local urban neighbourhoods to become productive spaces used for growing food, a practice often called urban agriculture (UA). UA seeks to use multiple urban spaces to produce food. While we may jump to thoughts of a city full of urban allotments, the practice is actually very diverse, with historical roots as well as encompassing technical innovations such as hydroponic indoor growing.
Recently, the organisation Incredible Edible launched a campaign called the Right to Grow, which seeks to change the rules, giving people the right to grow food on suitable public sector land. Red tape and complex leases often stop communities from making good use of public land, plus it’s often really difficult to find out where this unloved land is, as there are no available maps that indicate where communities might start to grow food.
The Right to Grow campaign would require local authorities to maintain a free accessible map of all public land that is suitable for community cultivation or wildlife projects. They would also need to make it straightforward for community groups to secure free leases to cultivate the land and allow those groups to bid for the land should the authority decide to sell it.
From concrete jungle to garden haven
Let’s consider Brighton, our local city. One could rightly ask, “What are the local possibilities for change and what would central Brighton look like as an “Edible City?”
Can we envision it as a city of healthy soil, thriving plants and productive agriculture? A city where open spaces, vacant warehouses and rooftops accommodate full to the brim greenhouses, productive vegetable gardens, buzzing beehives and thriving contented livestock?
Recently, in collaboration with the University of Brighton, I have begun to map Brighton to produce an image of the city as a ‘Garden of Edible Ideas’. This map builds on previous projects in Newcastle, Bishop Auckland, Peterborough, and London, for example.
The results of these mapping practices may surprise readers, showing that cities have an extraordinary hidden spatial capacity to produce food; rooftops, green open public spaces, such as those around housing estates, empty lots awaiting development, back gardens, and more. There is a lot of quantitative data here that might interest readers, showing that small-scale intensive growing can produce very high yields, although this largely doesn’t need to be shown as a map.
Returning to the opening statement regarding the convergence of food activism and mapping, maps, when considered as an image, have the potential to unveil what a productive city might look like. As we barrel headlong into a climate emergency, this unveiling speaks to the imagination about the shifts that might be required to create equitable, resilient, and sustainable cities.
Brighton, an edible city?
The image shows central Brighton as a city full of food gardens. This is not an attempt at urban self-sufficiency but more a demand for cities to take responsibility for the food they can produce and then import the rest.
Using the map, imagine walking from Churchill Square shopping centre, having visited the large roof farm, and continuing down North Street, passing the indoor farms and roof gardens on the old NCP car park. As you cut through Church Street, these now pedestrianised side streets are fragrant walk-through productive gardens, all connected to form a continuous green corridor (without cars).
From the map, we can picture how we might celebrate the urban honey harvest in August or the almost daily harvests of salad and fish from hydroponic and aquaponic farms. There are also urban eggs, and we remember the year that wheat was grown in front of the Brighton Pavilion, along Victoria Gardens to St Peter’s Church.
Such practices will bring new design concepts and planning regulations as we wake up to the economic, social, and environmental benefits of zero-mile food. What urban food mapping and growing also offer is a way out of the complexity of our food system, by bringing home the relationship between landscape, everyday food production, and neighbourly people.
Emily Cockayne, in her book, ‘Cheek by Jowl: A History of Neighbours’, puts this nicely, reminding us that “the word ‘neighbour’ originally meant ‘the man who tills the next piece of ground to mine’”.
Charting a sustainable course
I am not the only one mapping: the nascent concept of urban food mapping is taking root in communities across the UK and well beyond. Not just mapping urban agriculture but also other green solutions such as nature-based solutions for cities. The map, it seems, can be freed from the task of merely navigating us from home to car parks, finding coffee shops, or cheap hotels. It can be a transformative and radical image that can ignite change and reify our imaginative demand not just for a right to space and a right to grow, but for a right to control our food system.
