TENDING CULTURAL LANDSCAPES AND FOOD CITIZENSHIP IN TORONTO'S COMMUNITY GARDENS*

ABSTRACT. Scattered throughout the city of Toronto are more than no community gardens, sites of place‐based politics connected to the community food‐security movement. The gardens, spaces where passions for plants and food are shared, reflect the city's shifting cultural landscape and represent an everyday activity that is imbued with multiple meanings. Toronto's community food‐security movement uses gardens as one strategy to regenerate the local food system and provide access to healthy, affordable food. Three garden case studies expand on the complexities of “food citizenship,” illustrating the importance of that concept to notions of food security. The gardens reveal the role gardeners play in transforming urban spaces, the complex network of organizations working cooperatively and in partnership to implement these projects, and the way in which social and cultural pluralism are shaping the urban landscape.     

Alternative framings of alternative food: A typology of practice

‘Alternative’ food initiatives (AFIs) are often interpreted as political movements, constructed as defiant alternatives to industrial agri‐food relations, and represented by a performance of singular alterity. This understanding of alternative collapses into a mere politics of identity, criticised in the literature for its oversimplification. In this paper, we utilise an established methodological framework that retains AFI diversity, to create a novel typology of AFIs by diverse and embodied practice rather than animating political project. In doing so, we point to the political potential for AFIs to ‘do’ food otherwise and make different worlds.     

Taking Stock: Farmers' reflections on the deregulation of Australian dairying

On 1 July 2000 significant changes to the regulation of Australian dairying came into effect. These changes eliminated subsidies to milk producers and removed barriers to the inter-State trade of dairy products. Victoria's dairy industry group was a powerful proponent of deregulation, because of the comparative advantage that the State's farmers have in production relative to Australia's other milk producers. However, the deregulation of the dairy industry was contested stridently by many stakeholders, particularly farmers and their representative groups in States other than Victoria. Even within Victoria some farmers were equivocal and some were opposed to the regulatory changes. This paper draws on interviews with informants in the Victorian dairy sector to reveal responses to the regulatory changes. The interviews indicate that opinion was divided before deregulation and remains so. The debate was largely between those who saw the regulatory changes as 'inevitable', some of whom thought it would be a 'good thing' and others who accepted, grudgingly, that it was simply going to happen, and those who thought there had to be alternatives that would avoid the expected adverse consequences.     

RESTRUCTURING AMERICA'S DAIRY FARMS*

ABSTRACT. As the number of American dairy farms rapidly declines, the character and spatial distribution of the remaining farms is undergoing fundamental change. Concentrating on an examination of both the smallest commercial farms (with 10–49 cows) and the largest dairy operations (with at least 500 cows), this study shows that megadairies are spreading from California into Idaho and America's traditional dairy belt, while Amish farmers are growing in prominence among those milking fewer than fifty cows. Although the greatest proportional declines in dairy farms have been among the smaller operations, average farm size throughout much of the nation remains well below 100 cows. Within a decade Amish farmers may operate one‐fifth of the nation's dairy farms as they expand across the traditional dairy belt, and 500‐cow dairies in the Midwest will outnumber those in California.     

Smell this: Singapore's curry day and visceral citizenship

In August 2011, many Singaporean citizens grabbed their cooking pots and used the city‐state's national obsession with food to express growing dissatisfaction with immigration and integration trends. The ‘cook and share a pot of curry’ event—a local response to Chinese newcomers complaining about the smell of their Indian Singaporean neighbours’ food—is significant for its use of smell to catalyse a collective citizen reaction and for its reliance on contemporary social media. By analysing this event, we intend to (1) conceptualize the role of smell and viscera in framing citizenship; (2) understand how smells shed light on the city‐state's contemporary ethnic politics and sense of national identity; and (3) reframe the significance of curry day as an expression of visceral citizenship that complements how the state frames Singaporean citizenry. We maintain that curry day sheds light on a specific dimension of Singaporean citizenship, as it uses smell, viscera and embodied activism to mobilize against rationalistic state‐defined distinctions between local and international concerns, economic objectives and social cohesion, inter‐racial harmony and national identity.     

Implementing the Slow Life in Southwest Ireland: A Case Study of Clonakilty and Local Food

Cittaslow is an Italian‐based global network of towns and cities that grew out of the Slow Food movement. Cittaslow and Slow Food reject the standardization of culture and taste that has accompanied globalization. Instead, they focus on strategies that foster a sense of place that is derived from a town's unique environmental and cultural setting: its terroir. Clonakilty, a small town located thirty miles southwest of Cork, is Ireland's first and only “slow city.” This paper examines how a sense of place is conveyed in the town's restaurants through the selection of menu items and locally produced food. The results indicate that independently owned restaurants are more likely to embrace Cittaslow's efforts at conveying a sense of place than restaurants in hotels and pubs. Nearly all of the town's restaurants serving Irish food use locally available food suppliers.     

