Consuming the Creative City: Gastrodevelopment in a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy with Eden Kinkaid

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0:00:08.7 Eden Kinkaid: The history of this displacement and destruction are alive, right? And they keep resurfacing in these debates about development, housing, gentrification, as well as this designation. So in the context of racialized development in Tucson, this project of Gastro-Development does not appear to meaningfully break from these histories and dynamics. And this is obvious to folks working on the South Side, where these kind of development gentrification pressures are mounting.

0:00:39.2 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts Lectures, where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video, transcript, and graphic recordings are available on our website, shareable.net. Just click the link in the show notes. And now, here’s the host of Cities@Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:01:13.1 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities@Tufts virtual colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman and together with my research assistants, Deandra Boyle and Grant Perry, and our partners Shareable and the Barr Foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross-disciplinary academic initiative which recognises Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. We’re delighted to welcome Dr Eden Kinkaid. Eden’s a human geographer and social scientist whose work focuses on themes of sustainable and equitable food and agricultural systems, place, race and development. They have researched these themes in North India and in the US Southwest.

0:02:05.5 Julian Agyeman: In addition, they publish on topics of feminist, queer and trans geographies, geographic theory, creative geographies and diversity, equity and inclusion in academia. Their work has been published in some really impressive journals, Urban Geography, Progress in Human Geography, Transactions of the British Institute of Geographers, I think it should be Institute of British Geographers, but hey, the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Environment and Planning D, and various other journals and books. Eden has served as an editor at Gender, Place and Culture, the Graduate Journal of Food Studies, and You Are Here, the Journal of Creative Geography. Eden’s talk today is Consuming the Creative City, Gastro-Development in a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy. It’s quite a mouthful that, Eden. But a Zoomtastic welcome, Eden, to Cities@Tufts.

0:03:09.2 Eden Kinkaid: Thank you so much for that spirited introduction. I’m excited to be with you all today to present some of my work that I’ve been conducting here in Tucson, Arizona for the last several years. And I just wanna give a shout out at the start to my collaborator, Ellen Platt. We did much of this project together and a lot of collaborative research and writing. So I always want to recognize her as well, even though she’s not in the room with us. So without further ado, so in December 2015, Tucson became the first city in the United States to be awarded the Creative City of Gastronomy designation by UNESCO, which is the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. So this designation is awarded to cities in recognition of their rich agricultural histories, their vibrant food cultures, and more specifically, their efforts to somehow leverage this food culture in the service of sustainable development, which is defined in alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

0:04:02.0 Eden Kinkaid: So these goals include metrics for both environmental sustainability and social equity. So this designation was the culmination of efforts by a loose coalition of actors in Tucson, including the city and county officials, the mayor’s office, Tucson’s destination marketing or tourism organization, various actors in the local food system, as well as a group interested in protecting the cultural heritage of this area. And over the next several years, this designation would give rise to an organization called the Tucson City of Gastronomy, which is a nonprofit with a board of directors that kind of governs this designation and its use. It would also prompt a flurry of activities, fundraising, marketing, educational programs, chef exchanges, certification programs, festivals, and food tours. And all of these activities are part of what I’ll describe following Pascale Joassart-Marcelli as gastro development.

0:04:58.1 Eden Kinkaid: And this is a strategy of leveraging food culture for urban development. And all of these activities are also reportedly in the service of this lofty vision of sustainable development. So my research project asks, what would this designation mean for the city of Tucson? How would the food heritage of the city be mobilized and leveraged for development and for whom? We also might ask, what does the commodification of food heritage mean for Tucson’s residents, specifically the indigenous and Latinx populations whose food cultures are really at the center of this designation? And in a food city, in a food system that is marked by forms of racialized hunger and in a city shaped by stark inequalities of urban uneven development, what exactly would this designation set into motion? Does it herald a new kind of horizon of creative and sustainable development for Tucson or will it merely repeat longstanding histories of cultural appropriation, revitalization and racialized dispossession? 

0:05:56.6 Eden Kinkaid: So in this talk I explore many of these questions that for me are really at the heart of gastro development as a political, cultural, and economic project. And through a case study of Tucson’s UNESCO City of Gastronomy designation, I demonstrate how gastro development produces and relies upon a circuit of what I perceive to be extractive value production. And this kind of circuit of value brings together this UNESCO designation, various environmental imaginaries, meanings of place, circuits of capital, and processes of urban transformation, all in the name, again, of creative and sustainable development. And throughout the talk, I emphasize how this circuit of value production is racialized. In other words, it relies upon and reproduces forms of racial difference that are both symbolic and material. And it partakes in and contributes to cultural appropriation and risks contributing to gentrification and racialized dispossession.

