Jill K. Clark

Between the Country and the Concrete: Rediscovering the Rural-Urban Fringe

Substantial U.S. population growth in relatively rural areas adjacent to large urban areas is sparking renewed interest in the rural–urban fringe. This research identifies some of the roots of the rural–urban fringe concept and reviews recent scholarly interest in the related exurban concept. Analysis of primary and secondary data is conducted to examine the fringe in relation to both urban/suburban areas and rural areas of Ohio, seeking to determine the extent to which the fringe is similar to or dissimilar from the suburbs or more rural areas. Comparisons are made across a number of ecological, occupational, and sociocultural attributes. Differences between incorporated (cities and villages) and unincorporated (township) areas are also considered. Findings support the notion of the fringe being distinct from the suburbs, with more modest differences compared to more rural places. Practical implications of this research are discussed as are future research needs for further understanding an increasingly important settlement area of the United States.

Measuring Space–Time Access to Food Retailers: A Case of Temporal Access Disparity in Franklin County, Ohio

Typical measures of food access use spatial-only methods to identify nearby food outlets and the quantity, quality, and variety of food available. This measure of spatial access falls short in explaining the effect that the operating hours of food retailers have on food access. Our study aims to complement the spatial dimension of access measures by bringing time in as a new constraint on food access. To this end, we developed three measures of spatial, temporal, and spatiotemporal access and correlated these measures with socioeconomic status (SES) in a case in Columbus, Ohio. Findings from our analysis of food access disparity suggest that low-SES neighborhoods in Columbus are not at a disadvantage of spatial access, but their limited temporal access is a more pressing concern. Implications drawn from the study would assist community advocates, local governments, and other stakeholders in deriving a better understanding of the local foodscape that are not only mediated by space but also time.

The State of Food Mapping Academic Literature Since 2008 and Review of Online GIS-based Food Mapping Resources

Various mapping methodologies have been used to explore complex social, economic, and environmental components of the food system. Planning scholars, geographers, public health officials, and community organizations have created maps to better understand disparities in the food environment. This review provides an analysis of the nature of geographic information systems mapping in scholarly research and web-based food mapping since 2008. Our review of thirty-four journal articles and seventy web-mapping projects covers the purpose, study area, topics, methods, and application of food mapping research and initiatives. Scholars and community stakeholders will benefit from this review of methodologies to inform their research and policy initiatives.

Planning for Food Systems: Community-University Partnerships for Food-Systems Transformation

The United Nations estimates that by 2050, more than 70% of the world’s population will live in urban areas. In the face of continuing urbanization, how will communities meet the fundamental need for good food? What kinds of public policies, structures, and systems will ensure equitable and just access to food? We argue that urban universities have a responsibility and an extraordinary opportunity to help create equitable community food systems by amplifying community-led planning and policy to strengthen such systems. Drawing on case studies involving the University at Buffalo State University of New York system and its community partners, we describe the ways in which community-university partnerships can leverage policy change to support stronger food systems. We conclude with lessons for such partnerships: the importance of building lasting relationships for policy change, shoring up community capacity, understanding the benefits and burdens for universities and communities, and reimagining universities’ responsibilities to their regions.

Examining the Food Retail Choice Context in Urban Food Deserts, Ohio, 2015

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) characterizes food deserts as low-income neighborhoods that distinctly lack supermarkets and grocery stores (1). This definition elevates the importance of large food retailers where Americans spend most of their food dollars and deemphasizes the contributions of smaller food stores such as convenience and dollar stores for food choice decision making. Smaller food retailers are more prevalent than large food retailers (2), and excluding them from the conceptualization of food deserts has implications for research, policy, and practice focused on reducing chronic disease through improvements to local food environments.

The Local Food Policy Audit: Spanning the Civic-Political Agrifood Divide

Transformation of the food system rests, in part, on changing the rules by which all actors play. Many of these rules take the form of public policy, whether they be laws, regulations, government spending or other tools used to impact markets. So concerns are raised when local groups in the food movement are reluctant to politically engage to change these rules. This chapter begins by outlining the concepts of food democracy, civic agriculture and civic food networks and their relevance to the advocacy coalition framework (ACF). Then the ACF is used to organize a case study of the Franklin County Local Food Council and its transition from a civically-oriented group to an advocacy coalition through the use of a technical tool—the food policy audit . The chapter concludes by suggesting that community-based food groups have a responsibility to span the civic-political divide and bring food system governance back into balance.

