Thinking food relationally: Reflections on systemic and relational perspectives for mapping socio-material interactions, translocal networks and complex relationships within food systems and food supply chains

Keywords: food systems, relational thinking, urban food mapping, translocal food networks
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 21

Abstract

This contribution reflects on a synergy of methods implemented in two urban planning seminars designed to facilitate the understanding of food as a metabolic process involving multiple materialities, translocal networks and predominantly asymmetric relationships. Through a collection of maps produced by architecture and planning students, I aim to articulate how the use of follow-the-thing approaches, relational perspectives such as systems thinking and ANT, and the notion of urban metabolism can enable the unveiling of hidden socio-spatial relations, socio-material entanglements embodying various forms of injustice, and the global reach of food supply chains. The first seminar focused on the canteen of the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus, Germany, and explored its interactions with the university campus, the city of Cottbus and the Lausitz region, as well as its possible role in regionalising its food system. The second seminar looked at conventional foodstuffs, available in large quantities and at low prices in supermarkets, and the status quo of their supply chains. This second seminar had students follow and map the path of products from origin to disposal, uncovering intersections with gender, ecology, land use conflicts, politics, cultural identity, and power relations in the process. Methodological frameworks that include metabolic readings of food systems, relational thinking perspectives, spatial analyses, and various mapping techniques, offer a way to relate and visualise materialities associated with food, such as people, machines, infrastructures, buildings, urban environments and their surrounding and global hinterlands, to the non-material conditions shaping relationships and interacting with them at different levels.