0:06:52.6 Eden Kinkaid: So given these dynamics and these risks, I argue that the UNESCO designation and this broader kind of vision of gastro development that it’s a part of tends to produce Tucson’s food heritage as a kind of white cultural and economic possession, which should, of course, trouble us if we’re concerned with equity and such matters. So that’s just a bit of where we’re going. So the connections between food and processes of urban development are increasingly gaining the attention of scholars in geography and in food studies as well. And food culture and more specifically alternative food systems have a role in driving processes of urban change, in part because they’ve been seen as these kind of potential sources of symbolic and economic value in cities that are seeking to rebrand themselves as unique, trendy, appealing destinations to live, visit and invest in.

0:07:45.4 Eden Kinkaid: Geographer Pascale Joassart-Marcelli recently coined the term gastro development to refer to these relationships between food culture and processes of urban development. And as a paradigm, gastro development is premised again on the leveraging of food culture as a resource and strategy of economic development. And as she puts it a bit more critically and more precisely, it’s a strategy for urban growth and capital accumulation. So this project relies on gastro tourism, so food or culinary tourism, and the construction of the city as a kind of destination for food culture and the consumption of that culture. It also relies on a larger branding project and trying to brand the city as a creative city. So food culture becomes incorporated into this package of kind of place-based natural and cultural amenities, things like the natural landscape, the weather, arts districts, recreational facilities, a lively downtown and other what Pasc has called magnetic qualities of place that are used to draw new businesses and residents to the city.

0:08:43.4 Eden Kinkaid: So this vision of gastro development is very much in keeping with the kind of creative cities model of urban development, in which it’s a particular class of people, right, upwardly mobile, highly educated, typically white consumers that are accorded and attracted to the city to promote consumption, mainly, but under the guise of something called urban revitalization, which is gentrification, basically. So here I’m drawing on Pascale’s excellent book, $16 Taco. If you’re interested in this idea of gastro development, that is an excellent place to start. So according to Pascale, gastro development is imagined and enacted by a network of actors that she describes as an urban food machine riffing on the urban growth machine concept. And this is a group of urban elites and managers that are creating cosmopolitan foodscapes that are conducive to growth, rising property values, and gentrification.

0:09:35.3 Eden Kinkaid: So she describes how local media, government agencies, real estate brokers, community-based organizations, and nonprofits are unexpectedly joining forces in the service of gastro development and more broadly in the service of boosterism, urban growth, and the transformation of urban foodscapes. So she’s keen to point out that, “The ultimate goal of this food machine is not to support the food industry or to feed urban masses, but to promote urban growth and capital accumulation.” Clearly aligning it with a broader kind of landscape of neoliberal development projects. So how exactly is this accomplished? Part of my dissertation project was trying to understand how is value produced and leveraged and circulated within this project of gastro development. So in a sense, gastro development is a means of producing new forms of value, which we can understand through the language of capital.

0:10:24.0 Eden Kinkaid: In my recent paper in urban geography, me and Ellen, my collaborator, approached Tucson’s food heritage as a form of cultural capital. Which is a kind of value that’s embedded in the communities and everyday spaces of heritage foods. So cultural capital names a diversity of resources, including things like cultural awareness and knowledge, aesthetics, educational, cultural goods, and objects. So cultural capital in this instance refers to the kinds of everyday materiality and practice of food heritage held in the hands and the kind of social relations of those who steward and reproduce it. So, this designation, the UNESCO designation, works to convert that cultural capital into what’s called symbolic capital, which is understood as a kind of a form of socially recognized legitimation or honor that can be more easily transformed into economic capital, which is the kind of capital mainly that drives these projects, these actual projects of transforming the urban landscape.

0:11:22.9 Eden Kinkaid: So we call this particular form of symbolic capital gastronomic capital. And those holding gastronomic capital can make use of it for economic purposes. So we draw a lot on Nathan McClintock’s work. He describes the process, a very similar process, looking at how symbolic capital, looking at urban agriculture in Portland, Oregon, and how symbolic capital is similarly extracted in this case. He describes, “Urban agriculturalists themselves do not cash out on this cultural capital. Rather, rentiers, boosters, and financiers exchange these free gifts of culture for economic capital at different scales.” Urban growth coalitions mobilize the symbolic capital to competitively promote a city’s reputation as a hotbed of sustainability and livability in hopes of attracting new investments, skilled labor, and green consumers, just as developers exchange it at the neighborhood scale for differential ground rent.

0:12:19.2 Eden Kinkaid: So it isn’t the producers or it isn’t the people that hold cultural capital or create it or reproduce it that are able to cash out on it. It’s this kind of step where we abstract and transform that into symbolic capital, which is then leveraged at a kind of different scale with different kind of affordances. So crucially, in our case, the transformation of this cultural capital that is multi-ethnic food heritage into this kind of institutionally recognized gastronomic capital operates in tandem with processes of racialization. Through which cultural capital becomes extracted and mobilized. So in our case, as I’ll describe at length throughout this talk, this process of value transformation is driven by predominantly white actors and elite actors that are extracting cultural meanings largely from non-white spaces and traditions.