Examination of the Strategy, Instruments, and Measurements Used to Evaluate a Healthy Corner Store Intervention

As more interest is paid by researchers and community groups to food insecure communities and the associated health impacts for residents, interventions have been conducted to improve healthy food accessibility. Not much literature can be found, however, evaluating the healthy corner store programs implemented to improve the food environment and change consumer behavior. This case study attempts to fill that gap with an examination and discussion of the strategies developed by a community collaborative to evaluate a healthy corner store project for a coupled individual and environmentally based intervention. We address limitations of the evaluation approach and recommendations for improving community-based assessment.

Book Review: Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability

experience in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Gaffikin and his coauthors, then, point beyond The City in this insightful plea: “[A] credible theory of the contemporary urban should start by forsaking the skewed cultural lens of Westerncentrism and its habitual exclusion of ‘massive urban change’ cities in the developing world. Given the demographic impetus in the cities of the global south, the genesis of an alternative urban praxis should be sought there. And there we find, as normal, conditions of informality and differentiated citizenship that provide the basis for urban resilience amid acute sociospatial exclusion” (327). The book, in the end, is testament to the rich spectrum of social-scientific research on all things urban and to the work that remains to be done. I found myself fascinated by as well as often disagreeing with many of the statements on city and theory in this edited collection. Its U.S.-specificity is unfortunate and limiting at times but it also gives the project focus. It is also perhaps the reason why problematic terms like “white flight” or “ghetto” are used without the appropriate qualification or even critique (167). What would those terms mean outside of U.S. histories and geographies? With few exceptions, and with its focus on demography, residential neighborhoods, and politics, there is little in this book on urban theory in terms of the productive base of the resurgence of the city in society and subsequently in social theory that has been spawned by the new economic geographies of work, whether one focuses on the creative urbanities of inner cities or the sprawling globalized regional economies in which they are embedded. Still, this book is an important marker in the quest to further urban theory. As did its predecessors from Chicago (1925) and Los Angeles (1996), The City Revisited stands as a lasting, if uncontested, guidepost to how we organize our thinking on the urban.

Food By Jennifer Clapp Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2012

Food. A provocative title in its simplicity, but by no means does Clapp provide a simple story of the forces that shape the world food economy and contribute to current food crises. Clapp establishes a framework of four basic forces that mediate the relationships between the usual story lines of supply and demand: the state-led globalization of the industrial food market, the politics behind the uneven agricultural trade rules and trade liberalization, the powerful transnational corporations (TNCs) that take advantage of newly created spaces, and the “financialization” of food. Clapp provides evidence of the magnitude and importance of these forces by pulling together several research traditions to tell a more complete story. As a result, this book sits at the intersection of historical agricultural policy and influence of the state, the political economy of the agrifood system, and the globalization of the financial system. Research on the economic spaces of agriculture and production has waxed and waned over the past few decades. Lately, economic spaces of food and of consumption seem to be more in vogue. Economic spaces of the financial system have occupied a wholly different space outside research on food and agriculture. By pulling these areas of research together, Clapp demonstrates how these geographies overlap and reinforce one another. The resultant spaces, enabled by the state and governed by TNCs, establish the norms that the agrifood system functions by today. In Chapter 1, Clapp provides the full framing of the book, which essentially is built on the four major forces mentioned earlier. The subsequent four chapters flesh out each of these influences, with every chapter building on the one before and reinforcing the framework. In Chapter 2, Clapp explains how historical protective agricultural policies enabled the current political economy of the agrifood system. These same protectionist policies promoted the adoption of the industrial model of production. Through the collaboration of governments, international development agencies, and private foundations, surpluses, resulting from industrial production in wealthy countries, were dumped to reduce storage costs and to establish new markets—creating the dependence of poorer countries on wealthier ones. Taking this dependence one step further, Clapp explains in Chapter 3 how development assistance to poorer countries was tied to the adoption of the industrial model and trade liberalization—strengthening the position of powerful, wealthy countries and firms in these countries that they already enjoyed. As poorer countries’ market doors were thrown open and wealthier countries continued price supports, poorer countries became net importers of agricultural products. Chapter 4 addresses how agri-related TNCs horizontally and vertically integrated and concentrated to support the expanding industrial production of the agrifood system and its need for inputs, processing facilities, and distribution infrastructure. These TNCs rose in power and took a seat at the international policy table, made rules, and dictated new ways to introduce value-added opportunities. Chapter 5 describes how the latest valueadded products are found by firmly integrating food commodities into the financial system. Further expanding their roles, TNCs now straddle both the food and financial systems. This last move has increased the distance between growers and eaters and opened up the food sector to greater volatility and vulnerability in world markets. Clapp concludes in Chapter 6 by exploring the question of whether change in the agrifood system should come from within the current system or outside the constructed global 195 BO O K R EV EW