Vaissnavi Shukl
The idea of food deserts was unknown to me a few years ago. I recognized my privilege in having access to nutritious fresh food but still had a lot to learn about how certain areas are devoid of that basic necessity because of planning policies, politics and economic factors. I still could not entirely gauge the idea of comparing access to supermarkets with my own experience of a robust network of vegetable hawkers and street vendors in India. So we got in touch with urban geographer Dr. Jane Battersby whose work focuses on the interactions between the urban systems and food systems in the African context. She helped me understand why the supermarket metric is slightly flawed in the Global South and how we should all advocate for food centric urban planning.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off-Centre, a podcast where we discuss contemporary discourses that shape the built environment, but do not necessarily occupy the centrestage in our daily lives. We speak to radical designers, thinkers and change makers who are deeply engaged in redefining the way we live and interact with the world around us.

I’m excited for today because up until now, all the interviews I’ve done for the season are kind of micro in their outlook. A lot of them talk about products, about food, about larger questions, but today we’re going to talk about some actual real planning, design, policy, economics and the whole nexus of all of it. So let’s get started with your early work, which was really talking about food security. If you could talk to us a little bit about that. And then we’ll slowly slip into the other bigger, larger questions.

Jane Battersby
Absolutely. So I started doing research on food security in urban areas back in 2007-2008. When we started doing the research it was really very much around the conventional framing of insecurity. So I was looking at the household sale, what were the household determinants of food insecurity in urban areas, and this work started because there’s been a lot of focus on food insecurity in rural areas, and yet with the urbanisation we’ve seen particularly in Africa. There’s this realisation that people haven’t really grappled with what food insecurity looked like in the urban context. However, in the process of doing this research of large scale survey. It became clear to me at least, that although the experience of food insecurity was felt at the individual household scale, the drivers were very much more than that. My sense was that food insecurity was something that just happened in urban areas; it was a product of the urban. So it became clear that actually the way in which we designed our cities, the way in which people live and how they’re being in cities, was profoundly shaping how they could eat. And so that then led me to kind of emerge out of that household scale analysis to starting to think that kind of neighbourhood scale city scale but then also what’s happening in the micro geographies of the home.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I want to drill into something that we spoke about when we met for the first time and that’s this whole discourse quite popular on food deserts in in cities or particular neighbourhoods, so to speak, and something that I mean, I had no idea what food deserts were until I went to grad school in the US and it seemed like everybody there was talking about food deserts. And it seemed like food, which is so essential to our survival, had kind of entered into architecture schools into planning into urban design into policy. And because this goes on, food deserts in the US is quite elaborate. People have done a lot of work in terms of food deserts in California Food deserts, even larger cities like New York City where certain burroughs experience the phenomenon of a food desert. But when I was going through your work, which really appealed to me was it’s not a direct translation, a different geography, but what happens in African cities and what you offer work is really trying to understand is the phenomenon of food deserts, but in a completely different way, shape and format.

Jane Battersby
I have a fundamental problem with the kind of framing of food deserts both as… both as it’s being created in the kind of US context but then as it’s being translated. So what we’ve seen is this, initially, the idea of food deserts, kind of came out through food justice activists, who were really honing in on the fact that in lower income areas of cities and rural areas, it was hard to get physical access to affordable, nutritious foods. And they didn’t speak about any particular kind of retailing, but it was the general notion. And then in the US, it got picked up and turned into this very particular narrative, which was about this kind of the absence of large grocery stores in lower income areas. And in doing that, it kind of reframed the problem as one less about community agency and seeking community justice. Okay, we’ve got a problem that there’s not enough grocery stores, the solution is therefore, to change planning codes to attract large retailers, etc. And so it became this kind of very top down business centric approach to addressing a fundamental justice issue. And what we saw was that in the African context that idea was picked up and translated, even though it made no sense in our context, right. So in the US a lot of food deserts, if we’re going to go with that definition, are there because large grocery stores retreated from those areas. For a number of reasons. In the African context, we never had a lot of supermarkets like India, like Latin America. Though  Latin America is much further along in this, supposed transition to the supermarket economy. And so now we are working towards indicators that talk about the kind of food equity in cities that use the language of food deserts and use the indicator of supermarkets, even though it doesn’t really make sense in that context. So what we’re seeing in the African context is this kind of expansion of supermarket sector and its assumption that it’s good for food security, but the work that we’ve been doing, kind of looking at how people are actually getting food suggests that maybe that’s not as simple and that we need to completely reframe the idea of food deserts in African context. And in the Indian context, and in most places in the Global South.

