Julia Spanier presents at Urban Inhabitation conference in Sheffield

Julia Spanier presented a paper titled ‘Rural-urban care? Interrogating the transformation of city-countryside relations in community-supported agriculture‘ at the Urban Inhabitation in the Anthropocene conference at the University of Sheffield.

Abstract

In line with a relational ontology of space and place , I propose to think urban inhabitation by transgressing the conventionally set ‘boundaries’ of the city and foregrounding its entanglements with rural and periurban realities. This is based on the premise that imagining novel urban futures necessarily entails imagining the role of the rural in these futures. In this paper, I engage with these rural-urban entanglements by looking at the ways in which community-supported agriculture (CSA) initiatives transform the relationship between urban and rural dwellers. CSA connects food producers, most often based in peri-urban and rural areas, with consumers based in the nearby, and most often urban, areas who then commit to collectively bear the annual costs (and risks) of agriculture in return for a share of the harvest.
This paper draws on empirical research on four CSA initiatives in Germany, a total of 43 interviews, to explore the different, and more and less successful, ways in which CSAs contribute to the reconfiguration of cultural as well as material rural-urban relations . Specifically, I interrogate the concept of care in rural-urban relations, tentatively theorized as opposite and alternative to existing capitalist city-countryside relations, broadly characterized by socially unjust and ecologically unsustainable material circulation and exploitation alongside cultural polarization. While problematizing the many absences and difficulties of rural-urban care and encounter in the everyday performance of CSA, the paper casts a new light on the affects of sympathy and compassion when practiced between consumers and farmers : these relations of care may constitute alternative relations between city and countryside; novel rural-urban relations desperately needed in the Anthropocene.