Transnational Migration and the Gender Politics of Scale: Indonesian Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia

Recent research has begun to explore the dynamics of transnational migration from a feminist perspective, and studies of migrant domestic workers have played a prominent role in pushing forward this work. Emerging simultaneously, but largely separately, are explicit debates within geography about the politics of scale, the social construction of scale, and the gender dimensions of scale. This article develops an analysis of the gender politics of the production of scale, specifically, the ‘transnationalisation’ of Indonesian activist approaches to overseas migrant domestic workers' issues. Based on fieldwork in an Indonesian community in West Java that has recently become a sending area for migrants to Saudi Arabia and interviews with activists representing Indonesian migrant women, the article examines the various gender‐specific ways in which migrant women's rights activists construct and deploy the scales of the body, the nation and the transnational. It argues that activist approaches to migrant domestic workers' rights and the ways in which activists mobilise migrant women's narratives represent sophisticated feminist theoretical approaches to scale. By identifying and exploring the scale theory embedded in activist strategies, the analysis highlights the imbrication of feminist theory with practice, and underscores activists' agency in producing the meanings of specific scales. In so doing, the article is aimed more broadly at elaborating the ambivalent relationship between feminist activism/theory and transnationalism.     

MAKING SUSTAINABLE CREATIVE/CULTURAL SPACE IN SHANGHAI AND SINGAPORE*

ABSTRACT. Shanghai and Singapore are two economically vibrant Asian cities that have recently adopted creative/cultural economy strategies. In this article I examine new spatial expressions of cultural and economic interests in the two cities: state‐vaunted cultural edifices and organically evolved cultural spaces. I discuss the simultaneous precariousness and sustainability of these spaces, focusing on Shanghai's Grand Theatre and Moganshan Lu and on Singapore's Esplanade—Theatres by the Bay and Wessex Estate. Their cultural sustainability is understood as their ability to support the development of indigenous content and local idioms in artistic work. Their social sustainability is examined in terms of the social inclusion and community bonds they engender; environmental sustainability refers to the articulation with the language of existing urban forms and the preservation of or improvements to the landscape. Although both Shanghai and Singapore demonstrate simultaneous precariousness and sustainability, Singapore's city‐state status places greater pressure on it to ensure sustainability than does Shanghai, within a much larger China in which Beijing serves as the cultural hearth while Shanghai remains essentially a commercial center.     

Developing geographic information infrastructures: the role of access policies

Within societies, information availability is a key issue affecting society's well‐being. For geographic information, a geographic information infrastructure (GII) facilitates availability and access to geographic information for all levels of government, the commercial sector, the non‐profit sector, academia, and ordinary citizens. Although the importance of access policies in the development of a GII is commonly understood, research that has assessed the impact of access policies on this development is scant. This article adds this perspective. Based on information acquired from case‐study and literature research, the author argues that open‐access policies do not always promote GII development and in specific instances are counter‐productive. These findings may explain why many nations still adhere to cost‐recovery policies instead of following access policies recommended by research. The article provides alternatives for changing current policies into new access policies that promote GII development.     

Neoliberal subjectivities or a politics of the possible? Reading for difference in alternative food networks

Recent research on alternative food networks has highlighted the centrality of place-embeddedness as a strategy in constructing alternatives to conventional agri-industrial food systems, and has illustrated the political nature of these strategic localisms. Recently, critical human geographers and sociologists have drawn on relational theory to criticise the localism of alternative food networks as representing a politics of place which is unreflexive or defensive. Furthermore, some readings of alternative food networks argue that they reproduce the very neoliberal subjectivities that they seek to oppose. This article argues that agri-food scholars should be aware of the ways in which their readings of alternative food networks can guide and reproduce alternative food network practice. Drawing on Gibson-Graham's technique of 'reading for difference', I argue for a reading of alternative food networks that sees difference beyond the discursive field of neoliberalism. The article explores recent debates around governmentality as the mechanism through which neoliberal subjectivities are reproduced, and draws on a preliminary discussion of the alternative food network practice of the 100 Mile Diet in order to illustrate the arguments made .     

