Infrastructuring Food Democracy: Designing Social Innovations with Food Citizens in North East England

Abstract

This thesis explores design approaches to social innovations in our food system through demo cratic participation. In the Global North, social and technological interventions to support more sustainable and healthier food practices have largely focused on behaviour change and the indi vidualisation of responsibility. However, to address the environmental crisis and socio-economic inequality, the notion of food democracy calls for reframing food consumers possessing limited agency to emancipatory food citizens. In this thesis, I introduce food democracy as a framework for design to invite people to take agency and ownership over their relationships with food. In turn, I propose infrastructuring, a participatory design approach to social innovation, to create and sustain spaces of food citizenship. This framework is contextualised within three connected participatory action research projects in Meadow Well, an area of high socio-economic deprivation in North East England. Over the course of four years, I collaborated with a range of organisations and the local community to co-produce and evaluate a local food hub, a community garden, and food engagements with children. The findings from the food hub show how in the context of deprivation both the technological infrastructures and the principles of food democracy need to be applied flexibly to enable inclusive participation. The community garden project highlighted the differences between charity work and autonomous and self-organised food citizenship. Finally, working with children underlined the importance of direct socio-material experience of food, in which technologies need to be configured carefully. The thesis concludes that while food democracy offers a productive shift in how designers can think about ‘users’ of food technologies, the empirical insights from a context of socio economic deprivation problematise idealised notions of ‘active’ citizenship. It develops three design implications: the importance of socio-material relationships, the possibilities of food citizenship in the context of socio-economic deprivation, and considerations of power in food infrastructures. The thesis contributes food democracy as a design framework for engaged HCI, infrastructuring as an approach for open-ended innovations through which new capacities for food citizenship can form, and empirical insights into the challenges of doing food democracy in a context of socio-economic deprivation.