The Right to Food and the Right to the City: An argument for ‘scaled up’ food activism in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside
| dc.contributor.author | Drabble, Jenna | |
| dc.contributor.examiningcommittee | Peyton, Jonathan (Geography) Fridell, Mara (Sociology) | en_US |
| dc.contributor.supervisor | Masuda, Jeff (Geography) | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2015-03-25T14:07:20Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2015-03-25T14:07:20Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2015-03-25 | |
| dc.degree.discipline | Environment and Geography | en_US |
| dc.degree.level | Master of Arts (M.A.) | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | As food insecurity increases among socio-economically marginalized populations, community based efforts to address these issues have received particular attention for their potential to promote justice in food systems. This thesis presents a case-study analysis of right to food (RTF) activism in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), a community where decades of failed government policies and economic disinvestment have produced high levels of poverty as well as organized resistance and activism. I explored this localized movement through key stakeholder interviews (n=17) and 10 months of participation at a community-based organization. My findings suggest that local efforts to organize around RTF may have had some success in challenging the dominant discourse and practices associated with the entrenched charitable food model. However, these efforts are limited in their ability to ‘scale up’ this work to transform the systems that produce uneven urban food environments. I argue that the barriers to food access in the DTES are inextricably tied to broader historical contestations over urban space produced by processes of capitalist urbanization. Drawing on Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city,' I suggest how RTF activism in the DTES could benefit from linking more explicitly to the collective struggles facing wider efforts to reclaim the city. | en_US |
| dc.description.note | May 2015 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/1993/30314 | |
| dc.language.iso | eng | en_US |
| dc.rights | open access | en_US |
| dc.subject | food security | en_US |
| dc.subject | human rights | en_US |
| dc.subject | Downtown Eastside | en_US |
| dc.subject | Vancouver | en_US |
| dc.subject | right to the city | en_US |
| dc.title | The Right to Food and the Right to the City: An argument for ‘scaled up’ food activism in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside | en_US |
| dc.type | master thesis | en_US |