Mining History: Mobilizing The Past In Struggles Over Mineral Extraction In Peru

This paper examines how the past is constructed and mobilized within contemporary Peruvian mining politics. Beginning with an exploration of tensions existing within the mining industry's relationship to its history, I analyze how mining proponents have sought to both naturalize today's mining expansion by locating it within a national history of extraction, while also working to break free from certain negative aspects of the industry's past. The paper then examines how the past is remembered and invoked within the context of on‐the‐ground struggles at a large‐scale gold mine in the region of Ancash. I address the contradictory ways in which local history is constructed in these struggles and document how memories of past experiences with mining inform how area residents understand and critique the “new” mining economy. This paper underscores the need to understand the complicated, selective, and often‐contradictory ways in which the past is made present in extractive industry conflicts.     

Land,Labor, and Rural Development: Analyzing Participation in India's Village Dairy Cooperatives

Livestock-based livelihoods are currently being promoted by international development agencies as part of global efforts to combat poverty. India's dairy development program, organized around village cooperatives, has become an important model for such efforts. This article aims to identify household characteristics that influence membership in India's rural dairy cooperatives by comparing two villages representing different degrees of success. Utilizing logistic regression methods, data collected through a comprehensive survey of all households in the two villages are analyzed to examine (1) how variables describing animal ownership, agricultural attributes, and household labor availability contribute to explaining membership in the dairy cooperative; and (2) whether factors influencing membership differ across the two villages. Our results indicate that although agricultural property ownership influences cooperative membership in both villages, the kind of dairy animal used and labor utilized for dairying work also have a significant and context-specific effect on household participation.     

Tropicality,the unruly Atlantic and social utopias: the French explorer Henri Coudreau (1859 − 1899)

This paper addresses the works of Henri Coudreau, a little‐known French explorer of Guiana and Amazonia who was later forgotten by the ‘heroic’ histories of exploration because of his unruliness and nonconformist attitudes. Drawing on the literature of postcolonialism and tropicality as well as on recent studies of anti‐colonialist geographies, I address for the first time Coudreau's geography from the perspective of anarchist and critical thinking. My main argument is that Coudreau's work is a further example of the complexity and heterogeneity of the European intellectual field during the imperial age. Despite having come of age intellectually among all the European racist and ethnocentric prejudices of his day, Coudreau developed a different outlook thanks to two factors, viz., his personal experience in living for years with the indigenous communities of Amazonia, and his exposure to anarchist anti‐colonialist ideas through his collaboration with Elisée Reclus. Coudreau's tropical utopia of an independent Amazonia, and his endorsement of the stateless nature of local communities, ran counter to French imperial politics, occasioning Coudreau's dismissal from the French administration and his professional exile in Brazil at the time of the Franco‐Brazilian border dispute (1897?1900).     

Emerging Memorial Landscapes of Labor Conflict in the Cotton Textile South

While research into the formation of memorial landscapes in the American South has focused on those resulting from racial conflicts, a new landscape memorializing labor conflict and class consciousness is also emerging in the region's textile‐producing Piedmont. This memorialization poses significant challenges to dominant regional discourses of economic development and class mutuality in a region in which labor organizing and radical politics remain anathema. This paper examines this emerging landscape for what it can tell us about class relations in the region and the process by which memorial landscapes are formed.     

TRACEABILITY: TRACKING AND PRIVACY IN THE FOOD SYSTEM*

ABSTRACT. Lapses in food safety have spurred development of governmental traceability systems to track every stage of food production as part of a standardized information base. These systems form part of national and international government efforts to reduce food‐security risks and control food‐related disease outbreaks. The European Union, the United States, Japan, and Canada have traceability requirements now in various stages of implementation, as does the Codex Alimentarius. Traceability regulations require that, from farm (plant or animal) to fork, foods have a clear, verifiable record that tracks through all stages of cultivation, production, supplying, transporting, processing, and distribution. Traceability implies complete information control over the geography of one of life's most essential acts, eating. The apparent object of traceability is food, which seems to imply that human tracking is not part of the process, but food does not move on its own. Those people responsible at each stage for food transfers and transactions may go into the traceability database, making their locations part of the record and supporting precise monitoring of labor performance, consumer buying patterns, and ownership and management strategies. Given these capabilities, the development of public‐sector traceability systems demands careful consideration. Owners, especially large exporters and importers, are likely to see their needs and fears shape the system. The food workforce may well bear tracking's brunt. Consumers, the presumed beneficiaries of the systems, will probably resist direct incorporation (and full benefit), favoring their privacy over their safety.     

