Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T15:25:30.821Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The ‘Hungry Gap’: Twitter, local press reporting and urban agriculture activism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2017

Matt Reed  and
Daniel Keech
Matt Reed*
Affiliation:
Countryside and Community Research Institute, University of Gloucestershire, Gloucester, UK.
Daniel Keech
Affiliation:
Countryside and Community Research Institute, University of Gloucestershire, Gloucester, UK.
*
*Corresponding author: mreed@glos.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper is concerned with how urban food activists related to the media during 2015, when Bristol was the European Green Capital (EGC), how they represented themselves and how others represented their agenda. Our intention is to inform the debates on urban agriculture (UA) and, more specifically, to contribute to discussions about ‘scaling up’ UA. To achieve this, we adopt a form of analysis that rests on Castells’ insights about contemporary protest movements, the media and the role of communication technologies in constituting social power. By using Bristol, a city with a well-developed and studied urban agriculture movement, we suggest new areas for consideration that focus on the importance of communication in the development of the movement. Our study relied only on publicly available data; newspaper reports about the EGC and a sample of the social media used by the urban food networks in the city. We found that the mass media was mainly concerned with reporting topics other than food and that urban food was not a salient issue in their coverage. The Twitter network we analyzed was a loose constellation of different communities, which shared materials that were mostly concerned with creating a shared, normative picture of urban food. By considering the structure of these forms of media, we can observe the assembly of the forms of communication and their content. The paper concludes that the self-representation of urban food networks at that time reveals a narrow focus of interest. This emphasis may have contributed to the lack of connection within the city between potential allies. Our conclusion supports similar research findings in neighboring communities, which have observed the limited connections of urban food networks to the circuits of power and influence.

