Mapping the Edible City:Making visible communities and food spaces in the city

Our prosposal to co-convene a conference panel at the named conference has been accepted. Our call is a follows:Traditional mapping practices have drastically changed in recent years from having an apolitical, authorative voice. Enabled by new technologies, maps are no longer singular, static or reductive but instead are being transformed to make visible, educate and to empower many, by engaging different perspectives, topics, tempos and mobilities. Traditionally based in geography due to an engagement with space and place, spatial and urban anthropology now also speak to the particularities of place and locality, while a geographical turn welcomes in ‘thick description’ as storytelling and new media to the map. Popular, novel approaches include radical, guerrilla, emotional and critical cartography which enrich current urban design and planning studies with complex and surprising findings. Urban food practices, a topic of increasing interest to all, urban design, anthropology and geography due to increasing urbanisation, environmental concerns, precarity and a desire to reconnect to nature and to one’s food source, are also prolific in uptaking new mapping styles. Using GIS and other forms of artist, participatory and community mapping, amongst others, food mapping provides a rich arena in which to apply mapping as a tool to communicate new ways of understanding urban space, identities, relationships, informal and alternative economies, mobilities, and connections in and across the city. This panel seeks papers and other contributions that explore the tensions, criticisms, and new theoretical and methodological directions that such mapping introduces across disciplines in relation to key themes that include (but are not limited to) identity, space-use conflicts, gender, migration, the senses, ecology, productivity, and home/place-making through food