Gareth HAYSOM, African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, South Africa
The population of food and nutrition insecure urban residents is growing in absolute terms in cities of Sub-Saharan Africa.1 Africa is urbanizing at an unprecedented rate.2 Current framings of the urban food and nutrition challenge, policy orientations, and developmental responses are ill-equipped to engage both the pace and scale of Africa's urbanization. Despite evolving definitions of food security, food and nutrition insecurity in Africa remains framed as a food provision issue.3 Questions of food access, agency and the sustainability of urban food systems are largely occluded from urban food and nutrition policy and development programs. A critical area, overlooked in current urban food system policy and programming is the role that infrastructure, both material and social, plays in determining food and nutrition outcomes. Infrastructure is key to Africa’s urban transition. Africa’s urban transition of the next few decades will be formative of future developmental opportunities across the continent – a key determining factor of Africa’s ecological and sustainability -oriented future.4 Food offers a useful lens to interrogate the diverse forms of hybrid infrastructures used in African cities. Given the extractive colonial nature of Africa’s economy, Africa’s food system has in fact always been an urban system. If Africa's current and future challenges are going to be effectively addressed, work on Africa’s urban transition needs to understand past path dependencies enacted through historical policy frameworks. Issues have to be understood as inter-dependent. Africa's urban food and nutrition challenge is impacted by temporal relational contexts of action, requiring that issues are understood through processes of iteration, projectivity and practical evaluation.5 The urban food/infrastructure nexus poses generative and novel questions of Africa’s urbanization, questions seldom asked by policy makers and geographers seeking to understand African cities.
Mots clés : Food security|Nutrition security|Africa’s urban transition|Urbanisation|Infrastructure
A103942GH