Unpacking the new urban food agenda: The changing dynamics of global governance in the urban age

Abstract

Moving beyond the methodological ‘cityism’ of urban food scholarship, in this paper we focus on the ways in which the ‘urban’ is conceptualised, utilised and implicated in post-Quito development discourse. The analysis of international policy documents and data collected through interviews with stakeholders from prominent global organisations highlights the pervasiveness of globally orientated narratives of interconnected, multiscalar food governance that draw upon socio-technical agendas of ‘smart’, ‘territorially integrated’ and ‘resilient’ ideology of capitalised urbanisation. To counteract the tendency of these narratives to reduce complex metabolic processes to mere indicators and targets there is a need for a new research and policy agenda that takes account of urban agencies, inequities of power and the politics of knowledge that permeate multilevel food governance. As we conclude, the problematisation of the ‘urban’ and the contested emergence of smart (food) urbanisms require urgent attention to explicate strategies for a more polycentric and plurivocal food system governance.