The University as a Critical Player of the Urban Food Policies. Towards a Food Atlas for the City of Trieste

In the interdisciplinary food debate, food atlases are increasingly gaining attention. However, there is a lack of shared understanding of what a food atlas is, how it works and its empirical effects in reading the food-city nexus while driving its transformation. On the one hand, food atlases’ blurred contours highlight their potentiality for experimentation in diverse contexts, downscaling European food politics to local urban policies. On the other hand, this suggests that the food atlas may act as a critical device to upscale food micropolitics, where urban food policy is absent or precarious. It seems relevant to explore the food atlas to disentangle its spatial agency. By questioning the university’s role in re-shaping the food-city nexus, this study offers a preliminary Food Atlas for the multicultural city of Trieste. Despite the lack of urban food policies, Trieste and its university are relevant as a case study due to the recent rise of sustainable food practices and socially engaged food actors, suggesting the emergence of a food citizenship struggling to upscale its agency. Thus, the case study’s specificity offers a lens to frame the food atlas and its spatial agency, shedding light on the challenges, potentialities, and limitations of exercising a systemic approach to food planning.