Re-imagining foodspaces-welfare nexus across scales: building proximity networks

Recently, researchers highlighted how diseases and inequalities built by the contemporary food system express and spatialise themselves differently worldwide, prioritising extreme conditions while shedding light on their material expression, territorial distribution, and urban planning responsibilities in drawing these geographies. This contribution aims to underline forms of food poverty in contexts where the phenomenon is turning again into a structural issue, even though less extreme. Italian contexts well represent this condition (the case study of Trieste, in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region, will be considered in this contribution), where recent global crises are indeed increasing the number of people in poverty, considered in its multifaceted dimensions. In this context, the emergence of downscaling microstrategies and practices represents a potential prime mover towards more structured welfare strategies and politics. On the other hand, micro-strategies and practices could be upscaled through interconnections among foodspaces and between these and the city. Three case studies are thus analysed to underline foodspaces’ potential in generating welfare networks. In these examples, residential and domestic spaces are reconfigured in strict relation to urban spaces, designing urban infrastructures for collective care. Considering these premises, the main objective of this contribution is to unveil foodspaces potential as potential devices towards the welfare re-territorialisation.