Food and Gentrification

I have several projects that interrogate the intersections between food and gentrification.

First, I have an edited volume with Alison Alkon and Yuki Kato with New York University Press. It is called A Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City. It explores three topical areas. These include how urban growth machines mobilize foodscapes for development, the loss of food spaces due to gentrification and displacement, and forms of food activism and food policy that resist and ameliorate gentrification.

Second, I am interested in the role of urban agriculture in land use politics in Denver, Colorado. As a sustainability initiative with the backing of civil society, business, or government interests, urban agriculture can drive green gentrification even when advocates of these initiatives have the best of intentions and are aware of their exclusionary potential for urban farmers and residents. This is a city with many urban farmers that gained access to land after the Great Recession. They faced the contradiction of being a force for displacement and at risk of displacement as the city adopted new sustainability and food system goals, the housing market recovered, and green gentrification spread.

My research on this topic has been published in journals such as Research in Political Sociology and Boletín ECOS.