0:13:10.8 Eden Kinkaid: And the end result is more white food spaces. This is something that Pascale describes also in the case of San Diego. So these processes of value transformation, which operate under the banner of gastro development, become ways in which place, race, food, and cultural practices become transformed in new economically productive ways and in ways that have uneven outcomes. So it’s in this sense that the transformation into a creative city is a clearly racialized process. There’s plenty of work exploring this. The kind of imaginaries of the urban and the city that animate creative cities discourse and more generally touristic cultural economies, they often draw upon the cultural production of racially minoritized groups and repackage it as a kind of trendy, exoticized cultural amenity for consumption by outsiders who tend to be elite and often white.

0:14:08.4 Eden Kinkaid: So while predominantly white and elite audiences consume this kind of commodified product of place, the actual landscapes and spaces from which these symbolic resources are extracted, reimagined and leveraged, spaces which are often coded as non-white, are policed, revitalized, gentrified, and in the case of Tucson, literally bulldozed, razed. A history that I’ll get to in a little bit here. So what I wanna emphasize is that this racialized dynamic is not incidental, right? A racialized differential value is a precondition for the production of these new forms of value. So as Brandy Summer writes, this “Racialization of space is the organizing principle through which unequal and uneven development takes place rather than the results of this development.” She continues that neoliberalism repurposes and reassembles race. And Laura Polito describes how kind of colorblind discourses of multiculturalism, which are very much at play in this celebration of food heritage, these discourses of multiculturalism and diversity rationalize neoliberalism’s racializing project and obscure its racializing project in the name of multiculturalism and cultural celebration.

0:15:15.7 Eden Kinkaid: So I want us to pay careful attention to the manner in which these new forms of value are produced and how they might reproduce historical patterns of dispossession. This value is produced through kind of cultural appropriation, one that relies on this kind of gap between the value of food culture when it’s in the hands of minoritized communities and the value of that culture when it’s controlled and consumed by predominantly white elites. So that gap can be traced through the symbolic and material operations of gastro development, as I will continue to describe. So my project then is motivated by these questions, among some others. How does this urban food machine commodify landscape food heritage in place? And how is food culture transformed and leveraged within this urban food machine to produce new forms of value that underwrite what is called development.

0:16:03.1 Eden Kinkaid: So again, this is based here in Tucson, Arizona, where I currently live. Tucson’s the second largest city in Arizona. It’s located about an hour’s drive from the US-Mexico border. We’re also adjacent to and on the ancestral homelands of the Tala’atam Nation and the Pasquayaki also. Here’s a bit about our race and ethnicity breakdown. I won’t read through this whole chart here, but you can see we’re a multiracial, multiethnic city with nearly 45% of the population Hispanic of any race and about 43% non-Hispanic white and a diversity of other racial and ethnic groups. So tourism and food culture have long been a part of Tucson’s economy and its sense of place. It’s very much a service-based economy drawing a lot on tourism. And this orientation was only solidified by the 2015 UNESCO designation.

0:16:50.6 Eden Kinkaid: Through this designation, Tucson has been recognized for its indigenous desert foods, many of which are shown here on this slide and are foods of the Tohono Oʼodham. Also, it’s Mexican and other Latin American food the influence of Spanish and American colonialism on food traditions, as well as foods from a diversity of refugee groups as we are a resettlement destination. So there’s a lot of different kind of cultural influences here. At the same time that Tucson is celebrated for its culinary diversity, forms of racialized and class inequality shape its food system quite strongly, with Hispanic, Indigenous, and non-white populations facing pronounced food insecurity.

0:17:32.6 Eden Kinkaid: So in 2020, 10% of non-Hispanic white households in Pima County were food insecure compared to 18% of Hispanic households, so almost double. And we know that rates of food security among indigenous households nationwide are estimated to be nearly 24%. And COVID-19’s impacts on the local food system only exacerbated these disparities and led to disproportional gains of insecurity among non-white and Hispanic groups. So poverty is a major factor here. Almost 20% of the population here is living in poverty compared to a national average of under 12%. So there’s this kind of ugly irony at the center of the UNESCO designation. While we’re an international destination for Latinx and Indigenous food, these very populations suffer from food insecurity.

0:18:21.4 Eden Kinkaid: So what does it mean to have this designation in the context of severe food system inequality? And how might this, is this designation addressing that in any way? How might it? So this reality is what kind of motivates me to ask questions about whose heritage we’re leveraging for whose development and to whose benefit. So in terms of methodology, I’m a qualitative researcher. I’m drawing on 41 interviews conducted with stakeholders in the gastro development project. This largely focuses on the board of the Tucson City of Gastronomy. So that was my main focus. However, I also interviewed people at the city and county, representatives from tourism, representatives from food related nonprofits, community activists, farmers, food journalists, anyone that kind of touches this project. I also draw on an extensive media analysis, including the entire four year run of a local food magazine called Edible Baja, Arizona. Maybe y’all have these in your communities. It’s like a franchise and it’s a clearing house for local food media.