Vaissnavi Shukl
You think the definition of food desert does give a lot of importance to supermarkets as a sole source of food for a lot of people because I’ve never been to Africa, I don’t know what the food system is like. But in India, a lot of festivals that we would get up until eight years 10 years ago would be from farmers markets, vegetable markets. There’s a whole different typology which is called ‘mandis’ where it is different people who sell fruits and vegetables would gather and you just buy from it. And that’s also very interesting. I mean, interesting as we’ve all grown up with it, but you also have vendors coming on carts walking around the road to where you live and you just buy it from that person. You don’t necessarily even need to go somewhere to buy your food as long as that when it comes around you buy it. But even if you want to take like a sample at a particular city where there exists no supermarket in a traditional sense, but there’s also a lot of these other ways in which people get their food, does that kind of undermine or question the whole definition?

Jane Battersby
Yeah, absolutely. So that we have the same phenomena, but you have these multiple forms of small scale and informal food retailers that… that happens on the streets, in small shops, etc. And yet the narrative that’s come through has been that the supermarkets provide food that is cheaper and more diverse, safer, and therefore it becomes the obvious choice for people. And yet what we’ve seen is that that doesn’t necessarily become the obvious choice. So in all the places we’ve worked at where other researchers have done work, people will transition to supermarkets for particular things at particular times. So people will transition to buy kind of the non… non-perishables from supermarkets but will still go to the fresh fruit vendor that they know and they will still go to the fresh meat vendor that they will know… this will go to street traders. And it’s partly because those traders are working in a way that meets the needs of the population. So you can bind small quantities. You can buy on credit when the money runs out. They’ll… they’ll open all kinds of hours, conveniently located. So there’s a lot of benefits to the traditional systems. And the idea that the supermarket is going to come in and have all these benefits and that systems will fade away. Doesn’t seem to be doesn’t seem to be holding out. The question is why is this supermarket idea gaining traction? And I think… I think it’s gaining traction because it’s a simple solution to a complex problem. We all know the policymakers like a simple solution to a complex problem. The other one is recognising the kind of finance behind this and the power of developers and large retailers to drive planning agenda. We all will recognise this. So I think those are a couple of components that… that are shaping this… this narrative but I think also there’s something about how we map and represent things. So some of the work we’ve done has been mapping out where supermarkets are and laying them over central streets demonstrating areas of low income. And when you look at the city scale, you can see there’s food deserts, you can see there’s this kind of inequity and that that’s there. If you look at something at the city scale, if you look at supermarkets and income how would you go down to the neighbourhood scale, which you can’t make at the city scale, you can’t have all of the 500 vendors operating within a single ward in the city. You can’t have the kind of ephemerality you’re talking about the carts that go from place to place. How do you map that? How do you represent that? How do you make that visible to planners and policymakers?

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah, I want to probe a little bit into that because you said this kind of research is there is an aspect of the qualitative analysis in the quantitative analysis and economics but what I find interesting about your methodology was really looking at people’s lived experiences and a lot of your information and your analysis came from that lived experience versus purely just looking at a city and a plan and like marking supermarkets there.

Jane Battersby
Yeah, I mean, at the heart of our work has always been trying to understand how people themselves make sense of their food environment and how they live it. And what are the interactions of the food system with the urban system, that social systems how those things all come together? And I think that’s been absent, particularly our context from… from the way in which planning has been done. So part of the efforts we’ll be doing, we’re trying to try to bring that lived experience to the surface to kind of create narratives that policymakers and planners will be able to understand and start to incorporate into their approaches.

Vaissnavi Shukl
What would that process look like? What would you imagine it to be some kind of participatory crowd sourced process? What would… How do you imagine it being translated?

