URBAN FOODSCAPES – A POSSIBILITY FOR READING CONTEMPORARY URBANITIES

Abstract

All interactions that people have with food (where they eat, when, with whom, what, in what contexts, etc.) define and are defined by the territories and the sociabilities inserted in them. This communication aims to reflect on the possibility of urban foodscapes, understood as a result of the nexus between subjects-food-territories, being producers of social space-time, placing the food practices and the food system closer to the study of urbanities, based on its integration with the dimensions of social space-time proposed by Lefebvre. The results are obtained from a literature review, and illustrated by examples in multidisciplinary contexts where the food-people-territories nexus reveals possibilities of reading space(s), time(s) and sociability(s).

It is argued that all eating is, ultimately, the experience of inhabiting (and digesting) the world, and a form of urbanity that reproduces, produces, and is produced by the intersection between produced space, practiced space and representational space. Being the only physiological and sensorial act culturally conditioned, shared and spatialized in a possibly infinite network of relationships, eating can constitute a radical experience of social space-time production.