What can food tell us about how inclusive a city is?

Food can narrate what integration means and for whom. The ways ‘the other’ is understood in multicultural debates is often experienced through food interactions in public spaces, e.g. school dinners, neighbourhood meetings and ethnic markets. For migrants, food practices are a visceral part of the migration process, of their sense of belonging and of their complex routes towards integration (Bailey, 2017). Understanding these interactions offers insights into multi-cultural public social spaces and into migrants as social actors that are integral to in city-making (Çağlar & Glick Schiller 2018).

Main goal:

The Migration, Food and the Inclusive City project seeks to examine what role urban food practices play in everyday integration and transformation processes of migrants in cities. More specifically, the project addresses (i) how migrants produce and negotiate the nature of urban public spaces and urban identities through food and (ii) how migrant foodscapes stand in relation to processes of urban regeneration.

How?

The project uses qualitative methodologies and draws upon scholarship in human geography, urban geography, migration studies, food studies and anthropology. The MIGFOODCITY project will involve preliminary qualitative research in the Utrecht neighbourhood Lombok, a public event in Lombok and various workshops to build a research consortium on migration, food and the city.

Who?

The MIGFOODCITY project is funded by a seed grant from UU’s focus area Migration and Societal Change and was awarded to Dr. Sara Brouwer (UU), Prof. Ajay Bailey (UU), Dr. Manpreet Janeja (UU) and Dr. Natasha Webster (Stockholm University). Emilia Seidl and Lucia Terzuolo, both students at UCU, are research assistants in the project.