Publications: Hungry Cities Papers

The drivers of food insecurity in rapidly growing urban areas of the Global South are receiving more research and policy attention, but the precise connections between urbanization, urban food security and migration are still largely unexplored. In particular, the levels and causes of food insecurity amongst new migrants to the city have received little consideration.…

The relationship between household access to medical care and food security is a potentially circuitous and challenging relationship to model. This discussion paper uses multiple modelling techniques to determine the quality of the relationships between these variables using household survey data collected by the Hungry Cities Partnership in 2014 in Maputo, Mozambique. The results of…

This discussion paper aims to review what is currently known about the role played by the informal sector in general, and informal retailers in particular, in the accessibility of food in South Africa. The review seeks to identify policy-relevant research gaps. Drawing on Statistics South Africa data, we show that the informal sector is an…

The informal food retail sector is an important component of urban food systems and plays a vital role in ensuring access to food by the urban poor. Yet, policy frameworks both to address food security and to govern the informal sector neglect informal retail in the food system and, as a result, the sector is…

Although supermarkets have become a dominant food outlet for urban residents in developed countries, studies of food purchasing in developing countries such as China report a persistence of traditional food outlets, despite a proliferation of supermarkets over the past two decades. Yet, little is known about urban residents’ use of various food sources in the…

The underlying assumption in much of the Euro-American food deserts literature is that urban food deserts are dynamic spaces, expanding and contracting with the advent and withdrawal of supermarkets. This discussion paper argues that to tie such dynamism purely to the spatial behaviour of formal food retail outlets is both narrow and inappropriate in the…

After more than two decades of rapid urbanization, Chinese cities now face severe sustainability chal- lenges in terms of balancing economic viability, social justice, and environmental protection goals. While various types of planning have long been adopted to cope with these challenges, food as a centrepiece of daily life and of social and economic activity…

The recent inclusion of an urban Sustainable Development Goal in the Post-2015 UN Development Agenda represents an important acknowledgement of the reality of global urbanization and the many social, economic, infrastructural and political challenges posed by the human transition to a predomi- nantly urban world. However, while the SDG provides goals for housing, transportation, land…