Focusing on consumption as key to managing complex food system dynamics has drawn controversy from scholars and activists who argue that a focus on consumption obfuscates the social and ecological consequences of the larger transnational food system. We argue that these concerns, while holding merit, are grounded in assumptions about food systems that fail to grasp the importance of agency as much as structure. Starting from an appreciation for the transdisciplinary fusion of knowledge and concepts across governance, political economy, and urban complexity, we utilize the concept of “collective consumption” as a way to rethink how a consumption politics can help transform the larger system through collaborative governance at the local or regional scale. We take Food Policy Councils (FPCs) in the United States as our subject to explore how experimental governance arrangements can reshape the way political organization around food consumption can drive longer term transformation. Our paper proceeds in four parts. First, we dive into Castells’ use of collective consumption as it relates to urban politics, which includes a close assessment of how both “consumption” and “collectivity” are relevant to urban food systems governance. Second, we offer a view of how collective consumption can be utilized to promote a justice-based perspective in urban food governance, which promotes socio-natural transformation of the current agro-industrial food system. Third, we develop a framework for imagining the possibilities of FPCs as part of new collaborative state-society relationships, offering a distinct reterritorialization of urban food politics tied to a socio-natural politics of urban metabolism. Finally, we conclude by offering comments on future challenges and opportunities in realizing the radical governance potential of FPCs.
Social movements have played a central role in guiding political developments across Latin America for decades. Which particular groups have led the struggle, with what mobilization strategies and aims, and in which territorial spaces have shifted over time. In contrast to the period between the 1970s and 1990s, when cities hosted a preponderance of social movements clamoring for regime change in Latin America, by the 2000s mobilizations were as likely to emerge in rural as urban areas and to focus on regional livelihoods and conditions. Likewise, when democratization produced new political institutions for claim-making, movements began to use decentralized participatory processes to demand services, infrastructure, and public goods, participating in formal state politics more than challenging them. As movements focused less on regime change and more on everyday conditions, new forms of contestation emerged, with activists adopting spatial tactics to challenge or disrupt conditions and using these strategies as symbolic expressions of dissatisfaction as much as a means for demanding remedial action from the state. This chapter documents and accounts for historical changes in the geography and spatial tactics of Latin American social movements. Drawing on general trends across the region, it identifies new repertoires of mobilization, links them to changing social, political, and economic conditions, and assesses the significance of these shifts for both the theory and practice of social mobilization in contemporary Latin America.
Another International Leprosy Congress has come and gone, leaving behind it in the mind of at least one participant, precious memories that time will not efface ; the coming together of so many friends from across the world ; Hansen's microscope; the tribute to his memory around his statue in the Botanical Garden; Grieg's music played on his own piano as the evening light caught the view of fj ord and mountain from his house; St J�rgen's hospital, at once so moving and so. typical. Then the Congress itself, its crowded sessions, especially in the smaller lecture hall, and the great mass of research material poured out day by day, some of it so relevant and interesting that one frequently wished it was possible to be in two p1aces at once. The very size of this Congress proclaimed the rehabilitation of leprosy into general medicine. It was a joy to see the old fa miliar fa ces of fellow leprologists present in great strength for this historic occasion, but nevertheless a dwindling company among a crowd of colleagues from other medicai disciplines, whose presence was a happy augury for the future. The organizational problems surrounding this Congress must have been enormous. The accommodation, transport and entertainment of 700 participants, to say nothing of the 200
For years the Colombian city of Medellín was described by journalists as murder capital of the world, home to Pablo Escobar, and nexus of the Colombian drug trade. For international spectators, the city represented the peak of Latin American violence in the late 20 th century. Though the city receded from headlines at the end 1990s, this image of the city was pervasive. Not until a dramatic reimagining of the city almost a decade later did Medellín re-emerge in the international circuit, where its image was redrawn.
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