Right to food, right to the city: Household urban agriculture, and socionatural metabolism in Managua, Nicaragua

The labor between farm and table: Cultivating an urban political ecology of agrifood for the 21st century

“…UPE can build upon this work to offer a more holistic understanding of the global political economy of food by investigating how human labor transforms nature at each “link” in the food supply chain and how transformations in production processes, in turn, continually reshape labor and nature. Metabolism, in particular, helps us see how nature's labor (e.g., photosynthesis and fermentation) is harnessed by capitalists for the purpose of accumulation (Heynen, Kaika, & Swyngedouw, ) and by urban dwellers reclaiming a right to the city (Agyeman & McEntee, ; Eizenberg, ; McClintock, , ; Sbicca, ; Shillington, ; Stehlin & Tarr, ). UPE asks, “who produces what kind of social‐ecological configuration and for whom?” (Heynen et al, , p. 2).…”

“…For more on the “right to urban metabolism,” which builds off of Lefebvre's “right to the city,” see Shillington () and Swyngedouw, Kaïka, and Castro ().…”

“…argues that this is the reason that the topic of food systems is underdeveloped relative to other themes in political ecology.2 For example, Lucy Jarosz continues in this tradition and reveals food crisis to be a "predictable outcome" of a feedgrainlivestock complex that contributes to climate change and food insecurity and endangers and impoverishes workers around the world(Jarosz, 2009). 3 For more on the "right to urban metabolism," which builds off of Lefebvre's "right to the city," seeShillington (2013) andSwyngedouw, Kaïka, and Castro (2002).4 Kautsky drew the distinction between "agriculture" and "industry" to highlight the uniqueness of agricultural production.However, this distinction has become less stark as the landscape of agricultural production becomes increasingly complicated and, some might argue, more "industrialized. "…”

Cracking the nut of agribusiness and global food insecurity: In search of a critical agenda of research

“…Starting from the realisation that Brazil is one of the most relevant and intriguing theatres where the neoliberalisation of agribusiness is rapidly unfolding, this article is rather an invitation, or, maybe a provocation, for critical research. The proposed agenda of study should benefit from the politico-ecological work produced by geographers in recent years (to a significant extent it was rehearsed in the pages of Geoforum, as in Guthman, 2008;Marsden et al, 1992;Page, 2002;Potter and Tilzey, 2007;Shillington, 2013), which could help to crack the nut of agribusiness and food insecurity (certainly towards higher levels of food sovereignty). It must be an interdisciplinary dialogue around the fact that agribusiness is one of the most relevant battlegrounds of socioecological politics in the world today, as the Brazilian experience vividly illustrates.…”

Research-informed gardening activism: steering the public food and land agenda

“…The first looks at the individual sphere, where individual forms of back (or front) gardening and animal breeding are understood as forms of self-provisioning (Irvine 1999 (Bartling 2012), an act of production of a home ecology that claims a right to the city as a right to contribute to urban metabolism (Shillington 2013) or, as Tom Hodgkinson put it, a food provisioning self-liberating practice, where "digging is anarchy, anarchy in action" (Hodgkinson 2005, p.67).…”