Growing the Just city? The contribution of urban food projects to inclusive urbanism and healthy livelihoods in conditions of austerity

This research seeks to investigate the role that urban food and gardening initiatives have in empowering communities to build community economies based around principles of sharing and co-operation. This is in a context of urban austerity, which is usually conceptualised negatively, as an absence (of capacity, of funding, of wellbeing). Rather, the project seeks to use urban food growing as a lens through which to explore and illuminate more positive accounts of how people in cities, characterised (in part) by austerity, are looking to live well and create spaces of hope and justice in the city (North, 2011). Within the city of Liverpool, food, and growing food, will be explored as a way in which citizens can take back control of how a space is produced, ensuring both that as a space of justice, and as part of a more diverse account of how cities work, it contributes positively to everyday consumption patterns in austere cities (Hall, 2015).