Research & reports

Berliner, Susanne · · Germany

An ethnographic inquiry into a "refugees welcome" community garden in Germany offers power-critical reflections on social encounters, participation, inequalities, and the dynamics between 'the host' and 'the newcomer' in home-making. The study enhances understanding of how people with refugee biographies shape their surroundings and how communities navigate social heterogeneity. Specifically, it highlights inequalities and power dynamics within the context of home-making.

Mesut YILDIZ · Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems · Turkey (İzmir)

The Kadifekale Urban Orchard in İzmir, Turkey, was analyzed as a qualitative case study, showing that municipally supported urban agriculture functions as a relational public infrastructure reconfiguring women's labor, care responsibilities, solidarity networks, and public visibility. Based on one year of participant observation, in-depth interviews with 96 women, and focus group discussions, findings revealed women use the orchard to create space outside the home, build solidaristic ties, and increase public visibility. However, the case also revealed a persistent governance tension: municipal support is indispensable, yet women's influence over strategic decisions remains limited.

Dennis Raphael · Policy Press eBooks · Canada; United Kingdom

This chapter documents the growth of charitable non-governmental responses to food insecurity in Canada and the UK, including food banks, food diversion schemes, and community gardens. It is shown that these responses are problematic as they fail to address the economic and political causes of food insecurity. Further failures associated with charitable responses include the experience of stigma and degradation by food bank users and the promulgation of the belief that food insecurity is being addressed.

Caroline Verfuerth, Angelina Sanderson Bellamy, Barbora Adlerová, Amy Dutton · Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems · United Kingdom

Failures of the current food system are described as sitting at the core of multiple overlapping crises, shaping both consumption choices and food production, with low-income households disproportionately affected—their food security and access to healthy, sustainable food impacted as a result. Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is framed as a bottom-up response toward agri-food system transformation, an alternative food system built on locally sold, agroecologically grown food rooted in social values, and, alongside other food citizenship movements and alternative food networks (AFNs), driven by a vision of a democratic, socially and economically just, environmentally sustainable food system. Yet low-income households are underrepresented in the CSA community. This paper reports findings from a co-produced intervention between the research team, four CSA farms in Wales, United Kingdom, and two food aid partners, seeking ways to improve CSA membership accessibility for food-insecure households: 38 households received a weekly vegetable bag for two to four months, and 16 household members were interviewed at the project's start and at the end of the harvest season. Using a food well-being framework, the study found that CSA membership holistically improved food well-being by strengthening producer-consumer relationships, increasing availability of healthy foods, helping people care for their own and their families' well-being, and building place-based food capability and literacy—results the authors use to support calls for prioritizing food well-being interventions to benefit financially excluded, food-insecure households within localized AFNs.

Maddy Power · Policy Press eBooks · United Kingdom

In the UK, food banks and other food aid providers expanded significantly in parallel with welfare reforms and benefit cuts initiated after 2010. This contemporary phenomenon occurred within a historical context of long-standing community-based responses to poverty and hunger in the UK.

Chiara Certomà, Martin Sondermann, Susan Noori · Manchester University Press eBooks · Europe

This chapter critically analyzes the relationship between urban gardening and socio-spatial justice, exploring whether and how urban gardening practices can tackle social and spatial injustices. Urban gardening points out less visible sides of urban governance and planning, unveiling different forms of power, dominance, and resistance to the unequal distribution of benefits and burdens in space. The analysis questions the contradictions in the constitution of urban spaces and their capability to mitigate material, political, and social exclusions, unfairness, and inequalities.