Exploring Food and Urbanism

Susan Parham, Matthew Hardy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000440751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Exploring Food and Urbanism looks at the ways food and cities interconnect in a diversity of places across the globe. The book's focus moves from transformations in feeding the city and its hinterland in Istanbul, Turkey, through neighbourhoods struggling with food access in Blantyre, Malawi, to the challenges in making convivial public food spaces in Cairo. It explores everyday buying practices in Islamabad food markets that reflect wider changes in food cultures in Pakistan. The possibilities for growing food in suburban Cape Town in South Africa are tested, while possibilities for sharing meals using online methods to bring cooks and eaters together are considered across the Netherlands.

This edited volume makes clear that globally food is critical to sustainable urbanism everywhere across cities from kitchens to gardens, food markets, food shops, streets, squares, neighbourhoods, cities, suburbs, and hinterlands. It shows how food cultures, practices, and economics are closely intertwined with how places are planned and designed even if this is not always fully recognised. The editors of the book conclude that food can and should contribute to responding to the challenges presented by the worsening climate emergency through a focus on sustainable urbanism.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Urbanism.

Feeding the global city: urban transformation and urban food supply chain in 21st-century Istanbul

Candan Turkkan

ABSTRACT
This article focuses on the effects of urban transformation on the urban food supply chain in 21st century Istanbul. The article begins with a discussion on the particularities of the urban transformation that has shaped the city since the 1980s, emphasizing tendencies that are relevant to food consumption and supply patterns and practices. Next, 6 categories of fresh fruits and vegetables (FFVs), provisioning agents (mixed/foreign-capital supermarkets, domestic-capital supermarkets, bazaars, local suppliers, and urban and semi-urban/peripheral farmers, internet or store-based alternative food networks) are analyzed in terms of their perception of urban transformation and various challenges it poses. The article concludes with an assessment of the changes in the city’s food supply chain in light of provisioning agents’ responses to the urban transformation as a force that either enables them compete more successfully and expand their operations or pushes them to contract or even leave the provisioning sector completely.

Introduction

In the years following the 1980 coup, Istanbul began to undergo a series of major transformations that altered the city’s topography and demography. While urban expansion pushed the city’s peripheries further into hinterlands that once supplied the city with fresh fruits and vegetables (FFVs), relatively secluded Bosporus villages were integrated into the “city proper” with expressways. Laws, regulations, and decrees, first initiated by the junta and extended by successive governments, provided legal foundations and gave tax subsidies for the construction of the higher skyscrapers that fill Istanbul’s skyline today. On top of all, a major earthquake in 1999 devastated the country’s most industrialized region and created political, economic, and legal opportunities for many investors and politicians alike to bulldoze the loosely settled older neighborhoods, kick their relatively lower-class residents to the city’s peripheries, and to construct luxury residences in their stead.

While these changes have been well researched and documented by scholars from various disciplines, their effects on Istanbul’s provisioning remains understudied. Literature on urban provisioning generally focuses on effects of liberalization and internationalization on the provisioning agents in the post-1980 period (Kaldijan 2004; Atasoy 2013; Yenal 2014d; Yenal and Yenal 1993; Demirbaş 1993). However, urban transformation and its effects on the urban food supply chain are usually ignored – even when the analysis contains variables that may be directly affected by this urban transformation, such as consumer profile (Demirci Orel and Nakiboglu 2004), consumer risk perception (Akpinar et al. 2011), the relationship between supermarkets and intermediaries (Bignebat, Koc, and Lemeilleur 2009), and the relationship between supermarkets and producers (Codron et al. 2004). In contrast, studies on urban transformation rarely include food. If or when they do, it is primarily through an analysis of globalization, with an emphasis on how urban transformation and globalization have created new stratifications in the city, and changed class dynamics and signs of distinction (Keyder 2005, 2010, 1999c) (Keyder and Öncü 1994, 1993) (Öncü 1999; Öncü and Weyland 1997). Restaurants and eating-out patterns and practices, for example, have been marked as indicators and analyzed as changing consumption patterns (Chase 1994; Yenal and Kubiena 2016). Yet, again, these studies fall short of providing either a comprehensive analysis of the effects of urban transformation on the urban food supply chain or a close-up analysis of various agents of the urban food supply chain.

