Consuming the Creative City: Gastrodevelopment in a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy with Eden Kinkaid

Cities@Tufts Lectures

Scholars have recently coined the term “gastrodevelopment” to refer to the leveraging of food culture as a resource and strategy of economic development. Drawing on a case study of Tucson, Arizona – the United States’ first UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy – Kinkaid uses the lens of gastrodevelopment to examine how food culture is transformed into a form of symbolic capital that animates a broader project of urban development. Kinkaid shows how this transformation encodes differentials of value that are racialized and racializing and risk contributing to Tucson’s uneven urban geographies. Kinkaid then turns to community visions of food-based development to imagine alternative trajectories for the project of gastrodevelopment.

Dr. Eden Kinkaid (they/them) is a human geographer and social scientist whose work focuses on themes of sustainable and equitable food and agricultural systems, place, race, and development. They have researched these themes in north India and in the U.S. Southwest. In addition to this line of research, they publish on topics of feminist, queer, and trans geographies, geographic theory, creative geographies, and diversity, equity, and inclusion in academia. Their work has been published in Urban Geography, Progress in Human Geography, Transactions of the British Institute of Geographers, The Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Environment and Planning D, and various other journals and books. Eden has served as an editor at Gender, Place, and Culture, The Graduate Journal of Food Studies, and you are here: the journal of creative geography. You can learn more about their work on their website or by following them on social media @queergeog on Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky.

In addition to this audio, you can watch the video and read the full transcript of their conversation on Shareable.net – while you’re there get caught up on past lectures.

Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice with professor Julian Agyeman.

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