ABSTRACT

This chapter seeks to address why academic and activist framings of food issues vary so significantly between the Northern and Southern research contexts and why Southern food research so strongly conflates urban food security with urban agriculture. It describes the different framings of growing food in cities in the North and South, and then investigates the roots of the Southern discourse by focusing on Africa in the researchers' imagination, the framing of African urbanism and the construction of the African urbanite. While the urban agriculture and wider food system research seeks to highlight the impact of the current economic and political constellation on social and economic exclusion, human health, environmental degradation, neo-imperialism, and the like, there is often still a ludic quality about the associated activism. Researchers working on urban agriculture in North America, in particular, have focused on the non-food security aspects of urban agriculture.