Jane Battersby
Yeah. So there’s a couple of things that we’ve been doing to create this. The one is using very qualitative methods to understand that experience. And we’re doing that for a few reasons. Firstly, I think you often end up with quite siloed data. And so we need to kind of create those rich narratives. The other thing is it has been distilling the rich complex data into a kind of compelling narrative to generate political will. So in our current work, we’ve created the story of a child called uncivil. And we travel with her through a day and we put that to policymakers and suddenly, they can start to have conversations across the silos because they’ve got a story they can… they can relate to. We’ve also been in quite a lot of work with visuals so we’ve used photo exhibitions linked with texts from… from interviews to kind of bring the story to life and to immerse policymakers and planners in that world. I found it quite effective. But the other element that’s been, I think, something we’ve hoped for, but we’re already starting to see fruition of now is that the participants in that lived experience research start to be able to see the systems in ways that they don’t necessarily do when you’re was living so the act of being part of the research has actually created community agency and community voice. And so one of the… one of the projects we’ve been working in, we’ve actually managed to work with some of the participants to form a kind of ambassadors group, who are now going to policymakers and speaking to them. So they’ve invited the city’s environmental health unit, who do all the street safety food safety work, to come and speak to them to explain to them the processes so they can explain what the traders need to do in order to be compliant so that the environmental health just don’t having to shut them down for no reason or without explanation. So it’s, it’s actually seeing that the research process itself creates kind of a bridge between the policymaker and the community.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Which is my next point, and I was going to talk about food driven planning or food sensitive planning and in the, in the podcast that you produce you hosted and the paper that you wrote about what kind of papers and essays you were actually proposing a new kind of an approach towards looking at planning, which was to really have food safety, food infrastructure or the infrastructure necessary to deliver the kind of food security, food safety, and how that is one of the key points in terms of how we design cities and how we plan cities and how we make neighbourhoods. We could talk about that. But then I also want to talk about the emphasis on creating the infrastructure to have that kind of a planning approach because just like supermarkets, I mean, it’s not a simple act of just going to a supermarket, right, you have to take out time, you have to have a vehicle and go drive to that place, you need to park, you to do your shopping and then you come back home. So you need a mode of transportation, you need a way or a road to kind of go on and you need access to that place and access in terms of physical access, monetary access, etc, etc. How do… How does one really process food sensitive planning? What does it look like?

Jane Battersby
So how do we start to think about food sensitive since the planning, we’re gonna work. One of the things we’ve been really trying to advocate for is to have food as a… as an object planning and to recognise the role of food in shaping our cities. So there’s a couple of approaches to this. The first one is thinking about why is it that we haven’t planned for food? So as Wayne Roberts used to say, “More than any of our biological needs, the choices that we make about food, affect the shape, the style, pulse, smell, look, field, health, economy, street life, infrastructure of the city”. So when you start to think about how many times your life intersects with food, and how many things shape why you do what you do with food, it does seem very odd that planners haven’t really engaged with foods that much. So what we’ve been trying to do is well there’s two things that we need to think about in terms of food and planning. One is the food specific planning. So thinking about where you place market sites, how you design informal trade plans that incorporate foods and natural processes in that. So if you’re, we have a formal trade policy in the City of Cape Town, it’s about livelihoods in economics, it’s not about what’s getting sold. And so the failure to think about food in that means that you don’t have support infrastructure, food safety, it means you don’t have safe storage spaces for… for traders, all of which not only undermine their businesses, but undermine food safety and undermine access to food. Another element where you might think about food specific planning is when a planning application comes in for a new shopping mall of which we have many, and they are always at the supermarket as an anchor tenant, and they always have a couple of fast food joints kind of associated with them as well. One of the things we’ve been saying is well, you know, in order to get planning permission in this African context, you need to have an environmental impact assessment. In some cases, you’ll need to transport impact assessment, you’ll need to have in some cases of heritage impact assessment. Could we think about the idea of having a food impact assessment where the developer will have to explain what the impact on the food system food security might be? There’s other food specific elements like well, how do you start to incorporate urban agriculture into your zoning plan? So those things are quite obvious, but as you were saying earlier, there’s a whole lot of other aspects of planning that intersect with how people access and utilise. So this goes from everything from, yes, transport design, we know that transport infrastructure correlates quite closely with food trade. How do you start to think about the connections between… between those things? What is the… what’s the design element around transit, that’s going to mean that people are commuting two and a half hours to get to work every day, and that fundamentally shapes what they do. So there’s something about food sensitivity, that when we’re thinking about design of new neighbourhoods, how might you do that in a way that incorporates aspects of community composting, which incorporates gardens which incorporates kind of trading spaces within those areas. But then when you go down to the house scale, what kind of housing infrastructure enables people to make the kinds of decisions they want to make about what kind of access to energy and energy security, water and sanitation, even things like the presence or absence of a ceiling in a house affects the the kind of thermal gradients in the house, which affects what you can buy and store. So everything from that kind of microscale design of the house to the macro design of your kind of city transit plan, all of those things have had food implications. And so we think there’s a role for trying to embed a food sensitivity and certainly the language of food security, within kind of things like our metropolitan spatial development frameworks, which kind of sets the development plan for the whole city development plan, the district plan, and if we can get that language into those large scale planning documents, they can start to feed through to integrators. So that’s, that’s part of it. And I think the way that the… way the traction is going to come from this is by recognising that having a food secure population with a well thought out food system isn’t just about food. It’s about health, but it’s also about environmental justice. It’s also about employment and livelihoods. It’s about the livability of the city. It’s about waste management. So all these kind of objectives that political governments might have could be emits more effectively if they were to start thinking of food as a… as a kind of crucial element of the city’s metabolism.

