What does it mean to nurture ‘good intentions between city and country’? Performances of rural–urban relations in community-supported agriculture

Urban Farm DB summary

A 2025 paper examines how community supported agriculture (CSA) performs and shapes rural-urban relations, based on four CSA initiatives in Germany. It finds that CSA does not automatically nurture "good intentions" between the urban and the rural, but can foster material solidarity and mutual understanding between urban consumers and rural producers. At the same time, it finds that hierarchical rural-urban relations, or rural/urban autonomy, may also be enacted within CSA, and that CSA can in some cases deepen processes of alienation between the rural and the urban, arguing that investigations of rural-urban relations in CSA must go beyond assessing producer-consumer relations alone.