This article aims to fill this gap. Building on both the urban transformation and the urban provisioning literatures, the article traces the effects of 21st century urban transformation in the city’s food supply chain. By urban transformation, I mean “urban regeneration or renewal efforts at the older historic urban centers that have become heavily populated by the urban poor” (Türkün 2011, 62). These efforts may include renovation projects that may pay attention to community needs (see, e.g., (Akkar Ercan, 2010)) as well rebuilding projects that may destroy informally settled gecekondu¹ neighborhoods, displace their residents to the city’s peripheries, and reorganize the city center to attract potential investors and high income social groups (Erdi Lelandais 2014). Though dynamics of urban transformation change from neighborhood to neighborhood due to differences in demographics, legal status of land, urban land markets and housing markets, consequences of the transformations tend to be gentrification and the emergence of homogenized, securitized, private spaces in the city proper (Kuyucu and Ünsal 2010; Uzun 2003). Accordingly, new residents of these newly transformed neighborhoods have different food consumption patterns and preferences.

As I hope to show, these differences in consumption patterns are not only factors of ethnicity and class. Rather, the ways in which food, particularly FFVs, are being supplied to these neighborhoods have been altered due to urban transformation. Certain provisioning agents, like bostancıs, mobile and bazaar vendors and food production, consumption, and exchange spaces, like bazaars, bostans, and manavs have been either reduced in size and numbers, or in some cases, completely eradicated. Those remaining have had to adopt to a quickly changing cityscape, as well as steep competition among food suppliers. Plus, new laws regulating the transfer and sale of FFVs, increasing use of electronic weighing, recording, and barcoding systems that enable producer-to-consumer tracking have also brought many food exchange spaces and suppliers under the public spotlight. These pressures on the supplier side have added onto the changes in cityscape and demographics, thus rearticulating Istanbul’s relationship to food.

In addition to filling the gap in the literature, I hope that focusing on the effects of urban transformation on the urban food supply chain will enable us to think more broadly about precarity, income inequality, and increasing separation between the rural and urban, the center and periphery, the agricultural, and industrial. Ways in which urban transformation interacts with the urban food supply chain lead these to be re-articulated and expose certain political economic mechanisms, discourses, institutions, and structures. In this respect, this article is part of a larger conversation on capitalism, neoliberalism, and globalization – particularly, their varieties as experienced by developing countries. It draws from, on the one hand, Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system analysis, and, on the other hand, Foucault’s Birth of Politics lectures. While the former helps us situate post-1980s Istanbul within the context of an economic restructuring of the world economy (see, e.g., (Keyder and Öncü 1994, 1993)), the latter enables us to identify constellations of discourses, disciplinary mechanisms, and techniques of domination which give rise to specific subjectivities which are, in turn, harmonious with the said restructuring (see, e.g., (Brown 2015; Öncü 1999; Mills 2006; Chase 1994)

The article will proceed as follows: I will begin by unpacking some of the dynamics and actors of 21st century urban transformation in Istanbul. For the sake of brevity, I will not go into neighborhood-level variations; rather, I will discuss general contours, emphasizing tendencies that are relevant to food consumption and supply patterns and practices. Next, I will focus on various provisioning agents and discuss how these agents perceive urban transformation and deal with challenges urban transformation poses. Data for this section comes from semi-structured interviews I conducted with heads of various guilds and artisanal chambers, upper management, and supply chain coordinators of major domestic and multinational grocery retailers, municipal overseers, and registration board officials, as well as activists, researchers, journalists, and chefs. I will conclude the article with a short discussion of the ways in which the relationship between the city and food is being rearticulated in light of provisioning agents’ perceptions and solutions.

A transforming city

The early 2000s constitute a break in Turkey: On the one hand, on the 20th year anniversary of the adoption of market liberalization policies, the country experienced one of the worst economic crises in its history. Regulatory problems in the capital markets and banking sector (see: (Alper and Öniş 2003; Kazgan 2013; 221–260)) were exacerbated by public debt to international financial institutions as well as to domestic sectors; the crisis wrecked the Turkish Lira, erased whatever savings that remained or had been accumulated in the previous 20 years, and drastically reduced people’s purchasing power (Kazgan 2013, 221–260). Austerity measures that followed were even more brutal: They reinforced the sense of loss of economic independence that had been brewing since the adoption of liberalization policies in the early 1980s as they prioritized payment of public debts over improvement of purchasing powers and the welfare of country’s citizens. Plus, increased capital flows into the country (particularly since the implementation of the Customs Union agreement with the European Community in 1995) had not translated into more or better-paying jobs for many. Indeed, for the working classes, the deadly effects of the 1980 coup were still felt. Most of the organized labor leaders had either disappeared or were interned; strikes were outlawed until 1989 and made a comeback as wages and working conditions had barely improved (Boratav 2007, 177). Populist politics that once carried demands of the urban working classes to the larger political arena and enabled them to benefit from informal markets and urban rent redistribution strategies were no longer embraced or tolerated (Kuyucu and Ünsal 2010, 5). New redistribution policies adopted since economic liberalization in the early 1980s were, instead, “dominated by a strategy that followed a stringent and hardline approach against class-based economic demands (union-organizing, wage struggle, peasants’ support demands) while trying to appease the same masses through their ‘urban, shantytown-dwelling, poor and consumer’ identities” (Boratav 2007, 155).