Vaissnavi Shukl
It almost seems like, you know, now with a sudden rise in the culture as, as they call it, it seems like everything that is happening with organic food Farmers Market things that are now starting to be trendy with things that already existed before supermarkets ever happened. It’s just that now it’s more fashionable to go to a farmers market. Whereas maybe back in the day, it would probably have been frowned upon when supermarkets are just coming up. You know that that sort of aggregation of everything into one place versus now there’ll be a certain distribution of different kinds of foods and then the act of going down and find something that’s fresh, that’s also healthy because I feel like what often happens is when you look at kind of food that’s available through these different mediums, there’s also an aspect of health and nutrition that kind of gets backtrack because I certainly one of the other guests and I realised you pointed out very rightly that it’s not necessary that if your food secure, you’re eating healthy, it’s not necessarily that whatever you’re consuming, whatever food you have, you might not be hungry, but that doesn’t also necessarily have to be nutritional. You know, you could just be living close to a dollar store or something. You could buy food and eat and you could be eating and eating and eating it up. But it doesn’t mean you’re getting any… any vitamins and proteins and nutrients out of it. If you were to kind of integrate that aspect as well in terms of health and nutrition. Do you think there could be scope in planning and urban design to to really even talk about not just the availability of food, but also the kind of food. For example, I’m just thinking out loud. When cities like Ahmedabad, where I’m from, they started growing, the town planning schemes had space for retail commercial buildings. And so the retail and commercial buildings would have supermarkets which would sell your fruits and vegetables. People realised not too late that it’s not necessarily a preferred mode of purchase for a lot of people. It’s a social activity, you know, people really like to go together. My mother and my neighbours, for example, would make a trip out of it. And you know, you’d really want to browse and you want to haggle with different vendors and you really want to have your pick of the lot and the supermarket did not let any of those informal conversations to happen. It wasn’t experiential anymore. And… and so a lot of the street edges were that informal hacking used to happen that vendors used to just come lay their produce, which would move to make space for the retail commercial parts face a lot of backlash from people because there used to be the smaller nuclear markets supermarkets in very close proximity to people’s place, but then they were replaced by supermarkets which were had slightly further proximity. So the later transplants actually made space, not the best designs, but they did account for those kind of informal vending activities to happen where they were given a particular space in the town plan in the city plan, like unallocated space where they could come in same kind of introduction so would happen and in slightly different like more standardised form if I could see that but it was made a part of the planning. Yeah.

Jane Battersby
So I mean, there’s a lot there’s a lot going on with this kind of space. So as you’re saying, the kind of this kind of rediscovery of those more traditional building systems as having these benefits for potentially for… for health and well being the kinds of foods that perhaps getting getting sold in these spaces. Certainly the… the kind of connection to cultural fit practices is something that the supermarket’s have really struggled to deliver on our struggle to deliver an authentic and the kind of social activity, social practice of purchasing and networking, all those kinds of dynamics. So I think those are pretty important. I think. One of the challenges that we’re finding is there’s still this kind of deep antipathy of the state towards the kind of ending because of these public health concerns. That’s the debate. But the public health arguments, I think, has been, I don’t say over emphasised, but we know that there’s been various studies that have shown that actually the safety of a lot of street foods is actually safer than a lot of supermarkets and particularly in terms of meat because it’s it’s super fresh, you know, I haven’t had time to do that. But if you look at certainly in the African context, kind of colonial planning and legislation, the primary responsibility of local governments regarding food was public health and safety. So that’s the lens through which they will see this and that’s the lens which they’ve had that element. So I think we can start to reframe. So one of the things that we’ve done and Antonio Payton has subsequently done, is to go through all of the local government’s constitutional mandates and see where they intersect. And then it’s kind of realisation that actually we have a lot of responsibilities towards through that aren’t just health and safety. And so in doing that, it kind of opens up the potential of imagining new ways of being and doing. that all these efforts to try and incorporate someone’s giving. So like you’re saying with this kind of provision of spaces, albeit less than ideal for street traders. I’ve had a student who is doing some work in Cape Town looking at some of their bespoke provided spaces. And again, just that unless planners really understand how these spaces work and why they often end up big white elephants. So we’ve… we’ve seen where there’s been a municipal training base put completely away from where the traffic is, we’ve seen in the context where sort of big setback 3 metres from the road has a profoundly negative effect on trading, and then the traders don’t want to go and operate there. So I think again, there needs to be a really deep understanding from… from planners informed by lived experience about how and why people do what they do in these spaces. But my abiding sense is that these kinds of spaces and having this kind of retail diversity is fundamental to… to a resilient food system, to such a food system that not only gives people resilience, so they can kind of have choice, they can have agency, there’s things that supermarkets do better than informal traders. There’s things that informal traders do better than supermarkets. My sense is that in order to maintain people’s resilience to shocks, economic, social, whatever, they need to have a resilient… a diverse food system. And so we need to be able to plan that kind of diversity. At the same time, I think that having that kind of diversity also has benefits more broadly, it’s not for the food insecure. So we’ve…we’ve had a context where I mean, right now we’ve… we’ve had these incredibly high food prices globally, as a result of the UK… Ukraine crisis, and in India you’ve had the droughts. And so if you have a diverse food system that’s getting food from multiple sources with multiple flows and multiple kinds of economic relationships then there’s a kind of robustness to that system. So I think… I think if we fall for this narrative, that one kind of food system’s going to be the most appropriate business plan for that. I think we’re gonna… we’re going to be ultimately undermining the resilience of food systems, the resilience of our cities, and the resilience of populations. And so we’re gonna think about what kinds of food systems increase agency and sustainability