0:19:22.9 Eden Kinkaid: And then I also did an analysis of local, national and international newspaper coverage focused on this designation and other related themes. I also engaged in participant observation in many of the spaces in which gastro development unfolds which are markedly White spaces. And I focus on Tucson’s White food spaces and this kind of dominant agenda in an effort to study up, to examine the inner workings of institutions and elites, and also to focus on the agents and subjects of racialization, not the objects following Julie Gutman’s intervention there. So I have plenty to say about my positionality as a White person in this who does not speak Spanish. I did not set out to research in Tucson. I actually worked in India and speak Hindi for five or six years, and COVID forced me to do my research here. So it’s imperfect in that regard. And I have plenty of thoughts about my positionality and how that kind of factors into this work. If you’re interested, you could ask me in the Q&A.

0:20:16.0 Eden Kinkaid: So the designation, right is a way to sell a particular story of Tucson’s food culture and the broader kind of food culture of Southern Arizona. So what does this story look like in a dominant telling? The story begins in the Sonoran Desert. The Sonoran Desert and its foods are a kind of key differentiator in terms of Tucson’s gastronomic culture and tourism branding, just ’cause it’s such a unique and fascinating landscape. So the desert, it’s food and it’s kind of mystique figure largely in narratives of this region and it’s food culture and food histories. And I’m currently working on a paper that this section’s drawing on while it’s under revision for resubmission where I approach these stories as White settler food stories. So here’s a couple excerpts that I think represent broader repeating kind of themes in these stories. The first here is by Barbara Kingsolver, who is a well-known food and I don’t know, general writer.

0:21:19.6 Eden Kinkaid: She says, most people who live in the desert, if they’re paying attention, have a gut understanding that their cities function essentially as space stations with every ounce of sustenance shipped in from less hostile atmospheres. Biologically speaking, this landscape is equipped to support no more than a handful of humans who lived, hunted and cultivated seasonal temporary being patches before Europeans ever knew the place existed. And then we have another person who’s a artisan of local food artisan saying there were always rules where I came from, out here the Wild West, the way Arizona is, you never know what’s next. And so you don’t know what the limitations are. So these little blurbs encapsulate some of the tropes that run throughout characterizations of this region. And these stories often erase indigenous histories and presence in the region, which is the very reason why this designation was granted in the first place, is because here in Tucson, there’s the oldest recorded evidence of food cultivation in the United States.

0:22:22.1 Eden Kinkaid: Yet somehow we managed to find a way to erase these histories in the telling of these stories. So, for example, chefs expressed surprise that anything can even grow here. And food writers compare life in the desert to a space station in a hostile terrain that’s not meant to support life. Others working within the local food system compare Arizona to the wild West and this kind of untamed terrain where anything goes. So the desert is described as both inhospitable and devoid of life, but yet simultaneously as a space of daring and discovery. And this runs out all kinds of a, this runs through all kinds of advertising and storytelling around the local food system. And these descriptions often make use of frontier metaphors and sensibilities as they describe predominantly white artisans attempts to wrestle food and wrestle taste from this radically other and inhospitable environment.

0:23:03.9 Eden Kinkaid: And these narratives drive their appeal by reproducing of frontier mythology that portrays as McClintock describes, portrays the boundaries of racialized space as a frontier and the white people who cross these lines as pioneers. So through these desert imaginaries and discourses of discovery, Southern Arizona’s landscapes move through a process of decertification and devaluation and are characterized these kind of empty characterized as empty and barren places and spaces that only become revalued through their discovery by White producers who market their products as possessing this elusive kind of desert terroir and there’s all these subtext of this kind of White masculinity that run throughout these discussions. White food producers and writers audaciously position their experiments in processing indigenous foods, things like prickly pear and mesquite as the start of a trend that no one had been doing or that no one had been doing properly despite the whole indigenous histories of these foods.

0:24:08.6 Eden Kinkaid: So this discovery of the desert and its foods feeds into narratives of the uniqueness of this region that then becomes mobilized as part of this kind of gastronomic brand. The value of this landscape, however, seems to hinge on reimagining it as a White space that is discovered and made to bloom by these kind of courageous, inventive White entrepreneurs and artisans. And so this racialization of space is part of the symbolic processes of value production that attend gastro development. So once these kind of environmental imaginaries are reimagined, and this provides some like symbolic resources that are primed for the next moment of this gastro development process, which is the commodification of food heritage through the creation of this kind of city of gastronomy brand. And this is part of broader efforts to brand Tucson as a tourism destination. So here I describe two moments of this place branding project, how narratives of Tucson as a place are used to differentiate and market heritage food products, and how this brand is then scaled up to distinguish the entire city as a space of difference, cultural encounter and consumption.