On the other hand, economic liberalization increased Istanbul’s exposure to global consumption trends. As global networks of labor and capital intensified, previously unavailable commodities, and new spaces of leisure and recreation began to emerge in the city: Malls, theme parks, restaurants offering various cuisines from across the world, TV channels broadcasting in multiple languages to different time zones, and international art festivals became part of Istanbul’s sociocultural cityscape (Keyder 2005, 1999a). Further, globalization was shifting migration patterns (Keyder 2005, 1999a; Erder, 2010). A new group of upper and upper middle-class international urbanites, making up the managerial cadres of the multinationals now operating in Turkey, were moving to Istanbul. Lower classes were also headed to the city. The dissolution of the USSR and liberalization of the fragile economies of the ex-Soviet Eastern European, Caucasian and Central Asian republics sent many out of these countries looking for work. For these immigrants, Istanbul was a promising destination offering flexible employment opportunities and establishing new commercial relations (Yükseker 2007). Moreover, war in eastern and southeastern Turkey displaced many and reshaped these regions as well as major metropolitan centers of the country, including Istanbul. Relying on their networks of previous (im)migrants, these either settled in the outskirts of the city, and/or established new gecekondu neighborhoods (Ekinci, 2010b; Erder 1999, 2010). Indeed, by the early 2000s, 65% of the buildings in the city were considered illegal settlements (see: Istanbul dergisi, Tarih Vakfı Yayınları, 1994).

Urban renovation and regeneration projects built onto these flows. While the ambiguous legal status of the informal settlements made those neighborhoods particularly appealing for public and private investors alike, a coalition among bureaucrats, elected government and municipal officials, and public authorities has been critical (Türkün 2011; Kuyucu 2014; Kuyucu and Ünsal 2010) for the designation and implementation of the projects. Among these actors of the coalition, Toplu Konut İdaresi (TOKİ), a specially empowered, government-managed public body, is particularly important (Türkün 2011). Founded in 1984 to relieve urban housing shortages and problems caused by squatter housing, TOKİ’s duties, responsibilities, and powers widened over the years (ibid, pp.69–70). Separate from Toplu Konut İdaresi it was established under, and accountable directly to the prime minister’s office, TOKİ today operates as the sole authority on zoning, sale of state and urban-land, and regulation of the housing sector in Turkey (Türkün 2011; 70; Kuyucu and Ünsal 2010; 7). Although areas designated for urban transformation may require a final approval from the Bakanlar Kurulu (Council of Ministers), TOKİ executes most of the tasks associated with establishing a formal, capitalist, neoliberal urban land, and housing market regime. In addition to developing and altering urban renewal and regeneration projects, TOKİ can establish companies related to the housing sector, apply for and receive foreign credit, grant credit to other transformation projects, and most importantly, “determine[s] the boundaries of ‘squatter housing rehabilitation areas’, ‘squatter housing clearance areas’ and ‘squatter housing prevention areas’” (Türkün 2011, 69). With such a broad range of powers, TOKİ is thus able to manage, administer, and facilitate – in short, govern – urban transformation projects in Istanbul.

Scholars agree that th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Exploring food and urbanism
• 1 Feeding the global city: urban transformation and urban food supply chain in 21st-century Istanbul
• 2 Malawian urbanism and urban poverty: geographies of food access in Blantyre
• 3 Reconnection and reflexivity in Islamabad, Pakistan
• 4 Food consumption in the everyday life of liveable cities: design implications for conviviality
• 5 Production of Edibles and Use of Garden Waste in Domestic Gardens of a Middle-Class Suburb in Cape Town, South Africa
• 6 Sharing a meal: a diversity of performances engendered by a social innovation
• Index