This is a podcast series designed to help African planning scholars and urbanists to think through how and why food can be incorporated in urban planning and governance.  If you’re not a planner, don’t tune out. If you listen along you will find out how looking at a city through the lens of food gives us a unique understanding of the histories, current realities and potential futures of our cities. 

The podcast, presented by Associate Professor Jane Battersby, is based on the work of the ESRC/DfID funded Consuming Urban Poverty Project, which used food as a lens to understand and alleviate poverty in secondary cities in Africa, the IDRC-funded Nourishing Spaces project, which argued that the rising rates of diet-related non-communicable disease in African cities should be addressed, in part, through food sensitive urban planning and governance and community scale action, and the BBSRC-funded Nourished Child project which aims to define and communicate what a systems approach to improving the quality of diets among children under 5 and women of childbearing age would look like in urban settings to address the double burden of malnutrition.

Over the course of six episodes, the series looks at how historic food planning fundamentally shaped the economies, geographies and processes of inclusion and exclusion in our cities. We examine the ways in which the global development agenda is creating new opportunities to incorporate food into urban planning and governance. We think about the politics of food planning and food governance and talk about dealing with conflicting rationalities in practices. We also introduce the idea of food sensitive planning and urban design and wrap up with reflections on lessons learned from elsewhere.

Throughout this podcast series, please refer to Consuming Urban Poverty publications such as Tomatoes and Taxi Ranks, Urban Food Systems Governance and Poverty in African Cities and, the Incorporating Food into Urban Planning: A toolkit for planning educators in Africa.