Food, city and territory: some reflections from a socio-spatial point of view

The purpose of this article is to highlight the relationship among food, city and space by adopting a social sciences viewpoint. Since the 1990s, not only in sociology but in the social sciences in general, the level of attention given to the role played by space in the production of social phenomena has increased. To describe this trend, certain authors have coined the expression “spatial turn”, which is analogous to the “linguistic turn” that influenced poststructuralist sociology (Warf and Arias 2009; Löw and Steets 2014). The definition of urban food policies, like production of a food product and distribution, the fact that it is more or less accessible and generates surpluses, and its transformation through an industrial process or its use for a domestic recipe, are processes that provide a good example of the interaction among biophysical, economic and socio-cultural aspects, in which all the geographical and climatic characteristics of the places where these processes take place play a role, as do cultural influences, the skills of the actors, and their power relations. In this article, the associations among food, city, and space are shown through the presentation of examples, highlighting certain of the principal topics, and clarifying how the numerous issues relating to food can lead to problems of a micro, mesa or macro nature. In our conclusions, we will stress the value added of the specialist perspective in the study of issues relating to food.