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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:MANITOBA/oai:mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca:1993/30314 |
| Date | 25 March 2015 |
| Creators | Drabble, Jenna |
| Contributors | Masuda, Jeff (Geography), Peyton, Jonathan (Geography) Fridell, Mara (Sociology) |
| Source Sets | University of Manitoba Canada |
| Detected Language | English |
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