0:25:12.1 Eden Kinkaid: And throughout I emphasize the racialized tensions shaping this project of selling place. So Place-based marketing provides a really powerful tool for heritage food artisans to differentiate their products. So to realize this potential, The City of Gastronomy puts on workshops to help aspiring local food producers develop and market their products and they can also gain this Tucson city of Gastronomy designation for if they follow certain kind of social and environmental criteria in producing their products. So in one such workshop, a representative from the city of gastronomy along with a number of panelists who are artisans under this program they were sharing how heritage could be leveraged to market their products. So a representative from the city of gastronomy explained “the use of heritage ingredients allows you to tell an interesting story about your food product.” So that’s important for marketing purposes.

0:26:00.7 Eden Kinkaid: And further emphasized “using heritage ingredients is a way to differentiate your product from lots of other products”. So selling these kind of stories, these stories of place was seen as helpful if not necessary for reaching target niche audiences, including millennials. So as one local artisan noted millennials “will pay more money, pay a higher price for the story.” So make a story and let your buyers know that story, they’re onto us. [chuckle] So this was really a recurring theme. The workshop participants were really insistent on the importance of this story for marketing these products. So as one artisan and panelists noted, people come here because they love this area of the country and they wanna leave with an experience. That’s why it’s important to use indigenous plants and they’re very plentiful here and use them in your end product. You sell your products because people want to come here and take something with them.

0:26:56.6 Eden Kinkaid: And a city of Gastronomy representative added 70% of travelers wanna experience those flavors of a place they’re visiting for them. It’s a way to connect to that place while they’re there, they’re seeking authentic food experiences, they’re also looking for authentic food souvenirs to take home. They’re looking for things they can’t get back at home, flavors they can’t get at home. So given that many of these artisans are not necessarily of the cultural groups whose foods they’re celebrating and leveraging, that seems pretty difficult to avoid forms of cultural appropriation in this kind of marketing. For example, in the workshop there was a local distiller who was discussing his journey in producing local corn whiskey made from Hopi blue corn that he sources from indigenous farmers. And one uninvolved indigenous activist and interviewee pointed out how using sacred indigenous foods to produce alcohol feels like a slight.

0:27:35.5 Eden Kinkaid: And the fact that this distillery is called Town Under Black, which is some sort of translation of the Tohono Oʼodham adds to this sense of cultural appropriation. So another participant was experimenting with marketing a fiber drink made from prickly pear cactus, and her marketing pitch was, we’re making cactus the new kale. So this marketing strategy relies on mainstreaming this ostensibly exotic and undiscovered food prickly pear cactus in Nepalis in non regional markets, despite the fact that Nepalis are common an unremarkable food in this region among Latinx people. And at the same time, the slogan non ironically gestures toward the cultural politics of markedly White foods like kale that have been critiqued for their symbolic role in gentrification. So often it seems like the value added of these products relies on positioning them as new kind of creative renditions of heritage that typically make no point of contact with indigenous or otherwise regional food traditions, histories, or practices.

0:28:41.8 Eden Kinkaid: So these foods gain value by becoming what Eileen Morton Robinson calls White possessions. So this leveraging of the city of Gastronomy brand does not only happen on these food labels and in these marketing pitches, it’s used on a much broader scale by the local government and tourism sectors to brand the city as a whole. As one local official recounted, that’s one of the things we latched on to early and we’re selling as our heritage, food and culture. Because it’s so unique to our market, it can’t be replicated in other places. So even before the designation was granted in 2015 leveraging Tucson’s food culture for tourism, for food tourism was certainly on the agenda of the tourism sector. So one tourism representative described a branding exercise through which food emerged as a key asset when we were doing focus groups and people say, yeah, Tucson, your cowboys, absolutely, but yeah, also Santa Fe has cowboys and Texas and in parts of New Mexico.

0:29:32.5 Eden Kinkaid: And okay, so we don’t own the cowboy space. What about golf? Oh yeah, golf, it’s great. Golf in Tucson and Phoenix and Scottsdale and Palm Springs and in Miami, okay, we don’t own the golf. So we started going through this brand exercise and what makes Tucson very different than other places one of these features is gastronomy. So here telling the story of place becomes about claiming a marketing space, the cowboy space, the golf space. And in this branding exercise, Tucson’s food culture emerged as the clearest and most distinctive asset that Tucson could own for marketing purposes. But in order for this asset to really be leveraged, it would need to be commodified and packaged. So one developer commented even before the designation, we knew that we were a great gastronomy food destination, but we didn’t have the elements to promote it correctly, market it correctly, sell it correctly.

