Food2Gather: Exploring foodscapes as public places for integration

FOOD2GATHER investigates the roles food play in creating public spaces, shaping opportunities for communication and relations between places and the peoples that inhabit it (so-called host-societies, refugees, displaced populations, newcomers, etc.), thus creating conditions for living together.

Our research builds on the interplay in public spaces of two variables: food cultures and migration, through the concept of foodscapes - understood as public spaces knitted together through food related practices, including the physical, social, and institutional landscapes of foods and their modes of valuation. Foodscapes are seen as crucial agents in the construction of dynamic and reciprocal relationships among all of the communities that find themselves in Europe today.

Through different but complementary case studies in six European countries -addressed with multi-situated, ethnographic, historical and visual perspectives- this project uses the potentialities of foodscapes as a dynamic tool for facilitating living together. FOOD2GATHER’s view of living together are ongoing multi-dimensional adaptation processes considered as always changing individual and institutional actors as well as the social contexts in which they interact, considering encounters between peoples and lands, city and countryside, in a dynamic and transgroup relation.

FOOD2GATHER aims to map how foodscapes express means of communication, relations, metamorphoses in the human and nonhuman societies that mark the public spaces. It promotes cooperation between researchers, stakeholders and the civil society through joint learning and interactive collaboration. FOOD2GATHER does not isolate theory, but combines the concepts as they arise from our various forms of research: Meetups and get-togethers will always have a moment of reflection, where we aim to conceptualize the foodscapes as we see them unfold.

Expected results are revealing “a Europe in change”, and propose good practices tied to consumption, production, distribution and sharing of food in foodscapes aimed to foster both forms of sociality and inclusion as guidelines for hospitality models.

Read more about the project at the project web site at HERA-net.