Inclusive strategies to Feeding the City

Healthy and sustainable diets are increasingly advocated as essential for future of our planet. However, currently only a ‘green elite’ is changing their diets accordingly: the required dietary transition does not transpire across all population groups in western, urbanized society. This begs the question of what hinders and facilitates people in accessing healthy and sustainable food and in what way healthy and sustainable diets may be exclusive. This PhD project elaborates on this issue through this main research question: What does accessing of healthy and sustainable food in an urban context look like and how can its inclusiveness be improved? The theoretical framework used is practice theories. Theoretically, this project is interested in understanding accessing, which is conceptualized as a dynamic concept that is shaped by interactions with people’s ‘foodways’, meanings, understandings and daily practices in a material context. Accessing practices will be studied from a policy, consumption and provision perspective, zooming in on diverse understandings of healthy and sustainable food and self-perceived in/exclusion therein. Inclusiveness is studied through three in/exclusion mechanisms that structure the thesis: cultural, socio-economic and spatio-temporal in/exclusion. The research takes place in the context of the Dutch city of Almere and takes a mixed-methods approach.