0:30:16.0 Eden Kinkaid: So the designation has really helped us put a structure around it. So with this designation kind of formalizing Tucson’s food credentials, it’s now a key point of of leveraging investment tourism consumption and adding values through adding value through the kind of halo effect of this brand. As one person working in tourism explained, it just adds to site selector’s abilities to promote a place and make it stand out over when anywhere else. So it’s really important from a development standpoint. Another marketing manager described that there’s definitely been an uptick in food tourism and that the cachet of being a city of Gastronomy and being tied to local foods has helped with an ad push. So this designation gives a kind of structure for taking these imaginaries of the desert local foods and traditions and meanings of place and turning them into a vehicle for development imagined largely as business attraction and urban growth and tourism.

0:31:13.5 Eden Kinkaid: So while this tourism may bring benefits to small businesses, including Mexican American ones it’s not really a given. It depends how we kind of orient people to the city of Gastronomy and what kind of spaces it becomes associated with. And it tends to be associated with white spaces of elite consumption, etcetera. So there’s a concern that these efforts will continue to center on and reproduce White spaces and taste. For example, there’s this development project happening right now where these historic bungalows are being turned into a city of gastronomy hub with a very expensive restaurant and spaces of elite food consumption. So when we materialize the city of gastronomy and food heritage, it seems to often materialize into elite White spaces. So this problem isn’t new within urban development or within critical conversations in about local food systems. And we know that these neoliberal development strategies like place branding and gastro development build upon and reproduce patterns and of uneven development that have long shaped cities like Tucson and its economy.

0:32:12.0 Eden Kinkaid: So the socioeconomic unevenness of Tucson has been shaped by racialized settlement patterns dictated by the ascendancy of Whites Anglo power in the city at the turn of the 20th century. And these patterns have been reinforced through racial covenants and housing segregation dating back to the ’40s. And it is this racialized urban geography that has become the substrate for projects of so-called revitalization in the ’70s and the kind of gentrification issues that are happening today. So historically, these projects of revitalization and renewal have been driven by tourism. For example, in the ’70s, developers and planners identify the barrios near downtown as a kind of eyesore that would ruin their efforts to develop the downtown and it would ruin this image of Tucson that they’re trying to sell. So this area was purposely neglected and ultimately bulldozed, and it was the heart of Mexican American life in the downtown and also racially and ethnically diverse otherwise.

0:33:04.1 Eden Kinkaid: So the history of this displacement and destruction are alive. And they keep resurfacing in these debates about development housing, gentrification and as well as this designation. So in the context of racialized development in Tucson, this project, gastric development does not appear to meaning meaningfully break from these histories and dynamics. And this is obvious to folks working on the south side where these kind of development gentrification pressures are mounting. So one of our interviewees who’s a community organizer on the south side where a lot of this is happening, describe the relation between the designation and gentrification in this way. I really feel that gentrification is still at the forefront of the issue that the designation brings on. And we can see it now, especially with the housing crisis that’s happening, and it keeps growing within Tucson and it’s moving closer and closer to the south side.

0:33:46.4 Eden Kinkaid: And now it’s really, the other piece to it is like the cultural gentrification piece. I don’t know if there’s an academic word for it, but it’s like the appropriation piece of it from the Sonoran hotdog to the tepary beans and tamales. Like all these things are just being like pulled away from its original creators or its community. A lot of us don’t even care. We’re like, we don’t even know that it’s even existing. Like a lot of people in the hood, they don’t know oh, these restaurants, so it doesn’t affect them, but it affects them in a way they’re not seeing, which is driving up the costs of housing and restaurants. So while people who are critical of this designation, I, we can recognize that it may increase traffic and visibility of Mexican restaurants, for example, through this certification program. And it may support restaurants in what is the historic La Doce corridor, which is a, an avenue with a bunch of Mexican owned businesses pictured here.

0:34:37.0 Eden Kinkaid: It may very well support these businesses in a certain sense, but there’s concerns that these broader processes of appropriation and gentrification will ultimately undermine those gains by driving development pressures. So as one community member describes 75% of those businesses in La Doce, they don’t own the land, the property gentrification’s only a matter of time as the economy changes. All it takes is for some investor in Silicon Valley or Portland or somewhere to come and say that barrio is perfect for a microbrewery and I’ll buy out all those buildings. That’s all it takes. That’s how vulnerable they are. They have no protection because they don’t own any of the businesses. So these comments point to how the impacts of the designation and the broader kind of metabolism of gastro development that underwrites it threatened to displace and consume the very community assets that’s contributed to this designation in the first place.

0:35:28.8 Eden Kinkaid: And one community organizer reflecting on those forms of exclusion remarks. So that’s where the effects happen beyond gentrification, but also cultural displacement and the inaccessibility of what should be for everybody. So just quickly here, this model that I’ve described is not the only possible way we could imagine leveraging food culture for something called development. It depends what we call development. And in our research we found that this dominant model pursued by the city and county and city of Gastronomy, which is about tourism, hotel occupancy, food festivals, sales tax, business attraction, urban growth, etcetera, is at odds with a vision pursued by folks that are working in a more grassroots capacity to address things like food and housing insecurity, addressing these histories of divestment in these communities and working on cultural education and empowerment. So there’s a number of organizations working here in Tucson, I can explain in more detail if you’d like me to, that are on the south side that are led by people of color and indigenous folks that have a similar sort of vision.

