Just Urban Food Systems: A New Direction for Food Access and Urban Social Justice

Abstract

Food geography has exploded as a subfield of human geography in recent years; however, normative ideas of justice are not always explicitly addressed. The concept of a ‘just urban food system’ can incorporate ideals of justice into the issue of declining retail food accessibility for low-income urban communities –‘food deserts’– which have yet to be analysed through a lens of justice. In this article, I review geographers’ and planners’ research on changing urban food landscapes; I also discuss ways that food scholars have implicitly and explicitly addressed normative frameworks, such as food justice, food democracy, food sovereignty and the moral economy. I conclude with three potential research agendas to encourage research on the just urban food system: collective consumption, urban public/private property struggles and the just city.