KITCHENSPACE,FIESTAS, AND CULTURAL REPRODUCTION IN MEXICAN HOUSE‐LOT GARDENS*

ABSTRACT. The house‐lot garden in central Mexico is gendered space where changing cultural identities are negotiated, re‐created, and celebrated as “tradition” is continually redefined. No clear boundary separates the kitchen from the house‐lot garden or the private space of the household from the semipublic space of the community. During collective food preparation for religious fiestas, gendered reciprocity networks strengthen community relations and foster alliances between traditional neighborhoods and between communities in the region. At the intersection of everyday life and fiestas, food‐preparation spaces, or kitchenspaces, in the house‐lot garden are fertile areas in which to explore the cultural reproduction of nature‐society relations. They are vital to understanding gender, place, and culture in this region and represent people's symbolic connection with the land in increasingly urban contexts. This article analyzes the sense of place that Mexican women derive from their house‐lot gardens.     

Islam in Sydney: Contesting the Discourse of Absence

Non‐recognition is one of the key modes of re‐inscribing the Other. In Sydney's anti‐mosque politics this form of oppression was manifest as a discourse of absence. Sydney Muslims have been portrayed as non‐existent within, or external to, localities where mosques have been proposed. In these circumstances claims to belonging and citizenship by Sydney Muslims have been fundamentally injured. Census data are used to challenge the historical and contemporary constructions of Islamic absence in Australia. Sydney Muslims are a culturally diverse and somewhat disparate faith group. They are increasingly present in areas outside of the initial zones of residential focus. This diversity and dynamism is a substantial challenge for Islamic community building (Ummah) in Sydney and presents rich foci for further research.     

WATER RESOURCES OF THE CHUNCHUCMIL MAYA*

ABSTRACT. Chunchucmil, on the Yucatán Peninsula, was densely populated in the Maya Late Classic period (ca. a.d. 550–830), even though it depends principally on groundwater. In the 1990s, hydrologic investigations were conducted to determine whether groundwater could have met domestic and agricultural needs. The region's groundwater is near the surface and is influenced by sea‐level fluctuations; however, geochemical analysis revealed that groundwater quality is not affected by mixing with seawater. The potential exists for high and spatially extensive nitrate contamination in this karstic area, yet water‐quality analyses revealed only moderate levels of nitrate in the groundwater. Agricultural limitations are imposed by chloride, total dissolved solids, and salinity, as indicated by electrical conductivity; domestic water use is limited by the presence of nitrate, sulfate, and chloride. Throughflow in the ring of cenotes (sinkholes) around the Chicxulub impact crater may explain the movement and spatial distribution of water‐quality constituents in Chunchucmil's groundwater.     

Landscape persistence and stakeholder perspectives: The case of Romania's Carpathians

The traditional use of land for food, fuel and wood created cultural landscapes, which are threatened across Europe. The factors which contributed to their endangerment need to be identified to achieve effective preservation of such landscapes. The aim of our study was to identify landscapes with historical persistence in a GIS-based comparative analysis of historical and contemporary maps and the most prominent causes of the past landscape changes, based on stakeholders' perspective. We considered a case study in Romania's Carpathians. Three major land cover types were extracted from maps dating from 1912, 1980 and 2009: built-up, pastures and forests. The historical persistence of all land cover types was poor (<20%) and profound changes were quantitatively confirmed. Large, compact patches of unchanged forests were located in the neighbourhood of a national park. The persistent pastures were situated close to human settlements, and their preservation can be related to local traditional agro-silvo-pastoral management. Although the built-up area has increased over time, the corresponding surfaces are small and consist of scattered patches located around historical monuments. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to investigate stakeholders' perspective. Using cluster analysis five prominent causes of past landscape changes are identified: 'increasing tourism', 'land tenure and social changes', 'land-use intensification', 'post-communist transition', and 'foreign investments'. We join the results of the GIS analysis with those from stakeholders' perspective to gain more insights into the landscape changes. This research offers important information that could be used for the further planning of these valuable cultural landscapes in order to avoid potential conflicts and degradation.     

Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement: Place,Memory, and Conflict

Produced over the past decade, monuments and museums dedicated to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s have desegregated America's memorial landscape. Tracing a broad arc across the US South, the material elements of this landscape — historic markers, monuments, parks, registered buildings, and museums — present a distinct challenge to representations of an elite, white American past. This challenge, however, is offered in a distinctly gendered manner, inasmuch as the role of women in organizing and leading the movement is obscured. Further, the historical narratives concretized at these sites are mediated by conventions associated with civil rights historiography and the tourism development industry. The result is a complex, sometimes ironic landscape. Via the narratives they embed and the crowds they attract, these landscapes are co‐constitutive with contemporary politics of representing the past in the United States. This paper offers an overview of current memorial practices and representations of the Civil Rights movement found at the country's major memorial landscapes.