0:36:32.4 Eden Kinkaid: But it’s not in this kind of capitalist matrix. So they’re excluded for various reasons, which I can describe if you’re interested from this dominant vision and the resources that come with it. But that doesn’t have to be the case. We can revise thi project to make it actually respond to issues of sustainability and equity. So we’ve been trying to make some change around this as researchers. We’ve provided a report to this organization trying to explain all these issues to them, the Whiteness of their organization and how it reproduces these historical patterns of exclusion and racism. We’ve gone out and shared our findings with community members in various venues and tried to also gather community feedback about how this designation could be used in a different way to activate a different vision. So I think we gastro development, it’s a unfinished project. We could use food to create positive impacts in our local community, but we really need to examine forms of food system inequality and these kind of histories if we’re gonna do that in a way that doesn’t just reproduce the status quo, which is structural racism and settler colonialism. So I will leave it at that and I look forward to answering in your questions and here’s just a little bit about how to get in touch with me if you’re interested. Thank you.

0:37:44.6 Julian Agyeman: Wow. Thanks so much Eden. What a bringing together so many themes in urban planning, in food studies and neoliberal thinking. It’s a amazing, very good. We got some questions. I just wanna start off with the first question. How did they receive your report? Have they digested your report yet? It must have come… Did it come as a shock to them or did they know what was coming? 

0:38:26.0 Eden Kinkaid: Great question. Yeah, so we wrote this report because we felt like we should translate these findings into something practicable, not just this kind of academic analysis. So the reception was mixed. There were folks, so the board is actually composed of folks from a diversity of spaces. A lot of them fall in this kind of dominant development space. But there were, I don’t know about anymore, there were community activists and folks that are coming from this other alternative paradigm but there’s a problem of them falling off because they don’t feel heard because their priorities don’t fit into this vision. So there are certainly folks in the room that understood this and have been trying to say these kind of things for a long time. The leadership of the organization is not about it at all, [chuckle] and mostly tried to dismiss it ’cause there’s the current leadership doesn’t really take feedback that… However, the report was used to push some conversations that have been needing to happen. So we’re hopeful that it at least gave some folks in the room who could be sensitized to these issues. A little bit of language for articulating them.

0:39:36.0 Julian Agyeman: Yeah I don’t even profess to know about the politics of Arizona in any great detail, but it seems that you’re fighting, you must be fighting quite a battle against some pretty entrenched interests. Some great questions coming in do you have any examples of narratives or commentary that seem to appropriately address the local food cultures and racialized roots? And this is from Crystal, who is an activist in the Somerville area.

0:40:01.0 Eden Kinkaid: Thanks for the question. Yes. I’m currently drawing this all out in the paper I’m revising. What are the kind of counter narratives or like where do we find stories that don’t reproduce these issues? And I think the main problem is that in a publication like Edible Baja and in these spaces, the issue is that people who have those stories and those connections aren’t really invited to speak for themselves. And that’s a lot of the issue also with indigenous kind of inclusion or whatever you wanna call it in this. It’s often people who are not indigenous who are creating representations of indigenous food cultures. So one indigenous activist that we talked to her point was, call us up, let us tell our story. Yeah, there’s plenty of alternative stories from folks who have been living in this borderlands region for generations and who have more ties to the landscape and to these food cultures. The problem a lot of the time is that it’s people who don’t, who have the megaphone to tell the stories. Yeah, we’re trying to help uplift other stories and put them into this kind of dominant narrative.

0:41:14.0 Julian Agyeman: Quick plug. I have a website called urbanfoodstories.com. If you go to it, take a look. It’s precisely these below the radar narratives about urban food that we want to highlight. So if anybody’s got any of those and Eden, you and I can be in touch about that. Paige Kelly, are there any other US cities in the running for the designation? 

0:41:40.6 Eden Kinkaid: So the only one that has it now is San Antonio, which I’d be curious to see what’s going on there. I think it might be some similar, probably Dynamics is here otherwise I’m not sure if there’s any in the hopper, but those are… That one was 2018 or 2019, I think. Otherwise, I think we’re the only ones. There’s plenty of other UNESCO creative cities. So the Creative Cities program, there’s gastronomy, but there’s also folk life and literature and music. So there’s all kinds of different ones all over the us but not necessarily in Food.