Vaissnavi Shukl
And something you said in our first meeting was quite profound because you said there’s a lot of work being done internationally to nonprofit organisation through humanitarian organisations and he said, there’s a lot of aid but there’s not a lot of agency and that kind of really stuck with me because we might be trying our best to make sure there’s no food shortage, but what are we doing in terms of giving access I need to do agency to the people who will consume that food. So I want to ask you my favourite and my most frequently asked questions. That question is, what are you working on? And what’s next for you? I know there’s a large project that’s kind of an international multi-country, big project that you’re working on.

Jane Battersby
Yeah. So there’s two large things that I’m working on at the moment and they spend vastly different global scales. So the one piece is I’m currently writing a report with the FAO, Food Agricultural Organisation, the United Nations, the FAO. They have this thing called the high level panel of experts that writes a series of reports that then go through this process to ultimately go to global recommendations. And we’re in the middle of doing a report on inequalities in food nutrition, security, and understanding the drivers of that. You are talking about nutrition. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So we’re looking at kind of what’s… what’s driving through nutrition insecurity in its broader scope. So not simply the kind of micronutrient malnutrition, the hunger but also the kind of burgeoning obesity, diabetes, non communicable diseases, all of that stuff. And what we’re doing is we’re adding an equity lens to that, and we’re saying, Okay, so we’ve got these, these inequalities in experience, and they’re driven by things that are happening in the food system and wider systems are kind of making their systems linkages, but these are driven by inequitable processes. So trying to understand what kinds of inequity are present. And how to factor in these issues of justice, into addressing inequality. So it’s really not finding the band aid solution, but really digging into the kind of systemic drivers and taking a kind of rights based understanding of our challenge. And so that’s kind of trying to draw on case studies from all around the world and trying to feed into kind of global governance discussions which feeds into national policy discussions which means that and then at the other end, I’m working with a couple of community groups here in Cape Town, in which we’re still trying to continue doing this lift that experience, researchers still trying to find ways to increase community voice and try to embed some of the thinking around food systems transformation at that kind of micro neighbourhood scale. And the challenge is making those conversations talk to each other. And that’s kind of where we’re finding intellectual stimulation. And again, it’s thinking about, well, how, how does what happens at that global scale filtered down to what happens to those experiences? But likewise, how do those experiences start to then filter up to change those global decision making processes?

Vaissnavi Shukl
I mean, even… even the stuff that we talked about today kind of spans the ends right? At some point, we spoke about the storage space in people’s houses, and if they have the infrastructure, to buy grains and store grains or if they have refrigerators to store in dairy for a longer time, and then zoomed out to look at the infrastructure that makes all of this possible? So it’s… you cannot look at one without looking at the other and vice versa.

Jane Battersby
And the thing is that we don’t live at one scale. So we’re living in these multiple spatial experiences all the time. And yet so often when we’re thinking about planning and design, with increasing scale, thinking at the neighbourhood scale within the city scale, but how do we start to make sure that those things are always in conversation?

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah, but good luck with that research. It sounds absolutely fantastic. And thank you for accepting our invitation. This was fun.

Jane Battersby
Thank you so much. It’s been… it’s been a great conversation.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.