Book review: Urban Food Mapping: Making Visible the Edible City
reviewed by Alyssa Renteria
Bohn, Katrin, and Tomkins, Mikey. Urban Food Mapping: Making Visible the Edible City. First edition. New York: Routledge, 2024. 338 p. $45.99. LC: 2023033861. ISBN: 978-1-032-40281-9 (pbk), 978-1-003-35228-0 (ebk)
Urban Food Mapping is a collection of stories detailing how researchers are utilizing creative mapping methods to explore the relationships between people, food, and urban spaces and overcome digital mapping limitations. Co-authors Katrin Bohn and Mikey Tomkins admit they are not professional cartographers and neither are the majority of the book contributors. Instead, Katrin Bohn is an architect, urban practitioner, and principal lecturer at the University of Brighton. Mikey Tomkins is an independent researcher, artist, and director of Edible Urban (an urban agriculture consulting practice). Additional contributors largely have backgrounds in arts, architecture, and urban studies, influencing the book to resemble a landscape architecture book.
This book is broken down into five sections following the five urban food mapping themes: sites, activities, stakeholders, produce/cultures, and networks/resources. Each section contains five stories and after each section introduction there is a visual matrix; a two-page table spread displaying the visuals from each chapter organized by how they connect to the themes with details of the maps purpose (who, what, where, why, and how) and mapping methods involved (drawing, photography, interviewing, etc.). The vibrant colored visuals are mainly digital drawings, analog drawings, and photographs. The digital maps lean towards minimalism and would be difficult to reproduce or understand without written context since they may be missing essential map elements (scales, compass roses, labels). In the physical version, a few maps would benefit from enlargement in order for readers to be able to see finer details of more complex maps. In contrast, the digital diagrams were legible and easy to understand. The high quality analog drawings and photographs broke up the text into manageable sections and added to the overall aesthetic.
This book helps fill a gap in the literature by focusing on urban food mapping, a subtopic of community food mapping. A majority of the stories center around food growing and gathering with examples involving a wide range of urban land use classifications. The food production methods also varied between well cultivated areas, like community gardens, to foraging in transient spaces. Most of the study sites were in cities shaped by the Garden City Movement and over half of the study sites occurred in Europe with a bias towards Southern England. The sites experience average to high levels of humidity and most experience low to moderate levels of light; while not the only factors to consider during food production, they do indicate the areas are suitable for food growing.
This book could serve as supplementary material for an introductory course involving food systems. It would pair fittingly with a food systems textbook such as Integrating Food Into Urban Planning. Individuals new to conducting ethnographic research would be interested in this book for stories like mapping aguaje palm fruit vendors in Iquitos, Peru. Readers interested in mapping methods involving crowd science would benefit from stories like mapping Malus in Massachusetts, which details how a college course created a system for apple foraging over the years. Many of the studies were impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic in which the people they were communicating with or physical spaces they were studying changed dramatically. In response to the public health crisis and resulting regulations, the relationship and meaning of food to our human experience becomes very apparent which suits urban residents seeking methods to reconnect with food systems.
For experienced food researchers or food lovers, this will probably not satisfy their curiosities since the chapters are short and do not touch on all of the activities in our complex food systems. Topics such as temporary food experiences (pop-up restaurants, food trucks, carnivals, ghost kitchens), fast food, food delivery, labor networks, safety and accessibility in urban food environments, food and nutrition education, restaurant review sites, social media food trends, and food waste were alluded to but missing.
Urban Food Mapping is a collection of stories in which researchers use experimental cartography techniques, primarily mixed media mapping (e.g. digital and analog, collages, montages, repurposing objects into multidimensional maps) to capture the food experiences of individuals in urban communities. The stories largely center around the relationships in the food production process in Western world temperate urban environments. Overall, this book is good for readers new to artistic mapping, urban agriculture, and reconnecting with their food roots.
Alyssa Renteria
Data Visualization and GIS Specialist
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Las Vegas, NV
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