0:42:12.5 Julian Agyeman: Portland, Oregon have self designated themselves or the great Nate McClintock. And you’ve referenced Nate’s work a lot in one chapter in a book that I was editing, Nate talked about Portland as the mighty gastropolis. And what’s really interesting is your points about how food is enrolled in branding. And we found when we were doing research on our food trucks book that a big part of the whole food truck scene in Portland is about making it hip and cool. Yes, the food is important, but they didn’t let that pass the idea. Montreal food trucks are a symbol according to the city of multiculturalism. So it is interesting how cities respond to their food cultures and the designations, official designations is one thing, but the cities are doing it for themselves, aren’t they? And in many ways. So we’ve got San Antonio that is definitely doing it. Let’s take another question. Christina Diamant your points on how culinary communities can be disrupted and dislocated really resonated with me. How do you address the line between culinary innovation and gentrification? What I have in mind specifically as an example is tribes dark chocolate hummus. Christina yo need to explain this a little bit, are you around Christina? 

0:43:46.6 Eden Kinkaid: I think I did see that somewhere. Yeah, so I think just to circle back to Julian’s point, at the same time that there’s this rise in food trucks being trendy and the hip thing at the brewery and stuff, and like food vendors are criminalized in other spaces. So there’s a very, again, racialized manner of governing food sales. And we also here in Tucson have, they’re enforcing this law where you can’t hand out food to anyone because they’re trying to like clear parks of unhoused encampments. And so we have a big struggle happening there now with some of the mutual aid groups trying to get this off the books ’cause how could it, why is it criminal to share food? To Christina’s point yeah, this is tricky because the whole premise, I think you’re in trouble when you’re starting from the premise of leveraging food culture.

0:44:30.2 Eden Kinkaid: It’s already sounds slimy to be honest. But looking at these alternative projects in Tucson, ultimately they’re doing very similar things, They’re using food to bring people together and to build community wealth and to empower people. So again, I think it’s an issue of give the resources there. Those are the projects there, they know the struggles, they’re grounded in these communities that are most impacted and the communities that this designation’s based on. So they should have the resources to be doing the work that they’re already doing. They’re vastly under-resourced. So I think if you just give the resources to the people who are doing the work, like you solve a lot of these problems. There’s a lot of kind of catches there in terms of people, white food organizations, we know that there’s all these traits of white food organizations. And they struggle to actually give power to others and engage in these paternalistic, privileged ways that they orient themselves to this work.

0:45:29.7 Julian Agyeman: Micah Fillah, says can you speak more about where and how money flows in this current system. Are there any benefits running through existing Tusconian food producers and groups? Is there any conversation around diverting tourism money to help existing institutions? 

0:45:47.1 Eden Kinkaid: Yeah, this designation does not come with money per se. So it’s like the value that’s produced is through this kind of cultural cache and leveraging that in various ways. However, the city of gastronomy does apply for grants and they get grant funding and funding like from the county for example, they got I think half a million dollars of ARPA funds for economic revitalization or whatever after COVID impacts at a time when we’re seeing these huge spikes that people are studying and recording these spikes in household food insecurity and evictions and all of this. And that money went to this big festival that we now have called Pueblos del maiz which is celebrating maize. So it’s like this vast amount of resources is being put into a block party, which like there are vendors there that have an opportunity to vend and whatnot. But yeah it’s a question of who is benefiting. So what we’ve basically said is like, the city of Gastronomy should be a kind of megaphone. They have this brand, they need to leverage that brand to get resources and then give those resources to these community groups. So I’ve tried to offer my… I’m a grant writer, so I’m like, let me write grants for you. We can figure this out. But yeah, they’re not interested. Yeah, I don’t know if that answered the question adequately.

0:47:09.4 Julian Agyeman: Great and that’s very appropriate because Magnus has asked, do you have any information about the Pueblos del maiz program? Do you wanna just say a quick word about that? 

0:47:22.1 Eden Kinkaid: Yeah, so it’s been going on. Is this the third already? I think this is the second or third year. Yeah, it’s a big festival. I think it actually involves other cities across the border and maybe in Texas. I’m not sure what it looks like this year. I have not been tuned in at all. But yeah, it’s a big kind of block party with some education and cultural stuff and food tastings and things like that. Yeah, so it’s become one of our, like another one of our food tour events that’s supposed to bring in tourism. That’s why it’s being funded by the city and the county is because it’s brings in tourism.

0:47:56.7 Julian Agyeman: Well, Eden, thank you so much. We’re running out of time. Folks Eden’s… The podcast of this and the video will be available fairly shortly from Shareable. Can we give a great round of applause for Eden’s fantastic talk.

0:48:09.2 Eden Kinkaid: Thanks y’all get in touch if you want.

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0:48:16.2 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video transcript and graphic recording, or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University in Shareable with support from the Bar Foundation, shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized and partnership with research assistants, Deandra Boyle and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark By Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graph recording was created by Anke Dregnat. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor, and communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Alison Huff, Bobby Jones, and Candice Spivey. And this series is co-produced and by me Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share with others. So this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show. Here’s a final thought.

0:49:15.4 Eden Kinkaid: We could use food to create positive impacts in our local community, but we really need to examine forms of food system inequality and these kind of histories if we’re gonna do that in a way that doesn’t just reproduce the status quo, which is structural racism and settler colonialism.