Keywords

urban agricultureBristolfood activismsocial networkssocial media
Type
Research Paper
Information
Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems , Volume 33 , Special Issue 6: Themed Content: Critical Foodscapes , December 2018 , pp. 558 - 568
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bennett, W.L. 2012. The personalisation of politics: Political identity, social media, and changing patterns of participation. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 644:20–39.Google Scholar
Bennett, W.L. and Segerberg, A. 2011. Digital media and the personalization of collective action. Information, Communication and Society 14:770–799.Google Scholar
Bristol City Council 2013. A Good Food Plan for Bristol Bristol.Google Scholar
Brunori, G. and Iavcovo Di, F. 2014. Urban food security and landscape change: A demand-side approach. Landscape Research 39:141–157.Google Scholar
Burch, D. and Lawrence, G. 2009. Towards a third food regime: behind the transformation. Agriculture and Human Values 26:267–279.Google Scholar
Carey, J. 2011. Who Feeds Bristol? Towards a Resilient food Plan. Bristol Partnership, Bristol.Google Scholar
Carey, J. 2013. Urban and community food strategies. The case of Bristol. International Planning Studies 18:111–128.Google Scholar
Castells, M. 2011. Communication Power. Oxford University Press, London.Google Scholar
Castells, M. 2012. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Polity Press, London.Google Scholar
Conover, M., Ratkiewicz, J., Francisco, B., Gonçalves, B., Flammini, A., and Menczer, F. 2011. Political Polarization on Twitter. In Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Barcelona, Spain.Google Scholar
Conover, M.D., Gonçalves, B., Flammini, A., and Menczer, F. 2012. Partisan asymmetries in online political activity. EPJ Data Science 1: 6. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds6.Google Scholar
Cook, G., Reed, M., and Twiner, A. 2009. “But it's all true!” Commercialism and commitment in the discourse of organic food promotion. Text and Talk 29:151–173.Google Scholar
Crossley, N. 1999. Working Utopias and social movements: An investigation using case study materials from radical mental health movements in Britain. Sociology 33:809–830.Google Scholar
Crossley, N. 2008. The man whose web expanded: Network dynamics in Manchester's post/punk scene 1976–1980. Poetics 37:24–49.Google Scholar
Della Porta, D. and Diani, M. 2006. Social Movements: An Introduction, London, Blackwell.Google Scholar
Digrazia, J., Mckelvey, K., Bollen, J., and Rojas, F. 2013. More tweets, more votes: Social media as a quantitative indicator of political behavior. PLoS ONE 8:e79449.Google Scholar
Fligstein, N. 2010. Euro-Clash. The EU, European Identity, and The Future of Europe. Oxford University Press, Oxford.Google Scholar
Franklin, A. and Marsden, T. 2015. (Dis)connected communities and sustainable place-making. Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 20:940–956.Google Scholar
Hardman, M. and Larkham, P.J. 2014. The rise of the ‘food charter’: A mechanism to increase urban agriculture. Land Use Policy 39:400–402.Google Scholar
Hess, D.J. 2005. Technology- and product-oriented movements: Approximating social movement studies and science and technology studies. Science, Technology and Human Values 30:515–535.Google Scholar
Hollows, J. 2003. Oliver's Twist: Leisure, labour and domestic masculinity in The Naked Chef. International Journal of Cultural Studies 6:229–248.Google Scholar
Hollows, J. and Jones, S. 2010. ‘At least he‚ is doing something‚’: Moral entrepreneurship and individual responsibility in Jamie's Ministry of Food. European Journal of Cultural Studies 13:307–322.Google Scholar
Hollstein, B. 2011. Qualitative approaches. In Scott, J. and Carrington, P.J. (eds) The Sage Handbook of Social Network Analysis. Sage, London, pp. 404–417.Google Scholar
Hooghe, L. and Marks, G. 2009. A postfunctionalist theory of European integration: From permissive consensus to constraining dissensus. British Journal of Political Science 39:1–23.Google Scholar
Kang, J. 2012. A volatile public: The 2009 whole foods boycott on facebook. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 56:562–577.Google Scholar
Kirwan, J., Ilbery, B., Maye, D., and Carey, J. 2013. Grassroots social innovations and food localisation: An investigation of the Local Food programme in England. Global Environmental Change 23:830–837.Google Scholar
Lockie, S., Lyons, K., Lawrence, G., and Halpin, D. 2006. Going Organic. Mobilizing Networks for Environmentally Responsible Food Production. CABI, Wallingford.Google Scholar
Maslen, C., Raffle, A., Marriott, S., and Smith, N. 2013. Food Poverty. What does the Evidence Tell Us. Bristol City Council, Bristol.Google Scholar
Melucci, A. and Avritzer, L. 2000. Complexity, cultural pluralism and democracy: Collective action in the public space. Social Science Information 34:507–527.Google Scholar
Miller, D. 1999. Risk, science and policy: Definitional struggles, information management, the media and BSE. Social Science and Medicine 49:1239–1255.Google Scholar
Moragues-Faus, A. and Morgan, K. 2015. Reframing the foodscape: The emergent world of urban food policy. Environment and Planning A 47:1558–1573.Google Scholar
Morgan, K. 2014. The new urban foodscape: Planning, politics and power. In Viljoen, A. and Bohn, K. (eds) Second Nature Urban Agriculture. Designing Productive Cities. Ten year on from the Continuous Productive Urban Landscape Concept. Routledge, London, pp. 18–24.Google Scholar
Morgan, K. 2015. Nourishing the city: The rise of the urban food question in the Global North. Urban Studies 52:1379–1394.Google Scholar
Newton, J., Franklin, A., Middleton, J., and Marsden, T. 2012. (Re-)negotiating access: The politics of researching skills and knowledge for ‘sustainable communities’. Geoforum 43:585–594.Google Scholar
Obach, B. and Tobin, K. 2014. Civic agriculture and community engagement. Agriculture and Human Values 31:307–322.Google Scholar
Obach, B.K. 2015. Organic Struggle. The Movement for Sustainable Agriculture in the United States. MIT Press, London.Google Scholar
Opitz, I., Berges, R., Piorr, A., and Krikser, T. 2015. Contributing to food security in urban areas: Differences between urban agriculture and peri-urban agriculture in the Global North. Agriculture and Human Values, 33:341–358.Google Scholar
Papacharissi, Z. 2002. The virtual sphere – The internet as a public sphere. New Media and Society, 4(1):9–27.Google Scholar
Pudup, M-B. 2008. It takes a garden: Cultivating citizen-subjects in organized garden projects. Geoforum 39:1228–1240.Google Scholar
Reed, M. 2010. Rebels for the Soil. The Rise of the Global Organic Food and Farming Movement. Earthscan, London.Google Scholar
Reed, M., Curry, N., Keech, D., Kirwan, J., and Maye, D. (2013) City-region report synthesis, Work package 2/Deliverable 2.3 for SUPURBFOOD (Towards sustainable modes of urban and peri-urban food provisioning), a Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community. Grant agreement no: 312126. Gloucester, October.Google Scholar
Reed, M. and Keech, D. 2017. Gardening cyberspace-social media and hybrid spaces in the creation of food citizenship in the Bristol city-region, UK. Landscape Research, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2017.1336517Google Scholar
Scott, J. and Carrington, P.J. 2011. The Sage Handbook of Social Network Analysis. Sage, London.Google Scholar
Sonnino, R. 2016. The new geography of food security: Exploring the potential of urban food strategies. Geographical Journal 182:190–200.Google Scholar
Specht, K., Siebert, R., Hartmann, I., Freisinger, U., Sawicka, M., Werner, A., Thomaier, S., Henckel, D., Walk, H., and Dierich, A. 2014. Urban agriculture of the future: An overview of sustainability aspects of food production in and on buildings. Agriculture and Human Values 31:33–51.Google Scholar
Taylor, J. and Lovell, S. 2014. Urban home food gardens in the Global North: Research traditions and future directions. Agriculture and Human Values 31:285–305.Google Scholar
The Bristol Post 2015. LIVE UPDATES: Bailiffs move in to evict Stapleton Allotment tree-top protesters. Bristol Post, 12 March 2015.Google Scholar
Urbact 2015. Sustainable Foodin Urban Communities Developing low-carbon and resource-efficient urban food systems, by focusing on three areas: growing, delivering and enjoying food. Bristol, http://bristolfoodpolicycouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Bristol-URBACT-LAP-summary-REV8-3.pdf.Google Scholar